Summer 2025
By: John W. Garbutt – Class of 2019
On June 20th, about 20 minutes before the summer solstice, a long day of work was complete. As I was leaving and looking westward, a large bird flew over. It may have been the tiredness, but I was sure it was a Barn Owl chasing the last few minutes of spring as it flew toward good hunting grounds. We have had one around work during the past winters and one may roost in the area year around.
Summer began very rainy causing me to miss a lot of planned time at Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge for the start of nesting season. Hagerman’s roads were flooded as Lake Texoma was high was due to bountiful rains in Oklahoma. The Red and Washita Rivers eagerly shared their bounty into the lake. Despite this disappointment, the summer was milder than normal. Fronts toward the end of August and into September provided a nice autumnal tease. The trees at home even seemed to have a lighter green to yellowish tint as if they were beginning to break down chlorophyll. It had to be a trick of the lighting.
If you follow any meteorologist in Texas or perhaps the south, you see a chart around the end of summer with a dozen or so seasons listed for Texas. Most of the seasons, in Texas fashion, are a form of summer. We were in the “false fall” returning to summer section of the chart.
With high temperatures in the low 90s entering the final week of summer, the forecast showed a cold front right behind the autumn equinox. Could it be true? If so, would the lower temperature stay? While this seems to only be a human matter, on the final full Monday of summer, our earliest spring arrivals, the White-eyed Vireos and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, raced against time as they busily taught their second broods the required life lessons before the northern winds pushed them south.
As I left the park on that warm morning, I awaited the cool embrace of autumn and reflected on some of my favorite things from the summer of 2025.
6/22/25- Halberd-leaf Rosemallow at Connemara Meadow Nature Preserve.
6/30/25- Halloween Pennant at Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge.
6/30/25- Checkered White on Stiff Greenthread at Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge.
7/7/25- Cricket Frog at Frisco Commons.
7/27/25- A skipper of some sort on Pitcher’s Leatherflower at Oak Point Park and Nature Preserve.
7/27/25- Snowberry Clearwing on Pickerelweed at Oak Point Park and Nature Preserve.
8/3/25- Green Heron on the hunt at Bonnie Wenk Park.
8/24/25- Snow-on-the-prairie at Erwin Park.
8/24/25- Texas Spiny Lizards at Limestone Quarry Park.
9/9/25- Green Heron at Hall Office Park.