Nature Notes: Fall Puts on a Good Show

It’s Monday evening. By the time this column appears in print more than 50 percent of the local leaves will have fallen and a good many trees will be completely bare.

When I went out earlier this week to survey the fall foliage, however, less than a quarter of the leaves were down and only a few road shoulders were completely covered by leaf litter. Why are the leaves falling so late this year? It’s hard to say.

It may be related to global warming, but it’s probably mostly related to this year’s spring and summer. We had a dry July, August, and September. We had several rains in October, and the trees stayed green into November. Not all the trees. Tupelos turned into burgundy monuments before the first of October and by Halloween most were standing completely naked. They, along with flowering dogwoods and red maples, are among the first to lose their leaves at summer’s end each year. But many of the red maples are still hanging on; the rains may have delayed their change from greens to reds and oranges.

Earlier this week, the woods along many of the back roads on the South Fork were still ablaze with the colors of fall. The reds and oranges of the oaks — scarlet, black, and even white oaks — were dominant. The yellows of hickories and sassafras filled in the spaces between them.

The understories, mainly consisting of the sub-shrub layers of huckleberries and lowbush blueberries, were a wine red and thick as a carpet. In eastern Southampton Town on Millstone, Old Sag Harbor, Brick Kiln, and Sagg Roads, the thickly distributed and very healthy evergreen mountain laurels provided a middle layer of shiny green between the two red layers, lower and upper. Fortunately the sun was out and low on the horizon, which further lighted up the foliage so that if you looked at it too long and too hard, your eyes would start to play funny tricks on you.

The back roads of Northwest Woods in East Hampton were particularly brilliant. Swamp Road invariably puts on a good show, even in poor color years. Northwest, Alewife Brook, and Springy Banks Roads were added to Northwest’s luster. A little farther south, Stephen Hand’s Path and Hand’s Creek Road were equally impressive. You don’t have to go to the Poconos or Catskills each autumn to see vividly colorful native landscapes; you can see a host of them through the windshield right here on the South Fork.

There have been years plagued by gypsy moths and canker worms when most of the leaves in many of our woodlands were gone by mid-July. But we have been free of their ravages since 2005, after which we’ve had one good fall after another, except when a tropical storm came by. In 2011, a rainless Irene visited in late August making the foliage across all of Long Island drab prematurely. In 2012 things were looking good a week before Halloween, but then Hurricane Sandy came along and did in the foliage of the hardwoods and browned almost all of the white pine needles to create an equally ugly fall.

We were spared this year. The colors should last right up until the leaves fall to the ground. One wonders if the blue jays, squirrels, and deer appreciate the beauty of the fall as much as we do. I believe they do. We know how to poll the people before Election Day, but not how to poll the feathered and furred creatures that live quietly among the pretty leaves. I wonder if they realize how lucky they are!