Park Notes: Signs Of Summer In Montco's Evansburg

Cardinals are calling, or bobolinks, or sparrows, and their dulcet notes mingle and echo in the dense, humid, late-May air. Their songs are louder and more frequent than they were two weeks ago, and two weeks ago they were louder and more frequent than they had been a month before that.

Evansburg State Park is no longer just in the throes of a newly blooming spring. It’s nearing the maturity of its summer adulthood.

Skinny single-track paths snake along the banks of the Skippack Creek, which runs the length of the park. Through a long winter the paths were sometimes indistinguishable from the bare ground surrounding it. Bare trees with bare branches stood motionless, stilled in the long, deep December freeze like some arboreal cemetery. There were no bushes girding the path, and the cold, steel creek ran high, bloated by winter rains.

But as the creek receded the banks bloomed, and what was in spring a trail colorfully dotted with wildflowers and ivy and grass has become on the eve of summer a densely forested jungle. The trail, nearly overgrown despite its usage, is but a thin brown line touring the reborn wilds.

Hawkweed, ragwort, bladderwort are established now, altering, adding contours. Rockbeds at the mouth of small estuaries or the end of trails are no longer cold and slick but warm, dried, whitened by the May sunshine, with sprouts of ivy and wildgrass greening the spaces between.

“This wasn’t here yesterday,” says the mallard’s honk, every day, startled by passerby from a bankside perch and lurching into the creek.

The water has warmed, gnats race over its surface in the still places. Without rainfall in recent weeks the creek is ankle-deep in some parts, and the scattered dark, deep pools that do persist are quiet with the tense, palpable presence of larger fish, rainbow trout, brown trout, smallmouth.

From the slope on the opposite bank, a whitetailed deer stands still as a winter tree, watching the water and the trees across the creek with a fixed gargoyle eye, as if he could see the process of their changing if he watched long enough.