In a nutshell, Indian summer is a warm spell that follows cold weather. Since we saw several below freezing nights in October and then temperatures in the 70s F for the first week of November, I’d say that we saw Indian summer. Some of the flowers thought so too, like the aster pictured above.
This explanation of where the term Indian Summer originated is from the Old Farmer’s Almanac: “Early settlers would welcome the arrival of cold wintry weather in late October when they could leave their stockades unarmed. But then came a time when it would suddenly turn warm again, and the Native Americans would decide to have one more go at the settlers. “Indian summer,” the settlers called it.”
A very strange thing happened on Friday, November 6th; as if someone flipped a switch somewhere, almost all the leaves fell from the oak trees, all at once and in one day, as if it were a leaf avalanche or a leaf waterfall. People wrote me from Vermont saying the same thing happened there and I’ve heard several people, including old timers, say that they’ve never seen anything like it. If you know oak trees at all you’re probably as baffled by this behavior as the rest of us because here in New England many oak trees don’t lose their leaves until winter is well under way, and some hang on until spring. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen nature do and I don’t have any idea what might have caused it. Did the same thing happen in your area too, I wonder?
Goldenrod (Solidago) still blooms be sparsely, here and there.
This could very well be the last red clover blossom (Trifolium pretense) that I see until spring.
This forsythia thought that spring had already arrived. I wonder what it will do when spring really does come. It would be too bad if the cheery yellow blossoms didn’t shout that spring had arrived, but I’m grateful for the taste of spring that this plant gave me in November.
A lady bug landed on my pant leg and stayed for a while before flying off. She didn’t say what she was looking for but I was surprised to see here so late in the year.
A slug was either sleeping or browsing on a moss, fungi, and lichen covered log. I just realized that I have no idea what slugs do in the winter.
There are still plenty of fungi appearing. These examples were blushing a blueish lavender color. I don’t know if they were blueish lavender aging to gray or if it was the other way around, so I haven’t been able to identify them.
A wild turkey lost a feather in the woods recently. You can see an acorn or two poking out of the forest litter and it makes sense that the feather would be among them because turkeys love acorns. This is one bird that flies with a lot of historical baggage; Native Americans first domesticated wild turkeys around 800 B.C. and raised them for their feathers. It wasn’t until 1100 A.D., almost 2000 years later, that they started eating them. It is thought that only the Aztec turkey breed survived into the present day. The turkeys we eat today could very well be descendants of those same turkeys that the Aztecs raised, and wouldn’t that be amazing? A history nut could almost overload on information like that.
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with a 4 foot wingspan red tailed hawks are one of the largest and also one of the most common birds that we see here. This one had caught something but I couldn’t see what it was. All I had with me was my small Panasonic Lumix camera that I use for macro photos and this bird was really too far away for a good photo, but I tried anyway. It came out very soft but at least you can see the beautiful hawk, which is something you don’t see very often on this blog.
I don’t know if it was a hawk, bobcat, or another predator, but something took the squirrel and left the tail. New Hampshire’s gray squirrel population is thriving this year because an abundance of food in the forests and predators are very happy about that.
I know a place where hundreds of burning bushes (Euonymus alatus) grow and I visit there in the fall because seeing them all turn a soft shade of pastel pink at once is a beautiful sight. This year for some reason they decided on yellow-orange instead of pink but still, even with the unexpected color they were enough to make me stop and just admire them for a few moments. Even though they’re terribly invasive it’s hard to hate a shrub that delights the eye as much as this one does.
I wonder sometimes if every leaf changes color at least a little in the fall. These yellow ones are young examples of Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota.)
Isn’t it interesting how the path to the coldest season is strewn with the warmest colors?
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? ~John Steinbeck
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New Hampshire Garden Solutions 