Fall Archives - Wild About Utah

November 17, 2025November 14, 2025

Leaves have fallen and are falling- it’s Fall!!

Fallen Leaves
Courtesy Pixabay, Ivabalk, Contributor

Leaves have fallen and are falling- it’s Fall!! Their beauty, crunchiness, and odors excite my senses.

Consider the leaf, these lovely little solar collectors! How can any device imagined by the human brain collect light energy from the sun and convert it to food and oxygen while sequestering carbon? A tall order, even with AI! Yet, the humble leaf does it all! By capturing photons of light and utilizing the photosynthetic process, magic occurs!

In brief terms, the light excites electrons in the leaf’s chlorophyll which move through the electron transport chain producing needed energy to build glucose (food) from carbon dioxide and water absorbed from earth’s atmosphere. The glucose molecules along with phosphates, nitrates, and other chemicals are used to build infinite numbers of other molecules, essential for life to occur. Hope that was brief enough!

Yes, I have fallen in love with leaves- from waving grasses to majestic tree leaves. While raking leaves in my yard, I’m smitten by their beauty and functionality, and hope not to strain my back! Leaves from our Freemont cottonwood tree offer pyramids of gold with undulating leaf margins- exquisite! One can easily make a teepee from them, or other possibilities depending on where your imagination takes you. Our aspen trees sprinkle gold coins in between.

Aspen leaves have a special designed petiole, or leaf stem. Rather than the usual round shape, it is flattened which allows it to flip upside down when struck by wind. This makes it doubly efficient at capturing sunlight with both top a bottom receiving light. Chlorophyll is also found in the bark, hidden behind the white dust covering. Wet the bark and the green chlorophyll become visible.

We have many conifers in our yard, whose specialized leaves in the form of needles perform the same function. Their tiny surface area and wax-like coating are excellent adaptations for reducing transpiration (plant evaporation). This allows them to maintain their leaves through the extreme drought of winter’s cold temperatures and frozen ground, whereas broadleaved trees would soon dehydrate if their leaves were not dropped.

We have many other broadleaved trees on our landscape- box elder, green ash, rocky mountain maple, cherry, and river birch. Thus, we are blessed with a myriad of leaf shapes, colors, and texture. I enjoy all varieties- an artist’s delight! One we’re missing is Gamble oak, which was abundant in our N. Ogden backyard. These are a subspecies of the eastern white oak, as the Rocky Mountain bigtoothed maple is a subspecies of the eastern sugar Maple.

Utilitarian uses of leaves add more to the enjoyment, excellent mulch, compost, and piles for the grandkids to frisk in! Leaving some of them on the lawn in a shredded (mowed) condition is good nourishment for the grasses.

A healthy medium sized maple tree has around 100,000 leaves. That’s a lot of solar collectors! How many blades of grass in the average lawn? I leave that one up to you dear Listener!

Jack Greene for Bridgerland Audubon Society, I’m wild about every leaf I know- even poison ivy!

Credits:

Images: Courtesy Pixabay, ivabalk, contributor, https://pixabay.com/photos/autumn-fallen-leaves-the-fallen-2882733/
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright Friend Weller, https://upr.org/ and Anderson, Howe, Wakeman.
Text: Jack Greene, Bridgerland Audubon, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading Links: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Wild About Utah Pieces by Jack Greene, https://wildaboututah.org/author/jack/

Hicks-Hamblin, Kristina, Composting Autumn Leaves: How to Use Leaves for Compost and Mulch, Gardener’s Path, Ask the Experts LLC., August 30, 2020, https://gardenerspath.com/how-to/composting/leaves/

Yard & Garden Updates, USU Extension, https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/updates/

October 31, 2022November 1, 2022

You and I and the Winged Things

One of the greatest magics of these late autumn evenings is that of midges, gnats, flies, mosquitoes, and bugs which flitter about in the humble stratosphere of their world between the intermittent cold snaps. They loop and spiral, as if on spiritual roller coasters, gently refracting the setting sun through and upon their bodies so that they seem to glow and become prescient of the night’s stars soon to bloom. When the cool November sun begins to set low, I can look out amongst the naked shrubs and thinning trees, the tall shaggy grasses and dead kaleidoscopic leaves, and see those hidden creatures who only dance in unlovely places the splendid slow waltz of autumnal joy.

Through the cascading shadow, the dance of the waning wing-bearers becomes even more dramatic. As the sun continues to slide below the mountains, the insects increase their pace it seems, and then begins the cataclysm of the birds. Small gray and off-gray birds with different flecks, inflections, songs, and hearts, though unified as the kind that would easily build a good hardy nest in an old dilapidated mug, begin diving through the midges and gnats and flies and mosquitoes. The birds are trapeze artists. Starting from a perch in a nearby tree, they swoop with grace through the air in a dramatic arc. At the nadir of their swing, the snare roll abruptly halts, a sharp inhale of silence descends like thunder and is followed in quicktime by a cymbal crash as the acrobats catch their purse in midair. Then, gently arching back up to the adjacent branch across, a great applause raptures. Like this, the birds dive and breach, avian orcas earning their rich protein in preparation for the imminent changing of the season. The horizon of thin times drives the orchestra of life onwards.

As I watch the fading insects, bugs, winged things, and other wonders I ponder as to why many see them as pests. In the evening glow, it seems an impossible identity for these fellow inhabitants of our world. Do people fear them? Not understand them? Believe they belong in one place and not another? Watching them in that moment, the thought escapes my mind and I am glad. I am glad to forget their supposedly assigned state, and I instead reforge my memories anew in the present, watching them as sparks in the swiftly quenching day. The perpetual creation of the world continues along, with I and you and all we’ve ever known and will know wrapped within it.

I’m Patrick Kelly, and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Images: Courtesy & © Friend Weller https://upr.org/
Audio: Courtesy & © J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin https://upr.org/
Text: Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://www.logannature.org
Included Links: Patrick Kelly & Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Posts by Patrick Kelly

Top 20 Identified Insects, Utah Plant Pest Diagnostic Lab, Extension, Utah State University, https://extension.usu.edu/pests/uppdl/top-20-insects

October 4, 2021March 12, 2022

Sermons of Birds

There is a story I like of an old Zen master who one day was asked to speak wisdom to his acolytes as they were sitting outside. He obliged. He rose and walked to the front of the students. He waited a moment to think carefully about his words, opened his mouth, and then just as he was about to speak, a bird in a nearby tree sang its beautiful warbling song. The master did not interrupt but instead simply listened and waited until the song finished, and the bird had flown away. When it had, he finally spoke: “The sermon has been delivered,” he acknowledged, and took his seat once more.

I think about this story often and dwell on its themes. The true master who is the truest student. The songbird who speaks truth without language. The wisdom elevated by listening to the world without ego.

This time of year, I try to take the lesson of the Zen master and listen to the autumn world around me, the softening sounds of my time on earth. I take pause and hear the breeze which rustles box elders scarlet and shivers aspens gold. The wind which blankets the land and grows it rosy before winter’s snowy slumber.

The birds’ notes, the bearers of great truths, have shifted from their summer selves, too. No longer do they sing for love, but instead call for companions as they find flocks to blunder between fermented crabapple trees with, and telegraph where the good black oil seed is for the benefit of all who husk germ.

I find solidarity with their industry, for I believe we all come from the same inner place. They, doing what is good and right, and I as well. I, too, likely like you, get a hankering, a reckoning to winterize, to preserve, to stock up like a tree’s fattening roots, swollen full with the liquor of next spring’s buds and blossoms. I do it through crisp cider, hot corn chowder, steamed cans, jammed jars, strong mulled toddies, and wool. These are my fruits and fat stores. These are my natural inclinations.

I take from the story of the Zen master, too, that we are all on the same team. Just as the master understood to defer a message of truth to the birds, we can all recognize the truth in what autumn fills us all with: that drive of readiness for spring by ways of winter. That our season of without only can be because of seasons of with, and that our seasons of bounty can only be through the rest with which we are pulled in winter.

So this autumn, I encourage you to listen like the Zen master to the world around you. When it whispers, “put on a sweater and sip hot drinks by the hearth,” do so. When it bellows, “can and jam all of the things for winter is coming and the taste of summer is that season’s delight,” do so as well.

And when the world says, “listen,” in beautiful birdsong, do so, and know that you sing, too, by being who you are to your core.

I’m Patrick Kelly, and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Images: Courtesy Pixabay, HmsFree, Photographer
Audio: Courtesy & © Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://www.logannature.org
Included Links: Patrick Kelly & Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Posts by Patrick Kelly

Stokes Nature Center in Logan Canyon, https://www.logannature.org/

November 30, 2020March 12, 2022

The Subtle Peaces in Times Like These

Cedar Waxwing Courtesy Pixabay tdfugere, photographer — Cedar Waxwing
Courtesy Pixabay
tdfugere, photographer

In times like these, I enjoy the mid-autumn sunshine. The trees now shed of their light-hungry leaves, let brightness again seep to the porous earth’s floor. The naked branches bring back views of the mountains, unveil the cedar waxwings and robins swarming the crabapples in their lust for ferment, and let sounds roll uninterrupted across the valley floor and across me, too.

It seems that, only when there is snow in the mountains does the sunshine lift me highest as it does in mid-autumn. That juxtaposition of winter’s edging deep sleep with the echoes of the year’s warmth, brings a mellow cascade of calm. It is the calm of a cup of hot tea one holds while hearing the storm roll past just outside, just beyond smoke-bellowed chimneys. That peace of mid-autumn sunshine, though, is only a single note in the chorale of the day here, and season still churning forward unto ultimately itself again.

Great Basin Sparse Vegetation, Courtesy USGS, David Susong, Photographer

In times like these, I can look forward to other subtle peaces yet on their way, each their own a marker in time, a fruit on the year’s own bough, a rung at once both descending into winter, and back up into spring.

How the first big snow constricts the world gently, a cotton cocoon, perpetuating the life held muffled beneath its firmament. Metamorphosizing. Shifting. Becoming.

How the heavy clouds begin to sink to the valley floor, letting us for just one season keep the same company without wings. In them we realize concurrent confusion of feet upon the ground and our heads in the clouds. Perhaps in that bending of worlds our dreams begin to germ like the very seeds held in the darkness of the world’s soil.

How the darkness allows our afternoons to sleep, for us to dream while awake, and for the world to radiate its own light back skyward through the bright nights of snow-laden grounds. It is within the shroud that the other radiant stars can appear and remind us with silent fortitude of the days behind, and the days ahead, and, if we choose to see it, the promise of this season’s peace felt in the warmth of the mid-autumn sunshine.

I’m Patrick Kelly, and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:

Images: Cedar Waxwing Courtesy Pixabay,
Images: Great Basin Sparse Vegetation Image Courtesy USGS, David Susong, Photographer (David Susong, Utah Water Science Center Director, USGS)
Audio: Contains audio Courtesy & Copyright Kevin Colver
Text: Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://logannature.org
Included Links: Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Additional Reading

USDA Forest Service Fall Colors web site for the Intermountain Region, https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r4/recreation/?cid=FSBDEV3_016189

Gunnell, JayDee, Reese, Julene, Ask a Specialist: What Causes the Fall Leaves to Change Color?, USU Cooperative Extension, https://extension.usu.edu/htm/news-multimedia/articleID=18662