The Shadows Sing of Summer’s Decay

There is hope and boundless powerful joy beyond the mundane veil of this world.

The shadows sing of summer’s decay. The hawks flock to distant shores. The spill of late summer stars overfills the bucket of night, and I drink small gulps gasping at a bite of wonder that leaves me filled and yet endlessly hungry for the feast beyond the tiny imaginations that infect my day.

When all the land is pavement and the night falls silent with forgotten songs, I know there will be some wild thing growing in the cracks. I pray I will be always be the person to see them.

So let me collect these wildlings now, nurture them as the seeds of a better world. And one day, maybe a time will come when someone can plant them and live to see them grow.

Mushroom foraging | Western Maryland

A rain cloud plopped down on the mountain and made itself at home. I pulled out my paltry, just-in-case rain jacket to ward against what we thought would be a brief squall. It was soaked through after 45 min. I stopped feeling my fingers at the hour mark.

We had come to a nature center in the Catoctin Mountains to take part in our fall foray and tree ID as part of the year-long mushroom foraging class led by Jared Urchek from Vital Traditions and hosted by Fox Haven Farm & Retreat Center. The site was perfect for foraging mushrooms. First because you can’t forage on public lands, and the instructors received permission for us to forage on this privately owned site. Next because of the unique planting on the site where countless native tree species were planted to restore the disturbed forests on the former farm.

Find the trees and you find the fungi.

Mychorrizhal mushrooms are symbiotic companions to certain species of trees by spreading their pale branching roots underground. In exchange for plant sugars, the fungal roots extract and pass on nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil to the tree roots. By knowing a fungus’ preferred companion species, mushroom ID becomes a hell of a lot easier. So with red oak, you find maitake or hen of the woods (which is edible). On oak or beech you find turkey tail (which is used in herbal remedies). On maple you find red reishi (also used in herbal remedies). But be forewarned for the mychorrizhal roots can spread far. The first mushroom we found was very near a sapling of a typical mychorrizhal companion tree - except that mushroom was Deadly Amanita or Death Cap (which - I hope is obvious from the name - is very deadly)! Its fruiting body had spread here from some pines growing a little further away.

The edible and medicinal mushrooms were certainly fun to find - and the deadly fungi kind of alarming for how innocuous they looked - but what was more interesting was learning to see the forest in a new way. Getting down in the undergrowth of a maple to find puffball mushrooms that sent off black spores when squeezed. Looking under a huge decaying trunk to find delicate bleeding mycena that bled when crushed. Finding a weird black web on a squat log only to learn that it was a honey mushroom whose mychorrizhal roots turned black as they aged - and glowed as foxfire at night! I had walked past these marvels on so many hikes. What else was I missing?

To finish the morning off, Alecks from Fox Haven and her partner cooked up some hen of the woods and chicken of the woods while their young son roared in his dinosaur hoodie. We then separated off to our cars in ones and twos with thank yous and waves. On my drive back through the drenched woods and screeching windshield wipers, I dreamed of a hot shower back home. But I knew the rain that chilled my bones today would bloom the mushrooms of tomorrow. And wonder would bloom with them too, if only we had the eyes to see.

Singing insects | Eastern West Virginia

I got a screw stuck in my tire on the way to the wetlands where the singing insect walk was to start. When I arrived at the nature center, late and anxious and trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get home and even pay for a new tire if I did, I whispered an apology to an Audubon employee and said: sorry, I had a screw in my car on the way here. (Wait, wtf, replaying that in my head very quickly. Okay, let’s try to remedy that statement. Quickly, please!).

We were here at a small nature preserve with Wil Herschberger, an amateur naturalist and local expert on singing insects. Being late, I had already missed the part where they ID’d the songs emanating from the deepening shadows around us. Well, they sounded pretty whoever they were. And as we progressed throughout the walk it seemed like there was a lot more species than my untrained ear could pull out.

We went along the trails, shining our lights in the underbrush, Wil pointing out when a solitary cricket called from the canopy above us. In the bushes, we found tree crickets with our lights. Female crickets puncturing the leaf stems to lay their eggs. Male crickets rubbing their wings together to vibrate them into sound. It was an unusually chilly night for September, so their music was lower in pitch and slower, and Wil pointed out that there were many species that had ceased singing in the cold. But then our guide pulled out a sound app that was currently recording high frequencies beyond human hearing. There was singing all around us, but we could not hear it.

At the stream, I parted from the group and found a blue flower near the water. As I waved my flashlight across it, it seemed to glow differently, to fluoresce strange glowing blues in the artificial light. Someone came over and squee-ed in delight at the giant spider that had made its home among the blue flowers. The giant spider I hadn’t seen.

The flowers glow in wavelengths we cannot see. The insects sing in frequencies beyond our hearing. And countless wildlings find homes around our trailings.

Hawk watch | Western Maryland

Mist clung to the hills like ripped cotton balls. The day promised a sticky heat, a rejoinder of the last season. I wound through the hills of western Maryland, ending up on a one lane road through steep ridges and old farmhouses, finally making it to South Mountain, a part of the last ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia.

I was already late, so I ran up the steep trail through thinly spaced trees where Kris from the local bird society waited to greet me at the bottom of a stone tower. As I gasped for breath, she said, “Go on up! It gets dark in there so watch your step.”

At the top, my friend Maria greeted me with my adopted binoculars as I explained my miscalculated lateness. Before us stretched the Cumberland Valley, tinged with the hazy moisture from the tropical depression that had just moved through. Swifts dove between trees. Dark columns of insects spun above the ridge. And lantern flies buzzed from the tower ledge to the trees beyond.

“Bird three-o-clock,” someone called. We turned our binoculars there, searching. Some birds flew off the ridge and then began to soar, finding a spiraling column of warm air. Definitely hawks. Someone ID’d them as broad-winged hawks, four of them. No, five! They rose and rose for what seemed like forever until finally they cut away toward us, soaring right over us. As one titled slightly, the sun at our backs shone bright on its striated feathers. A moment of indescribable beauty captured in my binoculars then quickly gone.

We saw a few smaller groups of broad-winged hawks that went right overhead along with some Cooper’s hawks and sharp-shined hawks that had some fun attacking them as they circled above us. And then finally someone called to look behind us quickly. “Don’t look at the sun! Don’t look straight at it!.” A group of fifteen broad-winged hawks flew right beneath the sun and then quickly over us. They soared high, following the ridge further south on their annual migration to warmer climes.

JP from the local bird society recounted how in Corpus Christi, Texas, hundreds of thousands of raptors make their way through on their way to Central America. The volunteers counted 135K in a day. But here on South Mountain, it was just the start of their journey. This was just us wishing them well and safe travels.

Toward the end of the hour, one of the columns of insects moved atop the tower and decided have their orgy all around us. We flicked bugs off each other’s hair, packs, and clothes. My friend Theresa called out, “Well, this has been fun!” And we headed down the stairs for shelter after some mumbled thank-yous.

Seeds of an entangled future

Right at this moment, there are symphonies all around us, always beyond our hearing. Fungus that blooms outside our imaginings. Winged journeys that cross borders, symbiotic relationships that defy categorization, and songs of creatures we will never know for they are lost to history.

Pay attention and the world blooms. Wonder is right around the corner from mundanity. Grab it while you can. Nurture that wonder, those tiny worlds, and help them bloom.

Some seeds of worlds for you to consider:

• What if we stewarded forests for mushroom growth? What if we allowed folks to get certified in foraging on public lands? What would a world look like where Indigenous people could freely celebrate their ancestral foraging and foodways?
• What if we celebrated animal vocalizations as a concert? Singing insects celebrated as symphonies. Whale songs recorded as oral epics. Bird songs enjoyed as choral assemblies.
• What if we created rituals and holidays around bird migrations? What if we stopped policing people that naturally and freely migrated back-and-forth across borders? What if we based governance not on arbitrary lines but on the migration routes of animals or the expanse of certain ecological communities?

The shadows are singing

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWhen summer turns to autumn
And the sun’s warmth cools
Beneath the whispers of trees
The shadows begin to sing
A trill from the canopy
A chirp from the grass
And all around a soft thrumming
I think: let me stay here awhile
Let me sing of the glories of now

All the world churns
In a ceaseless noise
But a part of me -
A part that is growing -
Is singing here
Always
In the sweetness of summer’s decay

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.