"June has the feel of deep emerald forever amidst the whitewater rush of time. Activity and obligation are at a jumping, jamming peak. Streamside and hillside are popping with the scarlet stars of skyrocket, the blood-red dashes of penstemon and the carmine flames of paintbrush backed by blue camas, blue phacelia, blue flax and the deep, deep blue of columbine. Sweet wild rose and honeyed clover unabashedly offer themselves to the probing nectar-lust of the bee ensuring both their own present fertility and their pollinator's future and return. The songbird chorus still rings in the dawn air but is shorter and with less elaboration of theme and melody, as the voracious demands of nestlings consume the parents every waking moment. Sandhill cranes eggs are hatching into gangly appetites on stilts as coyote pups frolic at den's door impatient for their parent's return and hot mouse meat. In the lodge on the pond newborn beaver kits are demanding to be nursed while high in the cliff ledge aerie young golden eagles wait restlessly, eagerly searching with unequaled eye for the distant cruciform dot of the returning parent. The very air above the thick grass of the meadow and prairie shakes with chitinous stridulations of the orthopteran tribe-katydids, mole crickets, grasshoppers and locusts-as they raise their pulsing, rasping overture.
Yet in spite of all this noisy, fretful ambition and labor, the long warm daylight, the easy harvest of naive prey, and the sweet abundant salad of young and tender things provide a grace and easy respite found only in the generosity of ample June. Life remains serious, but there is still time for another family for the nest-robbed robin, for another fishing lesson for the young grizzly hard-pressed to finesse the stealthy swatting technique of its kind. Even that odd, overabundant, mechanically shackled biped ape that strides through the world as through an appointment book may feel the golden glance of sunlight on a warm, perfumed and buzzing afternoon and pause long enough to lose itself in a moment of still content, lingering knee-deep in the heart's ease and comfort of munificent and gentle June."
Copyright Steve Manning, Naturalist
Photo by MRoss
