Ovenbird in Quebec. Photo courtesy of David Bird via GBIF

The ovenbird is the herald of midsummer.

Everyone has heard it, loud, midwoods in June. It shouts “tea-cher, Tea-cher, TEA-cher!” over and over again from the vicinity of its nest among the trees. The signal, if you’re taking signals from the woods, is that the spring riot is subsiding and the rest of summer is not going to last any longer than it did last year.

The little warbler seems to be singing about the flowers. They’re midsummer’s emblems, though outnumbered 2-to-1 by spring blossoms like starflower, violet and Canada mayflower whose petal-falls are past by the time summer descends. Daisies and black-eyed susans are filling fields and embankments, among tangles of purple vetch and nightshade. Heal-all in grass unmown. Mouse-ear hawkweed, wall hawkweed, orange and yellow hawkweed with two or three flowers to a stalk have replaced the dandelions.

The rest is on its way, the ovenbird foretells. Queen Anne’s lace, like white suns suspended in outer space. Here and there subdued pink steeplebush, and their cousins by cone shape and height, the meadowsweet. On come the cattail-shaped inflorescences of timothy shooting up sweet to be chewed, powder-blue chicory, the cinquefoils with perfect yellow petals, growing secluded under red-osier bushes. Welters of bedstraw, with tiny white blossoms more like clouds or nebulae.

Roadside dust will soon be collecting on carpets of rabbit-foot, yellow-hop, white and red cow clover, and the tall, gangly white sweet clover with blossoms like little furled flags, not to be mistaken for wild mustard. In the gravel, stubborn little pineappleweed plants with greenish-yellow nubs. Soon, as if kin, will come button-like blossoms of tansy, escaped from captivity. Hairy-stemmed yarrow, aka milfoil, and delirium-scented valerian are soon to rise like white moons out of tanning grass. Ragweed, with deep-cleft, dark green leaves and small green blossoms almost unrecognizable as flowers. It’s the ragweed, not the goldenrod, that makes you sneeze.

Goldenrod’s bad reputation is puzzling. To my eye, goldenrod might be the very flower the ovenbird has in mind. It is for all practical purposes the season itself, from midsummer to fall finish. Its tail-like sprays of tiny yellow asterflowers sway out and down in gorgeous cascades, groups and individuals. In the blue-black dark of a thunderstorm they look wild and tough; in August sun the gold is so bright it almost hurts to look at it. It marches across fields like disorganized imperial parades from eons past. They’re ageless and aged, robust and at ease. They look like colonnades on the way through the entropic cosmos.

The ovenbird is not so much singing as announcing all this. What’s happening here, it foretells, is spring subsiding and summer rolling over lazily into meadowsweet and loosestrife toward autumn. The goldenrod, especially, carries everything down this slope. It will last you some four months or five — a seaside goldenrod will last you to November.

This spell descends from July through August, then turns into sunflowers and other asters, ripe apples, swallows gathering for southern skies. The ovenbird’s vatic June bulletin on the imminence of midsummer will haunt your thoughts, then.

You’ll wonder, once again, what to make of how it all diminishes to frost.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall” is available from North Country Press. Backyard Naturalist appears the second, fourth and sometimes fifth Thursday each month.