August's Silence

In days of old, before we marked the season's passing by the movement of the sun, seasons changed with, well, the seasons. Winter began around the time of the first hard freezes and snow (early November), spring with the first rains (early February). Summer showed up with the departure of the frosts in early May, and autumn with the harvests of August.
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I must say that I prefer this method of marking the seasons--it just makes sense. I hate to see snow on the ground at Thanksgiving and think that winter won't start for another month. Much better to view December 21st as the middle of winter! And after winter spring can't start soon enough, so bumping it up to February (it's where we get Groundhog Day, after all) is OK by me. Summer comes with leaves on the trees and temperatures in the 70's, and fall is heralded by the singing of the grasshoppers in the golden brown grass.
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The changes from spring to summer and summer to fall are perhaps a bit more subtle than the other two seasons, but it's there. Look around you. You'll see that the fields of grains have been cut. Roadside grasses are brown and seeding. Look to the trees--you'll notice many have leaves that have turned, and the ground beneath them is littered already with dead leaves.
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For me, however, nothing marks the change from summer to autumn more strikingly than the silence of the birds. The mating season is over. Too late for a new brood, the males have all but fallen silent. The morning songs of hopeful males is no longer heard. The house wren doesn't wake me up at 5:30am--I haven't heard his cheerful song in several weeks. Now the world is dominated with the soft churr and buzz of insects, and the quiet peeps and chirps of the birds' calls. It's almost eerie, the silence that falls over the woods and fields this time of year. The birds are busy, don't get me wrong, but they're searching for to get ready for the coming migration rather than searching for mates. My feeders have been packed with birds, some which I haven't seen since the early summer. Grackles and red-wings are bringing their young around, bulking them up for their imminent departure.
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Yes, the end of summer is a subtle thing, marked by a quiet stillness, an emptiness almost, as the season grows thin and starts to change.