Nature Watch
—What is moving, blooming, calling, and changing along the lower end of Five Mile Creek, plus the season windows the year actually turns on. Everything here is something you can walk outside and check.
🍃This month
☀️Daylight · Today
📅Next season window
🪵Ground · Cardiff
What to watch for
——
Water holds heat longer than air or soil does, so the strip along a creek warms slower in spring and cools slower in fall than the open ground a hundred feet away. It is why the bottoms green up after the fence lines and hold their leaf color after the ridges have dropped, and why the same walk gives you a different month depending which side of the bank you take.
Season windows
Full calendar →Hunting seasons
Dates only, and that is deliberate
Season dates are listed here because they are part of the year in these three towns and because people plan around them. Locations are not, and never will be. The state sets the dates and the annual regulations are the authority on all of it. Outdoor Alabama publishes the current seasons.
The nature year
Twelve months, one line eachWhere this comes from The month by month notes are written by the nature desk and kept in this site's own file. Season windows, frost dates, and the old seasonal turnings come from the same calendar data the calendar page reads, so the two can never disagree. Daylight is calculated on the page. Ground condition comes from the weather station in Cardiff. Hunting season dates are set by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.