A landscape that for months has been dominated by shades of green now turns to almost uncountable tones of yellow, gold, orange, brown, and red.

The transition is brief, as maple, birch, ash, aspen, oak and other trees and their shrubby understory all too soon drop their colorful leaves, leaving barren branches that will resemble a pen-and-ink landscape until spring comes, sap flows, and life stirs again within them.

Fragile herbaceous plants, wildflowers among them, will disappear into the leaf litter on the forest floor. Some, the perennials, will emerge again in spring from tubers, bulbs or rhizomes. Others, the annuals and biennials, will rely on maturing seeds for the survival of their kind.

Some mammals, like black bears, will hibernate. Others enter a state of greatly slowed meta

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