FALL’S ACT I

Sunday is the first day of what many Mainers consider the prettiest, loveliest and all-round best season of the year. And autumn’s Act I is special.

First of all, the summer visitors, much as we love and value their time here, are mostly gone home. Traffic is down to a reasonable level, and those huge mobile homes with the automobiles hooked on behind no longer clog the highways and block the back roads.

With another frantic summer out of the way, we can settle into fall chores and spend time with winter’s foul-weather friends whom we may have neglected.

The sun is still warm enough to enjoy hiking or just sitting somewhere in the lee of the fall breezes. One close observer, an artist, says the autumn sunshine adds a yellow or mellow cast to her painting. Another thinks it is like honey.

A few streaks of yellow are showing up in the yellow birch and occasional red in the swamp maples. But most trees still hold a full measure of green leaves – or dark red in the case of red maples. Never mind those ugly black spots on the leaves of many Norway and sugar maples. They are a recurrent blight called tar spot that does not harm the trees. Raking and burning the leaves when they fall can reduce next year’s infestation.

Most of the songbirds that go to Central and South America, such as warblers, vireos, tanagers, flycatchers, orioles, catbirds, have passed through Maine already, says Judy Kellogg Markowsky, director of the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden. They migrate at night and put down at dawn, in shrubs and trees. A few stragglers can be seen, she says, in places such as Cascade Park in Bangor.

Ms. Markowsky advises that hawks migrate in the day, on good sunny days with breezes from the north. On the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park every sunny day from now till Oct. 10 there are rangers and volunteer birders who help you spot the hawks in morning and early afternoon.

With the summer population thinned out, the deer are venturing out of the woods. Out on Little Cranberry Island, Dan Fernald has already bagged one with his bow and arrow, butchered it, and sent off some of the meat to be processed into hamburger and sausage.

So fall is in full sway. Make the most of it.