75° / 47°Sunny, showers lateSunset 6:05 PM
Foggy start, then sunny and 75, the warmest day this week, with a chance of a shower after 3.
Look up
After sunset, look low in the southwest for the thin crescent Moon with an orange-red star beside it. That star is Antares, so big that set in the Sun's place it would reach past Mars to the asteroid belt.
Touch it
Bucks rub their antlers on saplings all fall, first to strip off the dead skin that grew them, then to mark their ground before the November rut. Look for trunks shredded pale a foot to three feet off the ground.
Right outside
The big dark birds circling with wings raised in a shallow V, wobbling side to side, are turkey vultures. They can smell a few parts per trillion, enough to find a dead animal hidden under the trees.
Look up
Sunday at 5:54am the space station, a steady light that never blinks, climbs out of the west to high in the north-northwest and fades in the northeast by 6:00. Saturday night's forecast is mostly clear.
Touch it
A shallow pan holds so little heat that it can ice over on a night that barely cools a pond. The forecast now gives Saturday night a low of 32, so fill a pie tin and feel for ice at first light Sunday.
Go see
On Sunday morning, migrating songbirds caught at Belle Isle Marsh are banded in a biologist's hand, so you see a bird you would normally glimpse in a treetop from a foot away. It is free; rain or high wind cancels.
Coming soon
Mass Audubon's Habitat takes families with kids 5 to 12 out after dark under an almost full moon, stopping at the pond to listen for night animals and in the meadow to look at the sky. It is a paid program, so book now.
Coming soon
A golden-hour walk for families with kids 5 to 12 visits active and abandoned beaver lodges and chewed stumps, then watches the marsh at dusk, when beavers come out to cut branches for their winter food pile.
That's what's worth noticing.Go have a look.