Nature Watch
—🍃This month
☀️Daylight · Today
📅Next season window
🪵Ground · Our station
Every month along the lower end of Five Mile Creek has a handful of things worth walking outside to look at, and most of them are gone again in three weeks.
- 🐸February. The first frogs calling from wet ground near the creek.
- 🐦April. The dawn chorus at its loudest, in the half hour before sunrise.
- 🪲June. Fireflies in the damp low ground after dark.
- 🌼September. Goldenrod, and the first birds moving south.
The creek bottoms through Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside keep their own calendar, because water holds heat: they green up after the fence lines do and hold their color after the ridges have dropped. Season windows, frost dates, hunting season dates, and what people here have recorded on iNaturalist are all kept here.
What to watch for
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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.
What people are finding
—Anybody can file a sighting on iNaturalist, and people here do. These are the ones from Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside over the past year that other naturalists have since agreed on. Places are given to the town and no closer, and iNaturalist withholds the location on some records itself, most often the snakes and the salamanders.
Nothing comes off the list, so a species recorded once this spring is still on it years from now.
Species list
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
—Where 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 FIVEMILE weather station. Sightings come from iNaturalist, research grade only, which means other people looked at the record and agreed on the identification. Hunting season dates are set by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.