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There’s hardly a spot of color on the hardwood trees in our yard, but the light is glorious, as it always is in October, and the signs of fall are unmistakable. The pokeweed, in full berry-laden splendor at the end of September, has been reduced to drooping leaves and magenta stems. Likewise the beautyberry and arrowwood shrubs, each picked down to the woody stems by cardinals and blue jays and mockingbirds and all manner of other creatures in this small, teeming yard.
The drupes and berries of native plants — even pokeberries, which are toxic to humans and pets but don’t harm most wildlife — are a favorite not just of birds but also of cottontails and chipmunks and squirrels and the tiny field mice that we rarely see but know are here. From time to time my husband finds a leafy nest of baby mice in the toolshed, tucked into the rag drawer. When that happens, he quietly closes the drawer and heads to the house for a rag.
In this yard there is always something to eat. In October, the white snakeroot and frost asters are feeding the bees and the butterflies. The ironweed, goldenrod and frostweed, already gone to seed, are feeding many other creatures. They eat seeds and gather seeds and quarrel with one another over seeds from the weedy flowers we have welcomed.
There are two cobweb spiders outside the window next to my husband’s side of the bed. When I open the curtains, one of the spiders sits perfectly still in her fall-misty corner and looks back at me. Two feet above her, the other darts into the gap behind a shutter mounted against the brick. Two spiders of the same species but with diametrically different approaches to the looming moon of a potential predator’s face.
I am not a threat to these spiders, but I do spend a fair amount of time studying them in the window. When they die with the first freeze, they will leave behind egg sacs to hatch in springtime and bring a new generation of mosquito-eating spiders to this yard.
For months there was also a third spider in this window: a spotted orbweaver with an elaborate web and a miraculously original hiding place woven into the edge of it. The spider’s hidey-hole, made of oak catkins and spider silk, was shaped something like half a walnut. Watching that spider grow, peering into her web to see what was left of the insects she’d dined on in the night, was one of the chief delights of summer.
But one night last month a high wind knocked her little home askew, exposing her to the yard. When I checked the next morning, she was tucked into her house as usual, but by nightfall she was gone. For a few days I kept watch for her, thinking perhaps she’d gone somewhere to hide an egg sac from the Carolina wrens who are always patrolling our windows for spiders, but she never returned. One day, when the light was just right, I noticed a wren-size hole in the web she’d left behind. I was sadder than I had any real reason to be for this spider who had been on a killing spree in my window all summer long.
Here is the question I ask myself again and again: Why was I rooting for the spider and not the moths and the sweat bees? Why was I hoping a hungry wren would never notice her in her oak catkin bower? I love the moths and the sweat bees, too. I love the wrens. And I know that in the wild world of the backyard, someone I love is always hungry. I also know that someone else I love must die to feed the hungry ones.
The question raised itself again one afternoon last week, when I heard a songbird mob in the backyard. Whenever there’s a predator in the yard, all the birds gang up on it, shouting out alarms and divebombing the intruder. Last week it was a barred owl, hunting in broad daylight. Harassed by blue jays, the owl was flying from tree to tree, keeping to the area around a white pine where a squirrel and her young were nesting in a box built to house a screech owl family.
We have a perfect view of that nest box from the same bedroom window where the spotted orbweaver set up camp last summer, and I have taken great consolation from studying those squirrels — the mama watching a storm come on, the babies peering out the door and waiting for her to return, the adventurous toddlers exploring their nest tree.
The sight of that barred owl, clearly aware that baby squirrels were about, made my heart pound.
There are many squirrels in the world — just as there are many rabbits and many chipmunks and many field mice — but not so many owls. I understand the reason for that ratio. Nature is not concerned with the fate of a single squirrel. Nature is concerned only with the balance: enough squirrels to feed the predators, and also enough squirrels to make more squirrels.
I know that an owl hunting in bright sun is a very hungry owl. In the silence and the stillness of the nest box that afternoon, I tried to take some comfort from the thought that at least the owl had found a safe meal, and not the human-poisoned rodents that are so prevalent in suburbia. I tried to take joy in the owl’s joy and not grief in the mother squirrel’s grief.
This is the difference between the violence our species inflicts on the world and the violence of the backyard. The owl was only hungry. The owl had no bombs or bullets or poison to deploy. The owl was only hunting, and hunting does not involve drilling or fracking or dredging or clear-cutting or any of the other assaults we inflict on our wild neighbors.
Even so, my heart leaped again the following morning, this time with joy, when I opened the curtains to find the young squirrels once again cavorting outside our bedroom window. Always, when nature works as nature must, there are joys for every grief, a recompense for every sorrow.
Night falls earlier with each passing day now, but the recompense of shorter days is the glorious light of October. I wish you could see what happens to the magnificent colors of berry and bird and flower in the slanting light of October. I wish you could see the way October light shines through a baby squirrel’s perfect ears, the way it sets each perfect hair to glowing.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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