Messages from the Wild: An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural HistoryUniversity of Texas Press, 2010 M07 5 - 273 pages A Texas naturalist shares an intimate record of the wooded ravine near his home in this almanac based on decades of journal entries. In the mid-1960s, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live there. In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature’s daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming. This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, it is an eloquent account of one keen observer’s daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 7 | |
Chapter Three Spring Is Renewal | 39 |
Chapter Four Summer Is Melody | 93 |
Chapter Five Autumn Is Winding Down | 157 |
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adults American American robins animals autumn berries Biosphere blooming blue jays broad-winged hawks broods brown butterflies Carolina wrens caterpillars cavities cedar cedar elm chickadees cicada cold front color creek cultural cycles dark-eyed juncos dawn dayflower eastern screech owls eggs energy feed feet female fledglings flowers flycatchers forest freeze green grow habitat hatchlings hawks human hummingbird Inca doves inches insects juniper late leaves live lizards male messages migrants native natural nature’s neighbors nest boxes night northern cardinals numbers Ohio buckeye Owl Hollow owlets percent plants predators purple rain ravine ravine’s roosting scalybark seasonal seeds Sept Shumard oak sing snakes songbirds species spiderlilies spring suburban suburbia sumac summer swallowtail temperature Texas trail tree canopy tropical unnatural history vireo walk warblers warm weather week white-eyed vireo wild wind winter woods year’s yellow yellow-billed cuckoo
Popular passages
Page xiii - I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Page 252 - How indispensable to a correct study of Nature is a perception of her true meaning. The fact will one day flower out into a truth.