Backyard Wildlife: The End of Summer

Mary Woodbury

September 17, 2020

Last night my husband and I sat in the living room discussing plans for the house. Surrounding us were the cozy warmth of our new wood stove, the fairy lights strung about the bay window and around the room, the sound of crickets coming from the open front door, the shine of the wood flooring beneath our socked feet, the smell of a cinnamon candle as well as my home-made split-pea soup on the stove, and the definite chill creeping through the night air. Like two old folks on a front porch, we discussed the land, the autumn, the slow goldening of things before winter. We need to bring in our three-hundred feet of hose before the first frost and check the new trees one last time before winter. Our nights are already dipping below 4, or below 40 for you southerners. We talked house projects coming up: painting the sun room, moving our bedroom to the basement again after our new commercial-grade dehumidifier comes in October, next year’s gardens and our plans to grow the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. You might get the drift: a slow ending to another year. And what a year it’s been. I wonder if 2021 will be worse or better, what other post-truth declarations will continue to survive in this strange, new world like viruses taking us away to alien worlds. But for now, I want to look back on the summer with pleasure. For beneath the strife of our human world was a micro-ecosystem of things living in our back yard, making use of us leaving wild where wild grew–allowing for bees to gather and pollinate, weeds and wildflowers to grow, birds to visit and eat, and deer and other animals to gorge on fallen apples and pears. I figured that before the winter covers it all in white, I’d take a look back at our first summer in our new house and share some of the things we got to experience!

Oh, and before I go on, I had the wonderful opportunity to copy-edit Nova Scotia’s Ecology Action Centre’s summer magazine. Check it out here (PDF). Someday we’ll get a chance to get out more in the province; this is a preview of things happening in our wider backyard.