The Beauty in Nature
Enchanted Summer Evenings Clyde McMillan-Gamber
Sunny summer evenings in southeastern Pennsylvania are enchanting and become more so as summer progresses. Starting late in May, I often sit on our deck or lawn during summer evenings and enjoy seeing the green grass, trees, and shrubbery drenched in golden sunlight. I like to watch the daily activities of one or two cottontail rabbits and the several kinds of birds summering in our neighborhood. I enjoy experiencing the passing of puffy, white-and-gray cumulus clouds overhead as if in review before the blue sky. With imagination, I see innumerable, ever-changing shapes in those clouds. And I deeply inhale the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle flowers on a neighbor’s fence. Each evening, several chimney
Photo by Bruce Marlin
Adult firefly (or lightning bug).
Snowy tree cricket.
swifts careen swiftly across the sky in hot pursuit of flying insects to eat, catching those insects in their wide mouths. Those swifts provide exciting entertainment to anyone who watches for them. Soon after sunset each evening from mid-June to the middle of July, hundreds of male fireflies emerge
from the grass roots where they spent the day and walk up grass stems and take flight like tiny helicopters, all the while flashing their cold abdominal lights. Each firefly flies and hovers upright, blinking its signal to female fireflies still in the grass. They, in turn, glow, beckoning the males to
them for mating. The fascinating beauty and our enjoyment of those many male fireflies constantly flashing their beacons is beyond measure. They, alone, make summer evenings enchanting. At first overlapping the activities of swifts and fireflies, a half dozen little brown bats leave their daytime roosts as dusk deepens and flutter swiftly across the sky after flying insects. Those bats, too, are entertaining to watch swooping and diving after their prey and are beautifully silhouetted against the orange or pink — but darkening — sky. Each dusk, from late July through August, in our neighborhood, as elsewhere, a variety of small, green tree crickets fill the trees and shrubbery with their loud trilling please see SUMMER page 17
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50plus LIFE •
July 2018
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