The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Season Without a Name We should have a name for the period from about the middle of August to the middle of September, a time of breathlessness, waiting...
...It does get hot down here...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Season Without a Name We should have a name for the period from about the middle of August to the middle of September, a time of breathlessness, waiting and almost complete absence of motion and noise...
...Within a few days all of the lively feathered tribe had disappeared...
...In fact, it is precisely during this late summer time that trees toads, grasshoppers and locusts keep up the steadiest and most harmonious chorus...
...This year there was a particularly dramatic contrast between these weeks in August and September and the lively months from spring through late summer...
...Just yesterday, however, the late summer period of stillness gave evidence of passing...
...Generally bold and talkative, he acted as if he felt disgraced to be caught in his usual haunts while all of his friends were away on vacation...
...In our part of Delaware, at least, the period from April to mid-August was a time of extraordinary activity, especially among the birds...
...There, flying gaily about but still looking a bit shamefaced as if they had been caught doing something not quite fair, were our own Delaware robins...
...Yet their vocal exercises occur mostly at night...
...Then one morning the robins were gone...
...Everything waited, all nature was breathless and expectant...
...A good deal of noisy attention, too, was devoted to warding off possible enemies...
...We knew perfectly well where they had gone...
...My wife, Edith, saw a flock of robins, and I heard a single thrush...
...While the faithful little female was building and egg-hatching, the male carefully saw to it that she tended her charges and rewarded her by sitting on a nearby branch and singing his heart out from early morn till the last gleam of the evening sun...
...No noise, nothing that we did, disturbed them...
...The great tide of feathered migration has once more turned back toward the South...
...For days and nights there was scarcely a movement of the air, neither a ripple of the grass nor a breeze to set the leaves dancing...
...Soon the wrens followed the robins northward...
...This morning a catbird patronized the birdbath...
...The absence of birds was not the only mark of this rather empty period...
...We had almost persuaded ourselves that this year, unlike most others, our woodland entertainers would remain until the time of their final shoving off for the South...
...I felt like telling the parents that they could not expect their tiny offspring to find their way in this rough and dangerous world...
...But they thought they knew their own business—and off they went...
...The birds have no air-conditioning system and for them travel by air is at charmingly reduced rates...
...For three weeks there was but one bird to break the monotony of life in our woods: A single bluejay sounded his raucous and sour note...
...I cannot count this action against them...
...Not long ago we visited Vermont at this time of the year...
...I have kept the birdbath full of fresh water...
...our whole neighborhood was turned into a biological and musical desert...
...The sounds which make the world a lively place during most of the year are produced by birds, insects and the wind moving among the trees...
...Robins built nests on all sides and there was a great flying back and forth in connection with their selection of building sites, egg-laying, hatching, and feeding and teaching the young...
...There were times when you thought the universe had been caught in some sort of magic preservative...
...But insects have no part in producing the strange soundless period of which I speak...
...they do little to break the monotony of the strangely still daytime world...
...I have filled the feeding station with the most popular tidbits—it is all to no avail...
...One of their nests was built in a wren house anchored to a gum tree only a few feet from the table at which we ate most of our out-of-door meals...
...Both young and old disappeared as though in obedience to an order...
...The wrens were even closer to us and seemed to enter more intimately into our lives...
Vol. 44 • October 1961 • No. 34
