It’s the night season again. Early April after the clocks have gone back, when fungi in a multitude of colours spout in the woods, and the smell of wood smoke clears from the air. The leaves and wooded debris of autumn have been burned in garden and paddock and now a darkness descends while we are still going about our daytime business.
We’ve been alerted to the shift in the clock, the descending dark but our own internal clock never seems programmed for it. Light stolen at a stroke might have a profound effect on us but wildlife who share our world are oblivious to it. The birds and animals, and insects, and the plants that derive energy from the sun do not respond immediately to mankind’s notion of time.
The hands of the clock or the blinking illuminated numerals on the mobile phone are purely a human contrivance. The wild world goes by the seasons, and the simple black and white of day and night is measured not by a time piece but by the tilt of the earth and the proximity of the northern and southern hemispheres to the sun.
Daylight saving represents the slow build-up to the shortest day, the winter solstice which occurs in our hemisphere on June 22 or 23, and wildlife is prepared for it.
The messing with the clock at the approach of winter might not mean much to the natural world but it all the same has a profound effect in the way we view the wildlife that surrounds us.
With darkness descending early, all of a sudden we come face to face with mammals and handful of bird species which at other times go about their business at night when we are asleep.
Now our worlds intersect, collide. Leaner, darker months bring night animals closer to us as the hours of our shifts cross. More animals are killed on the roads as commuters travel home in darkness. Mammals like possums become common in the late afternoon.
We know the nocturnal animals are about in summer even if we don’t see them. Holes dug in the lawn by bandicoots, wallaby droppings on the garden path, scars on a tree where ring-tailed possums have sharpened their claws. The darker hours though coincide with a time when food is scarce for birds and animals, and they must make use of the extended darkness to search for it out of the gaze of predators. In spring and summer, with an abundance of food, the animals and birds of the night are less likely to stir before the sun has set, and so are out of our sight.
After the clocks have gone back, I look for the potoroos now scampering late afternoon across my lawn and, high in the gums above my home, I now hear the screech of the masked owls. In summer, I listen for them as I lie awake at night. In winter they start up just as I am about to watch the early evening news.