Let’s call this gap since the last entry the Dog Days of Summer — very little going on. Meanwhile the kudzu reached its full growth for the season. The kudzu develops scented flowers, blue ones a little like to sweet peas. The vines finally buried the large onion patch on one section of river bank and now periodic nighttime frosts are beginning to kill the leaves, the dead parts turning gray like weathered wood.
Unusual beach bodies that appeared over the last few months included one skate, one adult eel and one deer, a doe. The skate was about a foot and half across, the eel two and a half feet long. The doe quickly disappeared from sight, either washed away from shore or buried; I’d vote for the washing because the sand is too shallow. Parts of the skull and a few long bones washed up shortly, the result of warmer water on the decay process. Nowadays fresh deer tracks are visible each morning in the sand. The deer population has increased in the area so much so that one farmer had to shoot 120 of them to protect his 50 acre crop. Of course the dry summer reduced forage for wild life and that has driven them to eat things they usually avoid. The farmer, a hunter, had to bury all the carcasses because the warmer weather ruined the meat.
For several weeks blue-black wasps hop-scotched along the beach looking for spiders to capture. A surprising victim was a small land crab about the size of a nickel attacked by four of them. I didn’t stick around to see how the wasps handled the result.
A new pier was installed just upstream from the fancy one and almost as elaborate. The stairs from atop the bank descended through two landings and straddled a jetty before reaching the pier. A short second set of steps descends from the pier to the beach on each side of the jetty. The remnant of an old set of stairs at the bank top was the starting point of this project. Just the other day a couple months after pier completion some signs of erosion appeared on the bank under the stairs and washing down the bank to fan out across the beach towards the pier, as if a small swimming pool had spilled its contents over the bank. No other erosion signs were obvious anywhere along the bank.
Our fall colors appear to be at their best and mixed with the evergreens. A very dry summer did not affect the result and may have improved them, nor did it have much affect on the small streams and springs issuing from or through the riverbank. However, the amount of water did decline and several wet spots dried up. Leaves are falling everywhere. Even the cypress trees lose their very fine needles, turning brown before dropping. A pleasant cypress scent is strong now perhaps because more seed pods have fallen. The pods contain lots of sticky sap where the fragrance is greatest.
