Fall approaches!

[John Davis]

Fall still feels like a long way off in south Georgia.

[Phil C]

Fall also seems like a long way off in AZ.

[Lloyd McKissick]

I worked on a big project in Phoenix at Sky Harbour for several years in the early 2000s (had an office/apartment down there for the last year). Those "hellish" temperatures absolutely changed me, because elk hunting in 10-below zero in December here never used to bother me...but it certainly does now.

Speaking of slanting light...





This was the very last day for me up there in 2024, an early afternoon hunt on October the 31st.

My very last bird of the season...



with it's crop examined, birch leaves, buds and seeds



You hear people talk about "drumming logs" in the grouse woods (?), well here is a stellar example.



It snowed hard there two days after this, but I was on the road home to Denver.

[Dean Romig]

The old drumming logs I’ve found in my VT NEK covers were surrounded by piles of many seasons of grouse droppings.
Yours is on its way to being such a monument to ‘grousedom’!





.

[Lloyd McKissick]

It is all about this guy, after all...

[mobirdhunter]

Originally Posted by Stan Hillis

There is a subtlety that Lloyd's first pic captures that the others don't, and that I haven't seen yet in the deep South this year, that of the late evening sunlight having a glow that isn't present during the rest of the year. It is the signal to me that fall is approaching. The golden glow of it is captured in that first pic perfectly. I can see it here even before the leaves begin to turn. All of a sudden, one late afternoon, it is there and it fills me with warmth and hope. It took my wife some number of years to learn to notice it, but now she does, too.

It will happen here next month. I have always wondered if it is some angle of sunlight that I cannot measure or accurately describe. Nonetheless, it is as real as the sun itself. And, the thing that it awakens in me is as real as I am, or maybe more so.

Things like what Stan describes really don’t need explanation. They are sensed, felt — a part of our immersion in the natural world. You hunters know what I mean, like the primordial smell of the grouse woods after a rain, or the quality of sound after a long day on the prairie, just after the sun leaves only a glimmer at the horizon and day turns to gloaming. We are all richer for these things.

[Lloyd McKissick]

Mr. Gordon is correct, that wonderful lighting even works out here in the dry, open West. Late November, 3 or 4 years ago, ~6AM in NW Colorado, chasing elk.




and 1st light earlier that week



After my long autumn in Minnesota this is always something of a shock to the system. Still great fun but...very different.



Well...maybe not.