Estivation: prolonged torpor or dormancy of an animal during a hot or dry period.
I’m one of these strange creatures whose lowest point of the year is high summer. Yet it turns out I’m not that strange after all! I’m just an estivator, like my cousins the snails and hedgehogs and tortoises and lemurs!
It’s not just the hot part of a given summer day when I enter a torpor. It starts right ahead of the summer solstice and lasts into the early part of September. Even on relatively cool summer days, or during the lovely mountain summer mornings and evenings, each of my attendant parts — physical, mental, emotional — is draggy and slow and heavy. Motivation is a distant memory.
Summer is supposed to be the season of growth and expansion. Outdoor sports and long, busy, social days. I try. I drag my estivating carcass through camping trips and barbecues and outdoor festivities. But mostly I want to follow my friends’ examples:
- When it gets above 86 degrees, hedgehogs estivate by lowering their metabolism, curling up in a ball, spines outward, and hibernating for weeks
- Desert tortoises estivate in the relative cool of their burrows, where they can go for a year without drinking when their metabolisms are slow
- The fat-tailed dwarf lemur is a champion among mammalian estivators — they go down for up to seven months, punctuated by “interbout arousals,” which sound like fun
- Snails retreat into their shells to estivate when it’s too hot and dry for their taste
- Salamanders, earthworms and lungfish add a neat twist — they cover themselves in a thick layer of mucosal slime for protection during their estivations
Every summer I long to curl up in a prickly ball and ignore everything. It could be “reverse” seasonal affective disorder, where misfits get depressed in the summer instead of the winter. Or maybe my body just has other, seasonal plans.
Wake me up on September 15.
On Elk Meadow Road 