Late Dandelion, Assekonk

If there's one term that seems to describe much of what I'm trying to accomplish in watching the natural world, the word would have to be "phenology." Webster defines it as "a branch of science dealing with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as bird migration or plant flowering)." And that's fine, except that I typically tell people that what I do, in the phenological realm, is simply attempt to ascertain nature's timing in my neighborhood. It's an old pursuit, and in traveling the same route, just about every day, I'm following in the footsteps of well-known naturalists, from Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau, to the moderns. We walk familiar paths; we record everything we see and hear. Eventually, we come up with a reliable timetable... until something weird happens, like this Dandelion I discovered flowering at the beginning of December. November blooming dandelions are expected, but this one was definitely an off-the-charts surprise. So I added it to the records, and rewrote the phenological database.