The Still Heat of July
July is heat and stillness
The still heat of July.
If my favorite months are October and May, where there is movement and coolness, maybe my least favorite month is July, where there is heat and stillness. Though that seems unfair to have favorites it tells me what gives me pleasure in the natural world: a sense of aliveness, of being inside of the natural world. And in July, the natural world wants to keep me away because at least the bird world is busy feeding young, protecting young, hiding young as they grow into their wings and into the world. They want me nowhere near.
So I sat still in July—and often had to due to the heat—and watched as the Great-crested Flycatcher who had set up shop in a box in my front yard tended to their young. The parents came and went nonstop all day long. Those babies were insistent and hungry. If I had been a keener observer, like some of my foremothers (I’m thinking of Margaret Morse Nice in the 1930s in Ohio with her Song Sparrow studies counting the number of times a bird would sing in a day), I would have been counting how many bugs were being brought in. But I do not have that sort of patience.
I also spent time on the water in the Tivoli Bays—one place to find cool in July—where the Eagle soared overhead and the Least Bittern tip-toed out. I confess my greatest hope is to see baby Bitterns on the flats but no luck this year. The spatterdock came into bloom and the invasive water chestnut spread (the Tivoli South Bay is a blanket of water chestnut), and the day lilies burst into bloom.
I was lucky enough to head north to clean water, smoky air (fires in Canada are everywhere this summer) and the silence of the Canadian wilderness, just east of the Quetico with my cousin Polly. There: Loons. Moose. Otter. Beaver. And lots of warblers who bred there among the red pines and wild blueberries and bunchberry dogwood, and were soon to head south. I’ll be waiting for them to sail through in a few weeks.
Spatterdock in bloom
Beautiful northern sunsets thanks to wildfires
Paddling Northern Lights Lake
Juvenile Cape May getting eady to head south