Sturgeon Moon

Lake sturgeon were abundant and readily netted in the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain in late summer, and the name comes directly from that fishery. The fish are worth a moment: lake sturgeon are living fossils, essentially unchanged for well over 100 million years, capable of living past a century and growing beyond two metres.

They are also a conservation cautionary tale. Commercial harvest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — sturgeon were taken for meat, for caviar, and for the isinglass rendered from their swim bladders — collapsed the population to a fraction of a percent of its historical size. Recovery programmes are ongoing, and slow, because a female lake sturgeon may not spawn for the first time until her mid-twenties — estimates of first maturity run from the mid-teens to the low thirties and average close to twenty-six — and she then spawns only once every three or four years.

Green Corn Moon marks the point at which maize is edible but not yet dried for storage, an important distinction in a subsistence calendar.

Also known as

• Green Corn Moon
• Grain Moon
• Red Moon

The 1778 record

Travelling among the Dakota in 1766 and 1767, Captain Jonathan Carver wrote down all twelve month names in a single passage. Published in 1778, it predates the almanac list by roughly a century and a half and is the oldest independent check on these names.