The furnace has been on a couple of nights already to take the chill off. Driving home from Asheville the other evening in the wind-blown rain, I got a good look at the first real cold front of the year. Great dark clouds, purple looking in the twilight, were rising like a wall in the west, but it was a wall with tattered holes, through which shone patches of powder-blue, backlit sky. Friday morning came clear and blue and bright and crisp with a yard full of migrating songbirds. Autumn is, indeed, here.

Here we go again

Grail bird’s back in town again

Birders are rejuvenated. Binoculars and spotting scopes have been cleaned and readied. Field guides have usurped The Da Vinci Code’s spot on the nightstand. Fall migration is in full swing.

Two ostriches with their heads buried in the sand were having a conversation. The first ostrich said, chuckling, “Man can you believe it — all those wild stories about the earth heating up and the oceans rising?”

I was clicking Izzy into her booster seat last Saturday about 9 p.m. when she said, “Look Daddy, there’s a bird.” We were on the top deck of Waynesville’s parking garage and it was dark.

“I bet you saw a bat,” I said.

I was working in the yard the other afternoon when I heard a crisp “whap!” — like the sound of a line drive in the third baseman’s mitt — just above my head. A pipevine swallowtail butterfly spun to the ground, wings flapping wildly. My first thought was a dragonfly must have made a grab for it. When I reached down to pick it up, I found a bald-faced hornet latched onto its head.

Nothing takes me back to that shotgun shack along the dusty road around Horseshoe Lake quicker than the call of the rain crow. In late July and early August it’s a common sound coming from the woods around my home in the early morning, late evening and in the grey stillness before a summer rain.

The king of insect migration – King Billy – will soon be gliding its way to Mexico by the millions. The monarch butterfly was dubbed “King Billy” by early North American settlers because its bright orange color reminded them of William of Orange, King of England.

One of the tenets of the theory of evolution is a phenomenon known as character displacement. Character displacement states, in essence, that when two similar species inhabit the same environment and compete for the same resources, natural selection favors a divergence in characters – be it physical or behavioral.

No, it’s not another reality TV series, and there’s no need to call in and vote for your favorite. But if you pause a moment with that first cup of coffee, you’ll notice that the mornings are becoming quieter. It’s hard for us sedentary humans, slogging through 90-degree heat and afternoon thunderstorms to realize, but autumn is just around the corner. Nature, however, runs on a more intuitive clock.