Pumpkin Patch at Sunset

What you can do here

Set the breeze

Breeze runs from a still evening to a steady wind. The corn and grass lean harder, gusts come through more often, and the field gets louder.

Brush through the plants

Move your pointer, or drag a finger, through the corn or the tall grass. They lean the way you move and spring back on their own: the corn slowly, the grass quicker.

Listen for the crow

Touch the corn and a crow answers from somewhere across the fields. Sometimes you’ll see it too, a small dark bird rowing along above the trees. It calls at most once every ten seconds, and every minute or two on its own.

Send a gust

Send a gust pushes a stronger puff of wind across the field from the right. Watch it reach the corn first and the grass a moment later.

Use it as your wallpaper

Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.

Live link

On a computer desktop

Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.

On a TV or a spare screen

Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.

On a phone or tablet

Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.

A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.

Why the corn sways slower than the grass

A corn stalk is tall and stiff and carries heavy ears, so it swings slowly, about once every second and a half, and keeps swinging for a while after a gust has passed. Grass is light and limber; it snaps back faster and settles sooner. Both bend from the root, so the tops travel much farther than the stems, and the leaves and seed heads flutter on top of that.

Field pumpkins

These are field pumpkins, the big round kind grown for carving. They’re picked once the rind has hardened and the color has gone all the way through, cut with a few inches of stem left on. Kept somewhere cool and dry, a pumpkin picked like that lasts two or three months.

About the sounds

One long recording of a breeze moving through a dry field, and a crow calling a long way off. The crow waits at least ten seconds between calls. The breeze gets louder as you raise it.

If you’d rather just watch

• Autumn Covered Bridge, a New England lane in full fall color
• Harvest Moon, a drawn moon screensaver