Winter has been missing its usual sights, sounds and smells this year. An unseasonally dry period has cast a pall over the landscape.
Although winter is traditionally a quiet period, wildlife and the woods largely lying dormant awaiting the rebirth and rejuvenation of spring, has been more muted. The winter is not following nature’s script.
The seasons have their signposts which are aligned to our planet’s movement around the Sun. Spring brings excited birdsong, the scent of blossoms; summer the chirping of young birds and the aroma of eucalypt oil; autumn is filled with the calls of resident birds establishing winter territories after the departure of the migrants, the dank odour of decaying leaf litter. Then we go into lockdown as winter bites.
I tend to enter a partial torpor myself when June arrives. I fight to leave the warmth of my log fire for my daily afternoon walk, now truncated because of the shortening of the day.
What stirs me, though, is a symbolic walk to honour the winter solstice, the shortest day which falls in late June when the southern hemisphere is tilted furthest away from the Sun.
The solstice arrived on June 21 this year and as I made my way along the Pipeline Track below Fern Tree I noticed something markedly different from previous years. The birds were quieter than I had remembered them and, strangely, the smell of leaf and litter, of flaking bark, had changed. There was an odour there, but it was more a summer smell, of dust and dry leaf.
An observation by Jennifer Stackhouse in her gardening column in the Weekend Tasmanian appeared to confirm that we were in an unusual and prolonged dry spell this year, the month of April being the driest in a decade.
On my walk the silence was broken by a party of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, uttering their call that always sounds to me like the creaking of a rusty hinge on a door. Others compare it to a “keen”, the Irish lament for the departed and on this morning it certainly had a funereal feel to it.
I could see dieback in the blue, stringybark and peppermint gums and native cherry and wondered if the black cockie lament was an omen for the health of the woods.
But amid a changing climate, of extreme temperature and weather patterns, I’m determined to remain optimistic.
Nature’s work goes on in the woods, out of sight and out of mind. Beneath my feet prolific species of fungi are at work conducting the silent busyness of decay. Sprouting toad stalls and bracket fungi clinging to tree trunks provide the evidence.
And looking up at the silver wattles, I can see the buds of their bright yellow flowers forming, ready to burst into bloom before the end of winter, throwing their fragrance to the winds.