Autumn equinoctial winds whip through neighbourhood lanes. It’s a circling back to this time last year when I began consciously noticing and photographing what’s happening with insect pollinators and other more-than-humans living here.
Hopping chaffinches laboriously harvest the oily black seeds spinning out of cracked flax pods. And the wax eyes have arrived back in the hebes, picking at a potpouri of seed heads. Swollen fruit and berries – from flowers fertilised earlier by pollinators – begin to release and die. A profusion of their seeds scatter out. Capsules of future life. The valley reminds me of the repeating pulses, patterns and cycles. Old friends again.
I recognise the coconut fragrance which now wafts along the scruffy dome track behind the houses. Yellow gorse flowers are back. The same two manuka bushes, filled with star-like blossoms, are luring bees again. Little grey-blue butterflies, common blues, swirl across grassy berms and gravel down Postgate Drive. They were here last April too. Kahu Road has white flowering koromiko and houheria again but earlier than last year.
I notice the dried seed pods of pohutukawa, kowhai, wattles and even cow parsley, and the white, purple and red berries of ti kouka, ngaio and karamu.
We’re just past the halfway point between the winter and summer solstices. Light begins to decline. Shadows are sharper. Pam emailed me, “the equinox is sweeping in on a wild wind that has my late sunflowers and asters bowing their heads with no bees to brush off their nectar.”
Edge of Things 