Suddenly Summer

Summer.  It's not yet official but all the signs are here: leafy plants in full summer apparel, goslings the size of overgrown mallards, tulips and daffodils a distant memory.  A few days ago a freeze claimed plants in the garden, we were picking morel mushrooms, and oak leaves were the size of squirrel ears, but today it’s 87 degrees and suddenly summer.

I took the tractor and bagger out to collect mulch for the garden.  The trail to the field is now flanked with a wall of leafy green, screening what lies beyond.  The raspberries are blooming, young squirrels are everywhere, summer has settled in.  All that remains is the ripening of fruit and seed which for some plants has commenced or is already done.  Maple samaras litter the yard and whirl through the air like so many disabled helicopters.  The same trees have set leaf buds for next year so their seasonal objective is complete.  They have nothing left but to dole away long summer days adding mass and pumping oxygen until the short days of autumn shuts them down.

Just now a squadron of wood ducks came in at top speed, flying low over the marsh.  One of them hit the entrance hole of a nest box with incredible precision and disappeared inside to resume incubation duties. It’s likely she’s sitting on about 10 eggs, maybe more. Wood ducks often go about laying eggs randomly in suitable cavities, so by the time a hen settles down to brooding she might sit on as many as 30 eggs with no more than a third being her own.  Once hatched, only 30-40 percent of ducklings survive their first 90 days and as few as 10 percent live to attain flight status. High mortality rates during the first year of life are extremely common among almost all wild species, primarily due to predation. It’s tough out there.

Suddenly summer, and life in infinite variety and complexity pulses on.  For the keenly aware there are new discoveries.  At the Institute of Technology in Zurich a graduate student noticed a particular species of bumblebee making tiny incisions in the leaves of flowering plants that were yet to bloom.  Setting up an experiment, a team learned that the act of nipping leaves caused some plants to set flowers up to a month earlier than normal.  Bumblebees are hungry for pollen in spring and the plants need bees for fertilization.  By spurring bloom production both bee and plant are benefited.  It is symbiosis in action, the bees telling the plants to hurry up already and the plants responding on cue.

The complexity and mystery in living processes has but one overriding objective: to adapt, evolve, and reproduce so life can go on.  It's a course uncluttered, without accumulation of extraneous baggage or worthless possessions, running contrary to modern human tendencies.  We accumulate things and assign value to holdings of questionable worth.  It's a behavior unknown to our early ancestors who in practice were highly mobile with limited capacity or interest in transporting worthless stuff.  Why do we keep clothes never worn?  Why do we rummage through a corner of the garage or attic finding possessions long forgotten and of no critical value yet keep them?  Thrift and economy are admirable traits, especially today in the land of overconsumption, but there are limits, or should be.  Our sons indicate a total disinterest in dealing with our worldly collection when we’re gone, yet nary a nook or cranny remains unoccupied.

Predators collect prey, at times when not eminently necessary. The house cat is a perfect example.  It will seldom pass up an opportunity to kill even when it’s belly is at capacity.  But in nature nothing is lost.  The mouse left by the contented cat is seized by the sharp eyed crow, so the mouse lives on in the form of a scholarly avian acrobat with a raucous voice.  When the crow dies the essence of the mouse will be passed on again.  In this way the mouse has an eternal and beneficial destiny.  One day, when the earth is absorbed by the sun, what was the mouse will yet remain, perhaps as cosmic dust, and so it is with every living thing.

Crows, it turns out, will sometimes collect stuff and have shown interest in giving things to others.  They will bring gifts of trinkets to humans who feed them and might have a cache where they store valued tools, say the perfect stick for extracting food from a tight spot.  These are at best simple, practical behaviors, not unlike those employed by early man, and immensely different from the collecting and hoarding of items so common in human society today.

It is summer, the season of abundance, when innumerable seeds and fertilized eggs are cast out to be reckoned with as they will. Many do not advance beyond the embryonic state and those that do face dismal odds of surviving to reproduce. It is abundance not wasted or hoarded, as life fuels life. It is mass production with species survival in the offing. It is usually enough, sometimes just barely.