Sudbury Valley TrusteesConservation, Collaboration, and Community since 1953

There are two advantages to walking in the woods at this time of year. First, most insects you run into are kinds you like to see, such as dragonflies and butterflies. Few of the ambience-spoilers, mosquitoes and deer flies, make it past Labor Day. Secondly, these are the weeks when mushrooms look their best.

We have reached that time of year when a certain bird represents the comforts of snug home, loving family, and means sufficient to ward off hunger for another winter. Not so long ago, turkeys in this vicinity were domestic, dead, and de-feathered, but nowadays wild turkeys appear on lawns and roadsides, very much alive and fully dressed in their handsome plumage.

After deciduous trees have bared their limbs, certain outdoorsy individuals enter the woods in pursuit of white-tailed deer. Searching for their quarry, what do they see? Wet gray days have washed the color from autumn leaves, but scattered clumps of hardy ferns glow with lively, eye-catching green. The hunters’ wandering gaze finds those pretty evergreen ferns that brave the frost.

Some autumns our streets and trails roll with acorns, but not this season. Oak trees produce more of their jauntily-capped nuts some years than others; this year they’ve made very few.