July-soundways | Afternoon | Molt

Her teazing Purples – Afternoons -, c. 1862 (Fr310A)

The Snell record reveals a meteorologically quiet July. Quiet settled into twenty-six of the month’s thirty days: July 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Of the remaining days, rain broke the silence, first on July 2 and 6, when it fell lightly and intermittently, next on July 10, when it took the form of a violent thunderstorm from the north, and finally on July 24, when rain fell all day long. Stratus clouds dominated the skies, and the most often referenced atmospheric condition was the dry, hot, smoky skies. July 22 was so arid and smoky that the mountains disappeared from view. While the average temperature for the month was 71.5º F, the thermometer rose to  91.9º F, and the month ended with all living things subjected to parching drought. 

Bird species in the July scatterplot number just under 100.

Now we enter the space just after high summer when the sonic extroversion of spring and early summer is replaced by an inhabited hush. It is not that the birds have departed—they remain all around us—but rather that they have withdrawn into the interior time of the molting season. Their feathers, ravaged from the effects of wind and rain and long bleaching in the sun, must fall away, leaving their wings marred by gaps, their powers of flight impaired. In the period of the molt, summer’s wild songbirds—sparrows, warblers, thrushes among them—wander away from their defended nesting territory and stop singing; sensing their new vulnerability to predators, they go to ground, concealing themselves in the vegetation and only furtively calling. The molt is a period of mending, but for now the fullness of restoration is uncertain.

:00

The listener is bedded down in a depression in the forest floor, the sleeping site of another animal since passed on. They barely stir but enjoy an interval of solitude, the flow of a destinate existence, in currency with winds, birds, thoughts…

Out of the hum of insects—cicadas, crickets, katydids, bees, beetles, mosquitoes—July first offers, the listener has learned to pick out the sounds of the molting birds: Wood Thrushes, House Wrens, Chipping Sparrows, Gray Cat-birds, American Goldfinches, Veeries.

And behind them, still others: American Bitterns, Least Bitterns, Ruffed Grouses, Bob-whites, all the Rails, Woodcocks, Upland Plovers, Spotted Sandpipers, Mourning Doves, Cuckoos, Whip-poor-wills, Nighthawks, Flickers, Kingbirds, Flycatchers, Swallows, Blue Jays…

:17

From the shallow hollow in the ground, the listener just catches the flickering of more hidden birds: the Great Blue Heron who has crossed July’s threshold with the Glossy Ibis, the Purple Martin, the Peregrine Falcon, the Louisiana Waterthrush, the Downy Woodpecker.

:52

The sun is below the horizon; in the lower atmosphere of the falling Earth the Wood Pewee’s song disperses the remaining twilight.