Sound and Fury

In fall the noisy, sassy Douglas squirrel--more aptly called the chickaree--provides comic relief in the big, solemn evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest. At this time of year he is out and about, collecting pinecones and stashing them in hollow logs, where they'll keep for years. Interrupt him at his work, and he'll give you an earful. He is, in the words of nature writer Anita Nygaard, "a leaping, bounding, chattering gambol of  energy and fury." The ear tufts he grows in the northern winter, the dark-red, turpentine-scented coat, and, especially, his personality call to mind his old-world cousin--Beatrix Potter's impertinent Squirrel Nutkin. Look for the piles of pinecone scales he leaves on stumps.
 

Flight of the Flickers

Unless you're watching for their fall migration, northern flickers--North America's most abundant woodpeckers--will slip past you like Indian summer. In southern Canada and all our northern states, there are more flickers moving now than during the more intermittent spring migration, but they have long since shouted themselves out. No more do raucous flocks bob through the trees, calling excitedly. Instead they flow in steady, stately flight high over the brightening forest canopy, silent as the monarch butterflies that share their airspace. Most will spend the winter in the southern United States, and some will find refuge by drilling their way into vacant buildings. Unlike other woodpeckers, flickers spend much time on the ground, foraging for insects, especially ants. One flicker's stomach contained about 5,000 ants, two others 3,000 each. 
 

Golden Oldies

From Newfoundland south to Delaware and northwest to Alaska, the round, dancing leaves of the quaking aspen--our most widely distributed tree--glow neon yellow as they catch the rays of the low-arcing sun. Tree texts have it that quaking aspen is short-lived. "Old at 50," says one. Aspens, however, should be thought of not as trees but as root systems. The "trees" are really clones sent up by the main part of the organism. Inject a radioactive isotope into one clone, and it will show up in another 100 feet away. A root system may underlie a whole hill and weigh 32 tons to the acre. Aspen doesn't do well in dry habitats such as Yellowstone National Park, so why is there so much of it there? Botanist Roy Renkin thinks aspen may have gotten started in the park when the climate there was cold and wet--i.e., during the Ice Age. If so, aspen could be earth's oldest living thing. 
 

Dinosaurs' Elder

When swamp and lakeshore flush with ripeness, there's a stirring in surrounding sandy soil. From the hills of Colo-rado to the salt marshes of the Atlantic and from Nova Scotia south to Ecuador, ancient beasts, older even than the dinosaurs, are cutting their way out of Ping-Pong-ball-shaped eggs with their soon-to-be-shed egg teeth. Some of the hatchlings will stay in the earth until the following spring, but most will claw their way up into the sunlight. Then, through some unknown navigation system, they will strike out toward rivers, ponds, and swamps maybe half a mile away. There, over the course of perhaps a century, a few may grow to more than 70 pounds. You can spend a lifetime in the outdoors and never encounter common snapping turtles emerging from their nests, but along roads, on dikes, and in dry meadows it's not difficult to find the oval, eggshell-littered holes where the nests have been. Dig around gently and you may find hatchlings that have died or haven't left. Adult snappers, which can't withdraw completely into their shells like other turtles, have evolved an aggressive response to potential predators. They will nail you if you mess with them on land, but when submerged they almost never bite a human.
 

Silver Threads Among the Gold

From southern Canada to Mexico, fall webworms are spinning silver threads among the gold, red, and green hardwood leaves. The webs resemble the earlier work of eastern tent caterpillars, but you won't find them in the forks of branches. Look for them instead where the branch tips are etched against the bright September sky, then think like Aldo Leopold, who wrote, "If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good." Fall webworms are the communal larvae of a diminutive white moth that overwinters on the ground as a pupa, emerges in spring and summer, and lays eggs on the leaves of at least 120 species of deciduous trees. The trees are not seriously injured, because they evolved with fall webworms, because the growing season is essentially over, and because these native insects come with their own set of natural checks and balances. Yellow warblers, for instance, feed on the caterpillars, and at least two species of hornets carry them off to their young. Poke around in a web and you may find hollow caterpillars, eaten from the inside out by larval wasps.
 

Autumn Reveille

You'll hear it one morning in the Mountain West, when the first frosts burn the purple sage and southbound waterfowl settle into creek bottoms. The low, clear note increases in volume to a scream, then fades to a series of short grunts. At the edge of a meadow or along a ridgeline, the bugler, maddened by hormones, stands with his head to the sky, neck swollen with blood, venting steam from his nostrils, churning the ground with his hooves, thrashing shrubs with his immense, back-swept antlers, spraying urine on his belly, hocks, and mane. During the rut, bull elk bugle to assert their dominance over their harems and to challenge rival bulls. The larger the bull, the deeper-pitched his bugle. There used to be an eastern subspecies, but it was ushered into extinction by unregulated hunting. 

The last eastern elk in the Appalachians, and perhaps east of the Mississippi, was killed by an Indian in 1867 in what is now Elk County, Pennsylvania.