1 p.m., 60F, sunny

The first pull-off on the boardwalk into Ridges Sanctuary overlooks open water with beds of sedges running off in both directions. Ordinarily I stop at these open-water swales for rosettes of spatterdock and flowering sedge culms craning up toward the boardwalk. Today, I am drawn in by a flash of wings across the background of trees. There appear to be three empidonax flycatchers banking out over the sedges to extract the insects. I have binoculars with me and study each of them. But they are intent on hunting and pay no attention to one another, and consequently they do not sing. So I cannot tell what species they are: I know them only by their calls, a “quick-three-beers” or “fitz-bew” or “che-bek” setting the species apart. Like screams and sirens and whistles of cicadas, flashes of lightning bugs, sonograms ticking across a laptop as bats fly overhead, the songs of empidonax flycatchers are all I know to differentiate them.

They are in their element here, carving up the air with the ease of figure skaters looping and leaping and spinning, working the rink from edge to center to corner. They are in charge, and they know it. The yellow-rumped warblers are working the field alongside the flycatchers, sturdier and more conservative, making shorter flights out. They command less of the airspace. They were not built for this: they are opportunistic insect-catchers.

A palm warbler shows up, bobs his tail, senses he’s out of his league and retreats to the shrubs. Pine siskins keep a noisy watch from the tops of the pines and spruces. A brown creeper lisps its way upward along a tree trunk. Cicadas squeal. Chickadees buzz. A white butterfly circles upward at the margin of a tree.

The birds move on to greener pastures. Only then do I hear something buzzing and gnawing in the sedges at the edge of the swale. Bogbean leaves are beached on the mud flats.

Further on, I hear a few white-throated sparrows in the bushes beside the trail. I crouch down but see them only in glimpses as they flit from branch to branch. Again, a buzzing, sizzling, gnawing sound in the sedges, a grasshopper stridulating, I suspect. Blue jays screech. Crickets purr. Cars roar by on the highway about 300 feet away.

The boardwalk crosses a slough of Carex lasiocarpa and twig nut-rush. I pass the trail running between the lighthouses and get to the warm sand blanketed with creeping juniper, edged with white pines and boles of leaning white cedar. Chickadees are chasing each other through the trees, lisping and honking. A white-throated sparrow warbles its way southward. A nuthatch calls once, quite a ways to the east. A damselfly lands on the warm sandy trail and settles its wings down in 1, 2, 3 steps. I sneak toward it. Is it green? It flies off, wary enough and smart enough not to let me get close.

Without warning, a red squirrel goes off behind me, sputtering and chattering, out of his mind, furious that I should be there, so close. I follow him into the trees and he bounds carelessly between branches, stopping periodically to harangue me. He stares at me. Then he races away and out of view. A solitary, late-season spring peeper squeaks from 30 feet away.

The trail parallels the ridges arching eastward, then it cuts north across the swales. These ridges and swales repeat the same themes again and again as I cross them: sandy ridge of pine and wintergreen and trailing arbutus; wet mossy forest; swale of Carex lasiocarpa and Carex oligosperma; wet mossy forest again; repeat. Yet it isn’t exactly the same each time. This swale has a fallen log with a pitcher plant growing on it; the last one was a bed of Carex trisperma. And each swale is the same from year to year, but also not exactly: I passed this log 13 months ago, and I saw the very same pitcher plant, only this time the flowering stalk is up. The whole place is like this. The dwarf lake iris are always here, but this year every colony seems larger, and they are in places where I don’t remember seeing them before. This year’s dry trail is the same dry trail it was one year ago, but this October afternoon it is lit up with white amanites. Ridges and swales, seasons of the year, beauty encased in the balance between repetition and novelty.

I have reached the east end of the preserve. I take a moment to root around in the soil for the slender, threadlike golden rhizomes of Coptis trifolia, then I begin the brisk walk back. The dragonflies are flying low over the boardwalk at Solitude Swale. A flicker flies off from the wooded trail into the forest. A belted kingfisher rattles as I reach the visitor center.

The robins have given up on the early morning, and once again I’ve managed not to catch them in the act. Each year I wake up on a July morning and there are cardinals singing, not robins, and I can’t tell you when the robins stopped their morning racket. This year I’ve got it down to a two-week window: on June 26, the robins were working noisily in the backyard by 4:00 in the morning; on July 12, I realized at 5:00 a.m. that the cardinals were starting up, but the robins never had. I’ll try to narrow it down a little more next year.

A few notes from the past three weeks:

The morning of June 30, two green-spored parasols are unfurling lushly in an immaculate lawn at the intersection of Grant and Lee. That evening, as I bike home they are completely open, as big around as the husks of flayed grapefruits. By the next morning they’ve been kicked off their stalks and are dessicating belly-up on the grass. I’m sorry not to watch them grow old and putrid in place. I bet they’ll be back again next year.

On the evening of July 3, the trail into Lyman Woods from the hospital parking structure is crowded with ash seedlings. Emerald ash borer, which will do these in before they can reach reproductive age, is in the meantime working its way across the European Union, a fact I learned the day before. A flooded section of trail through Lyman Woods is draped with hog-peanut. Wood nettles are waist high. Leaves on a hispid buttercup are as big as dinner plates. Woodland tick-trefoil is fruiting, floral buds on the Joe-pye weed inflorescences are closed but raised high enough to look me in the eye, blackberry fruits are hard and green, and narrow-leaved wild leek seeds are developing inside green sheaths that, scratched away, reveal the black seed coats. False nettle spikes are erect and full of flowers. White grass tugs at my legs. Poison ivy spills onto the trails. Heal-all is flowering light blue. Beanlike follicles are developing on poke milkweed, slender and elongate and standing erect at the ends of sinuous peduncles. The forest is mosquitoey and saturated, filled with songs of indigo buntings, cicadas, great-crested flycatchers, eastern wood pewees. Everything is lush or rotting. A great big Carex sparganioides in full fruit is leaning across the trail. A red-bellied woodpecker barks and a flicker calls. House wrens noisily occupy the backyards.

Maple Grove is sunny and 80F when I arrive the evening of July 11. Two cicada species are singing full blast, and I resolve to learn their songs as soon as I get home. Tall bellflower is sprawling and gangly, blue flowers emerging from bullet-shaped buds. Bottlebrush grass goes to pieces at a touch. Elderberry flowers are ripening into berries. A common gall midge has laid its eggs in the midribs of some of the jewelweed leaves, and they are swollen and turgid. Common coral slime mold (Ceratiomyxa) sporangia have withdrawn and are visible only in little patches here and there; the little rice grains of white carnival candy slime mold (Arcyria) have emerged in their place. The fallen log where I learned Cribraria several years ago has rotted almost entirely into the ground, only about 6 inches left to go.

Broad-leaved wild leek is on the cusp of anthesis, floral buds white and tensed to open. A week later, the flowers will all be open, fireworks on the forest floor. Upright hedge-parsley is dotted with tiny white flowers. Fowl manna grass spikelets fall by the handful, husks clattering on the leaves. A plumpish, soft mayapple dangles from between the paired leaves, its stalk broken. It will not ripen.

In the last half-hour of my walk, a wood pewee and a great horned owl call. Fireflies twinkle in the shrub layer, waist high and below, reminding me of a night almost 35 years earlier when a friend and I stood temporarily lost on a recreational portage in a waist-high pool of fog in a northern Wisconsin bog, pricked with fireflies, until we were saved by a group of co-counselors singing “hava nagila” to lead us back to camp. Cicadas are still purring as I walk cross the bridge over St. Joseph Creek toward home.

Then the next morning, June 12, Rachel and I canoe Silver Lake at Blackwell Forest Preserve, and water milfoil is in bloom. Fish are everywhere, Chara is brittle and stinking beneath the water’s surface, there are ducks galore. Rachel watches a green heron hunting, then we both watch it fly off. We work our way around the lake. I spend several minutes listening to the contented nibbling sounds of ducks floating and grazing along the shoreline.

Today, I am reminded that even if they are quiet in the mornings, the robins are not done with us. One lost its composure about 10 minutes after the 4:50 cardinals this morning, chittering for about 2 seconds. And at the end of our walk around the neighborhood, Brooklyn and I came across a robin in the middle of the sidewalk, picking at a tightly-rolled woolly bear caterpillar. The robin flew off as we approached. I rolled the caterpillar around gently, but it did not uncoil. I picked it up and pulled at it a bit, and it wriggled its feet just perceptibly and held tight. It appeared to be just fine. I set it in the grass before Brooklyn and I went in.

Thursday morning, 10 members of our lab group converged on Warren Woods Ecological Field Station in Berrien County, Michigan for our fourth collecting trip. Over the past year and half, we’ve been collecting herbarium specimens for the field station and our own herbarium to document the flora of the site and build up a teaching collection. WWEFS has the sort of bottomland forest that, even if it’s been cut over, still yields something interesting on every visit. The sandy soils on the ridges are forested with beeches and oaks, beechdrops and dwarf ginseng. The slopes are sedgy and ferny. The floodplain is filled with silt that has run down the slope and that pulls at your boots after big rains, but sand is still exposed in the bottom of stream flowing through. Ashes and elms grow in the bottomland with paw paws, fountains of sedges, skunk cabbage. The fallen logs are mossy, and many are sodden and host diverse gardens of grasses and ferns and forbs.

As we collected, a female ebony jewelwing–Calopteryx maculata, the genus name coming from the Greek for “beautiful” and “wing”–flew a slow flap-pause, flap-pause bouncing flight that seemed choreographed in part to showcase its white-tipped black wings. This damselfly species is spectacular and, in my experience, only and almost always in forests of just this kind. Several times I have seen it flying through a forest I was in for the first time just before I found a wet depression or a river. When we lived in southern France for a semester, I would bike the back way to work, sometimes following a creek through a sandy woods. There, too, I would see a Calopteryx looping by, presumably a different species. The ebony jewelwing is an icon of these river-bottom forests I love best.

Red-eyed vireos sang incessantly. Mayapples fruits were unripe, but most had been chewed off or simply fell early. Rain of the previous week brought out jelly fungus running the length of downed logs and a red raspberry slime mold exuding thick cytoplasm. Carex prasina and C. laevivaginata inflorescences had shattered; Carex grayi inflorescences were full. Narrow-leaved wild leeks were flowering. We collected what we could find in flower and washed the muddiest sedge roots in the shallow-running river.

We lunched indoors, then we walked out to a wet meadow along the road where water was standing and poison ivy grew everywhere. Marsh pea flowered alongside the gravel road. I waded into the water and came out with a rush, returned for a Carex vulpinoidea, went back in for three big flowering dogbane plants. We pressed them and then got more from along the road: sassafras, slippery elm, a couple of ashes, another sedge (Carex cristatella). A tree frog called as we pressed. I walked back to the car to get the pruning shears, and a green frog called from the marsh, like the sound of a plucked cello string. We drove home in late afternoon, past the flocks of billboards for lawyers (“Top dog gets you top dollar!”), who must make their money on traffic just like this. It took us about twice as long to get home as it had taken to get there.

Friday morning, the first robin of the day babbled noisily in our backyard at 3:00 and then was silent. By 3:20, a few robins were singing in other yards, and by about 3:30 they were going in full force everywhere. The morning traffic started up on Fairview Avenue around 4:00. At 4:50, a cardinal whistled in the tree outside our window. A minute later, a mourning dove sang. Two minutes later, a second cardinal. I wondered whether we might be nearing the late-summer pivot point, when morning robins in our neighborhood will give way to morning cardinals, but it’s still too early. Give them a few more weeks. Everyone quieted down then. At 5:00, our neighbor’s sprinkler went on.[1]

I read and wrote for a bit, walked Brooklyn, had breakfast with my son, then biked into work. I locked up at Big Rock Visitor Station. Silvery burs were forming on the branch tips of licorice bedstraw, and green burs the size of tiny sweat bees were loose in the inflorescences of the sanicles. Lopseed spikes were flowering from the bases upward, many wearing a single ruff of flowers at the waist. The lower flowers were reflexed and ripening to pale fruit. Down the trail, black hairy sweet cicely fruits were hardening up. Enchanter’s nightshade were in full bloom: tiny, white, four-petaled flowers with plump inferior ovaries blew like trumpets on the spikes. Bottlebrush grass spikelets stood perpendicular to the stem but still hinged at the base and mobile, dribbling anthers from between the scales.

Rain was threatening. The mosquitoes were making pests of themselves. They buzzed in my ear and all around my face, balled up on my neck as I slapped them. Inflorescences on joe-pye weed were bunched as tight as cauliflower florets. Short’s asters two months from flowering were chest high. Leaf miners had carved trails through the jewelweed leaves. Solomon’s plume bore tough berries the size of BBs. A wood pewee sang, and a red-eyed vireo continued singing, as it’s been doing and will continue to do all summer long.

There is an impressive patch of broad-leaved plantain at the intersection of the Woodland Trail loop going counterclockwise toward the east and the return loop from the north. They must be getting everything they need in this weather: their leaves were almost as big as frisbees, and their flowering spikes were knee-high. Beside them, the first flowers were forming on pale jewelweed, self-pollinated fruits turgid and lumpy beneath. The Canada wild onions were tipped with papery-sheathed bulblets that detached easily. Collecting a handful was like gleaning tiny onions. The narrow-leaved wild leeks were already setting seed, perhaps a full two weeks ahead of the Berrien County leeks we had seen the previous day. The seeds were enclosed tightly in a fleshy knot at the tip of the spathe: scratch the flesh, and the black seed coats shone through the wound. The crowns of yellowing rue anemone leaves formed splashes of light in the understory. Woodland tick-trefoil was flowering.

A flicker called. A light rain pattered against the canopy. Red-eyed vireo and indigo bunting sang. Hog-peanut twined along the trail over hackberry seedlings, asters, bottlebrush grasses. The wind picked up, and as I walked further east, it dropped down to meet me, cool and moist on my face, pushing the mosquitoes away temporarily. There’s been a lot of cutting in this forest in the past year, and the outcome is nice right now: beneath the oaks grows a thick lawn of zigzag goldenrod, joe-pye weed, Short’s aster, a goldenrod whose name I never remember, apices of twining hog-peanut, ash seedlings, daisy fleabane. Most of the mayapple fruits were nipped off or fallen, the unripe fruits perhaps pilfered by squirrels. Though I’ve never seen an animal take one.

Wild ginger seeds buried inside the ripened ovaries have darkened to a deep chestnut brown. A bed of clearweed grew soft and glassy on the naked soil. Rubbery fruits about the length of rice grains and half as thick were forming on the honeworts. A colony of 100 or more pokeweed plants at the east end of the Woodland Trail loop, ranging from belly-height to roughly seven feet, were sprouting spikes of small, white flowers.

The mosquitoes became incessant, crawling in my ears and nose and buzzing around my eyes. I picked up my pace. A house wren called from the field beneath the ComEd lines. A white-breasted nuthatch sang. Ahead of me, a man was sitting on a bench, conducting business quietly on his phone. He was wearing loafers with no socks, and I thought of the mosquitoes that must be feasting on his ankles, but I didn’t want to stare. He appeared unperturbed. He stood and walked slowly behind me as I walked past the bench, still talking quietly. I passed a colony of pale jewelweed, then a patch of Agaricus mushrooms that had opened to a diameter of about six inches, with thick caps that split along the edges as they’ve grown, dark gills beneath, a short, distinct ring around the stipe. One patch of two or three caps was decomposing lushly, smelling like death.

Twenty feet behind me, I heard the man in the loafers raise his voice to ask a question that sounded rhetorical. Then I smelled something rotting again and stopped to look for it. Thirdy seconds passed as I searched, standing still. The man passed me, walking slowly and perfectly erect, a slight lift at each step, almost floating along the trail. His hand was on his head as though he were caught mid-thought. His call was over, his lips were slightly parted, and he was scanning the woods as though he had never seen this kind of place before, or perhaps as though he sensed he knew it and was just trying to place it. Yet he also had the look of someone who is utterly at home here, and perhaps everywhere. He was in no hurry. I admired his focus and his cool, but I could not tell: was he here, or was he a thousand miles away, talking through a design or a plan or closing a deal, still asking questions? The mosquitoes calmed down and the rain completed. I retrieved my bike and went into work.

That night at 8:30, the first cicada I’ve noticed this year sang a long, pulsing song from the far end of our block just as the lightning bugs were coming out. Saturday evening, Rachel came home after a month out east. We walked Brooklyn and worked in the yard. Rachel pulled the garlic. The bulbs are the size of racquetballs. Glade mallow has taken over the rain garden, and it is magnificent.

Note: [1] This bird sequence actually combines Friday and Saturday mornings. But the sequence is general enough that it may well have happened on Friday as well, and I just missed part of it.

Coral slime molds caught me by surprise Saturday morning, spreading like hoarfrost on the sides of downed ashes. With them, equally unexpected, were a scattering of wolfs milk: delicate, rubbery orange spheres that bleed fluorescent goo when you squeeze them. These two slime molds popped out a couple of weeks earlier than I expected. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for Cribraria and Arcyria as well, their comrades-in-arms. Narrow leaved wild leeks were on the cusp of flowering, edges of the white petals showing from behind the separating green petals like the hem of a slip. I let Brooklyn run down hill into St. Joseph Creek. She splashed around and looked back up at my friend and his dog and me. Then she ran back up the hill to us. She stood patiently as I picked her leash back up then shook river water on us. My friend was impressed that Brooklyn would just come back like that when there’s such a nice river to play in, then stand still to be taken again by the leash. What could I do but agree? Brooklyn is that kind of dog.

It’s the onset of the green lull, and little has changed at Maple Grove in the last week. Also, I haven’t written up my notes from last weekend. So, from a sunny 7:45 on Sunday morning, June 7, in order:

• Northern parula warbler and a blue-gray gnatcatcher at the margin of the woods as I walk in. Behind us, a yellow warbler in the neighbor’s shrubs. Chimney swifts overhead.
• Great-crested flycatcher. Red-bellied woodpecker. A blue jay. Robins and an eastern wood pewee.
• Path rushes immature, slender and prickly.
• Recurved buttercup fruits ripe and ready to fall, breaking easily from the receptacle.
• Carex rosea fruits ripe as well, the plant slenderer than I would have expected, but undoubtedly this species, stigmas thick and black and tightly coiled at the tips of the perigynium beaks. The Carex davisii fruits I somehow missed on the way in: they’re nowhere to be seen, like the serviceberries at the church lot down the street that I’ve pilfering (faithfully) for 17 years. Carex cephalophora heads yellowing.
• Oak catkins strewn across the poison ivy and virginia creeper.
• Fowl mannagrass inflorescences shattering, raining spikelets onto the trail.
• Mosquitos in my ear.
• Jays and red-eyed vireos singing. Great-crested flycatcher blasting. Cardinal whooping. Eastern wood pewee whistling. The 8:00 a.m. churchbell.
• Beams of sunlight slanting diagonally through the trees, casting patches of light on the forest floor. Cranefly moving through.
• Senescing Enemion, flecks of pale yellow.
• Mayapple fruits gone on a few plants I pass, before they could reach maturity.
• A big, burly bee–carpenter bee? bumblebee?–patrolling over the leaf litter, alighting, moving off.
• An abandoned tennis ball; Brooklyn doesn’t even care.
• Two narrow-leaved wild leek scapes standing right next to each other, practically holding hands at the base of a sugar maple, inflorescences still hooded, the flowers practically wriggling inside, the long-tipped spathe about to split open.
• A red eyed vireo.
• Zigzag goldenrod knee-high. Beggars’ ticks thigh- to waist-high.
• Another patch of mayapple, about half the fruits gone.
• Sprawling yellowed bluegrass.
• Wreckage of Virginia bluebells that has died back for the season.
• A colony of broad-leaved white bear sedge where I saw a thicket of seedlings almost exactly a year ago.  

The last two nights I’ve walked up and through Lyman Woods a bit after sunset. Poke milkweed plants are colluding at the top of a hill, in indulgent flower. This is the second time this year I’m struck by how many there are here. A deer surprised me on my walk through, standing so close to the trail I could have run over and tagged it. This is of course not true: I could no more have tagged that deer than Brooklyn could capture any of the hundreds of squirrels or bunnies she runs after in our yard. Neither of us is handy in that way.

Saturday night I was talking with Rachel on the phone as the lights went out in the forest. We don’t usually talk on the phone while we’re in the woods, but it was nice to hear her voice as the fireflies were going off all around. It was dark where she was, and it was dark where I was, and her voice was right in my ear, which made it seem like we were standing in the same darkness together. We finished our conversation. I stood and watched the lightning bugs glowing intermittently in the sunflowers. The edges of the leaves faded into one another. The forest grew darker, the lightning bugs brighter. I could barely see my feet as I walked out.

On the way home, a minor miracle: as I approached the frozen custard place, bemoaning the fact that I had forgotten my wallet, but applauding myself that I would saving money and also not eating unnecessary frozen custard, I found a forgotten five dollar bill in my pocket. I got a small chocolate cone, which comes with two scoops. It was a little crooked, a little tippy, but it was good and cold.

I was just uphill from Big Rock Visitor Station Thursday morning, biking to work on the road leading into the Arboretum, when I saw a robin fly low over the pavement like a plane with engine trouble. It seemed to have bitten off more than it could chew. It was wrestling against the thing in its bill as it skittered to a halt. Had I not been biking towards it, the robin might have prevailed. Instead, with no time to wrestle its foe into submission, it flew off, leaving the thing on the pavement, and as I biked past I couldn’t tell at first what it had left. A very large moth? Perhaps, but why drop this one? A robin carries so many things so capably: snails and earthworms, bundles of sticks, terrible-tasting caterpillars. This thing looked like the silhouette of a boulder shrunken to the size of a silver dollar. I turned around and set my bike down to see what it was.

The robin’s burden turned out to be a young crayfish. It was still glistening with moisture. It propped back on its tail as I approached, planted its feet, aimed its long antennae and snout at the sky, and raised its open claws. It was frozen in fighting position. Years ago we had a smallish but scrappy cat named Fire. I once watched Fire leap up at a swooping hawk, claws out and back arched, to try to pull the bird out of the air. What was that cat thinking? The hawk would have torn him to pieces. Yet I would not have wanted to tangle with Fire if I were that hawk, and I would not have wanted to carry this crayfish if I were the robin. In fact, I was a little nervous about picking it up myself, but I had to get it off the road. I surveyed it from all sides. It watched me back, unmoving. It was implacable. What would this crayfish have done, had the robin gotten it back to the nest? Would it have eviscerated the chicks one by one? Or tormented them until the parent robin, exasperated, said, “Enough!” and returned it to the marsh? After a few moments I mustered my courage and grasped it firmly but gently by the sides, certain it would tear a hole in my finger. It did not. I set it beneath the trees and biked into work.

There were storms that afternoon. While I revised text and met with staff, raindrops hammered the leaves, banging against leaf rollers, leaf miners, larvae tucked tight into galls, aphids. They pummelled caterpillars and spiders holed up at the edges of their webs, ticks and craneflies. A friend poked her head into my office and said she didn’t want to be intrusive, but would I like a ride home? She had room for me and my bike. But I could see a break in the rain was coming, so I said no, thank you; and when it arrived, I took my opportunity. As I biked out through Crowley Marsh, a red-headed woodpecker swooped low over the road, wings flashing white. It landed on a bur oak in the middle of the low savanna and was joined by another. I watched them for awhile, then biked home past a corral of burbling cowbirds.

There was a tornado warning that night. The boys and Brooklyn and I retreated to the basement for 20 minutes. The cats wandered down to join us. It was a real party. We texted Rachel photos. We finished off a carton of ice cream from the deep freeze. The weather passed.

A singing chorus frog greeted me the next morning, Friday, as I biked in past the oxbow just north of the Ginko Collection. That evening, I took the train downtown for the Grant Park Music Festival. A pair of pigeons were pecking at each other on the sidewalk, either bickering or kissing. I suspect the latter. One flew up to an electrical junction box mounted on the side of an office building about 8 feet above the sidewalk and was quickly joined by the second. They kept pecking at each other even on that little box. They were still going at it as I walked away.

I expected every seat at Millennium Park concert shell to be filled and the lawn densely packed with blankets and picnic baskets. Apparently many in Chicago weren’t interested in this particular night of free music. It was a perfect evening, and I sat next to a gentleman a bit younger than my dad would be if he were still alive, hunched over a book with a canvas bag at his feet. I took out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had saved for this moment and made it last as long as I could, which was about 2 minutes, maybe less, tearing it into pieces as one does with a good PB&J and relishing them individually. Cardinals and cedar waxwings were singing in the armature overhead.

The conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero, emerged to enthuiastic applause and told us about the first piece the orchestra would be playing, Charles Ives’ “Variations on America,” which I believe Guerrero said Ives had written at the age of 17. It was fun, but my mind wandered. Then, without a word of introduction, they began the piece I had come for, Brahms Symphony No. 4 in E minor. It was beautiful. The sun was setting as the orchestra played. Starlings (I think, I wasn’t sure) copulated briskly–a bit too briskly, as songbirds do–on the strut that ran behind and to the right of the string section. The woman in the seat ahead of me pulled out her phone and turned Merlin on, set it to listen for birds. I watched her phone for a minute as it thought, distracted by the music. “Would you mind if I skipped the birds, just this time,” it might have asked, “and listened to the symphony? This 2nd movement is wonderful.” Instead, it silently returned no answer, and after a minute she turned it off. Her husband took videos at intervals throughout the symphony.

When the Symphony ended, the couple in front of me left, along with about a third of the audience. I had thought this would be the end of the evening, but it was just intermission! I read through the break and watched the sunset crawl up the Aon Center to the north of Millennium Park and up the side of Harbor Point, the condominium building on Lake Shore Drive to the east, wishing I had packed a second sandwich. I scrounged around in my bag and found an apple. I watched the cardinals and cedar waxwings coming and going. A gull flew overhead.

Only when Guerrero spoke again to announce the last piece did I see that a choir had walked in, silently, to fill the entire back of the stage. Guerrero described the piece, “Conquest Requiem” by Gabriela Lena Frank. The piece is based on the history of La Malinche, a Nahua woman from the gulf coast of what is now Mexico who was sold into slavery in the 16th Century. She served as a translator and interpreter, had a child with Hernán Cortés, helped enable the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Her history is complicated. I had never heard a thing about it until Guerrero’s story. The music is haunting, beautiful in places, vast for a piece that lasts only 40 minutes. I have a very limited vocabulary for this kind of thing. I drifted along with the music. In the fifth movement, “Rex tremendae,” the chorus abruptly stood up and, as one voice, sang from the Dies irae, Rex tremendae majestatis qui salvandos salva gratis, salva me, fons pietatis. “King of awful majesty, who freely savest the redeemed, save me, O fount of goodness.” The music filled the park and spilled out into the city.

I walked back to the train, talking with Rachel on the phone about the storms of the previous night, which had reached her by the next day, the afternoon of the concert. I stood outside the plate glass window of a bar as we talked, watching the U.S. playing Paraguay. I walked to Union Station and read on the platform, waiting for the train. We boarded, and I dozed intermittently, reading the same few paragraphs over and over, until we reached Fairview Avenue. I walked home, passing over St. Joseph Creek at about 10:30. It was bubbling quietly through the culvert that passes beneath Austin Street.

Yesterday morning was cool enough to bike comfortably, but the temperature was rising and the air growing saturated, and it would stay that way, as it is now while I write and the cat is in the window watching birds in the pine tree, suddenly realizing there is a milkbone for the dog on the bedstand, which, if he plays his cards right—if Mittens, the cat, plays his cards right—will be cat food momentarily. But in yesterday’s still morning, on the road that leads toward Big Rock Visitor Station, there were anxious calls like the whines of hungry birds who don’t know if they will ever eat again. I stopped my bike and looked high. Nothing. My eyes drifted around, then they settled on a red oak trunk where two baby raccoons were stacked one above the other, shrieking. Another raccoon was calling from high overhead, out of view, but stopped. Perhaps it was the parent, shouting helpful directions, as parents like to do. The two babies kept calling and looking my way. I did not want to agitate them further, but I did stay long enough to watch the upper one crawl downslope over its sibling, lose its footing, roll over its sibling’s back and tumble six feet to the ground, where it picked itself up and climbed the tree again. They were still shouting as I biked away.

At the end of the day I returned home, where I made supper and sat outside with Brooklyn for a few hours. Brooklyn wandered around the yard, chased a squirrel running across the top of the fence, lay in the ferns beneath the pear tree. I started a fire. I read the last three chapters of Steve Brusatte’s epic The Story of Birds, which recounts the long history of bird evolution from dinosaurs to today, with terror birds and demon ducks and dodos and a host of other exotics long gone, some that overlapped with humans, most that we can only know from fossils. Robins moved around the yard picking up nesting material, sticking their noses into piles of leaves. Brooklyn meandered over to drink from her kiddie pool, then returned to lie next to my chair. I played with her ears as I read. The night grew dark enough that I had to step out from beneath the pear tree to finish the book, squeezing out the last light of the day while standing close to the fire, letting the sweet dry heat rise up under my shirt. At about 9 p.m. I finished. “Let’s enjoy birds during this moment we share the world together.”

I let Brooklyn inside, as she wanted nothing more than to sneak up to our bed to lie down, and walked toward Lyman Woods.

Jupiter and Venus were paired low on the horizon, following the sun slowly downward behind our neighbors’ houses. I followed the clouds northward. They were piled high, masses glowing the color of ripe peaches on the west side, every lobe cast into relief by the setting sun. Rachel and I texted back and forth as I walked, the light dimming. I crossed Ogden Avenue, walked northward. Rachel texted me a photo of a snake winding sideways across a tree trunk. The toads started singing as Sterling Avenue dipped down toward the east side of the wetland that feeds into Lacey Creek. Two lightning bugs came out. I wrote Rachel about the toads and lightning bugs. We wished we were walking together. We said goodnight and I put my phone away.

I don’t like to use a flashlight when I walk trails at night, because it messes up your night vision. You don’t see anything except the ring of light right at your feet. You hear less, you think less about the trail. Also, when I walk trails at night without a flashlight, I kind of feel like a badass. I’m not proud of that. I think walking without a flashlight is a net positive: yes, I’ve stubbed my toes and fallen at times; yes, I’ve had some disorienting moments. But I learn more about a site by walking it at night, and I like the experience of not feeling familiar with a trail I’ve walked hundreds of times previously, just during the day. Sometimes it’s a little scary. When I was 20ish, I thought I’d like to experience a bog at night as a fox or coyote or raccoon experiences it, so I walked to the bog at the camp where I was working, sans flashlight, and crawled through the sphagnum. This was great, really enriching, a little gooshy on the knees, but within a minute I became frantically and irrationally frightened that I might come nose-to-nose with a bear in the dark, scare it, and that would be the end of my face and, most likely, of me. I stood up, returned to the trail, and ran back to my cabin.

The trails through Lyman Woods are as hard as pavement. You cannot not feel them under your feet. I walked in along the trail that leads from the neighborhood to the east of the forest, followed it comfortably along, then, without warning, the ground under my feet was soft. Okay. No worries. I returned to the trail, followed it along again, and this time took what I felt to be the correct turn, but I was heading downslope toward Lacey Creek. Again, this was not right. I returned to the trail, tried a third time and somehow failed again. I took out my phone and turned on the light, and the trail resolved clearly. I followed it along the correct route.

But somehow even with my light, I ended up at a cul-de-sac I had never seen before. There were houses backing up along Lyman Woods, so perhaps I was beside one of these? Then I realized I was exactly where I had entered the woods. The trail had felt so natural because I was walking backward along the trail I had come in on.

At 20, I got turned around and didn’t worry about it. At 55, these moments make me think of John Cheever’s middle-aged swimmer, making his way across the county from one pool to the next, becoming increasing exhausted, standing disheveled at the side of the road before he gets to the next backyard pool, looking up at the night sky at one point and finding that he cannot recognize the constellations. I think of On Golden Pond. I think of my grandpa sitting alone in the dark because, we only began to suspect years later, he no longer had the confidence to walk on his own.

But also I think, “dammit.” And so I closed my eyes for a few minutes to regain my night vision. Then I walked the trail without error into the woods.

Trails stretch out when you walk them in the dark. I know this is just perception, but I cannot help believing it’s also partly witchcraft. The trail through the brush toward the wetland was about two and a half times as long as usual, and many trees had been placed in my way since I last walked it. By contrast, the trail that follows the edge of marsh into the densest, nicest part of Lyman Woods is fairly open, and I could easily see. I reached the end of it, walked up into the forest, and immediately I was in a matrix of sparse gossamer, threads trailed between the trees adhering lightly to my glasses, my cheeks and beard, my forearms. The air with the gossamer in it was that much more feelable. I raised my arms above me and walked slowly uphill, remembering where the fallen logs were, remembering every step of this trail I started walking regularly in 2020. I walked the ridge, looking around at the white oaks in the dark. I walked the boardwalk, careful not to turn an ankle. I climbed over the big log. The gossamer was gone now, only moderately-cool evening air and a good walk toward the parking structure on the backside of the hospital.

On the way home, I passed the marsh where the toads were still droning from the cattails. The tall grasses were pricked with the flashes of lightning bugs. I reached home and called for Brooklyn. I could hear her plop off of our bed upstairs and, collar jingling, walk down the steps to greet me.

I can imagine a good life as a baby raccoon, tumbling down the tree trunk over my sibling, calling for mom, scared, but safe. But I like life at this age. I can talk myself down and continue on. I can think through problems I couldn’t at 30 and concentrate better than I could then. I can watch my boys grow and joke around with them. I know the joy of imagining Rachel’s voice in my ear as she texts me photos and thoughts from across the country. I got turned around on trails in the wilderness at 20 years old and survived. I’ll be getting turned around on trails as long as I persist in walking at night.

4:45 p.m., 75F, a thin layer of clouds

There is so much left to do at the end of the day on Sunday, but still I cannot stand to be inside when it’s 75 out and there’s a thin layer of clouds, and just a few hours left before sundown. I bike to the Good Samaritan Hospital parking structure and lock up my bike, pull on my permethrin-treated pants and shirt as mourning doves coo. For a moment I am ten again, listening to the sound of doves without knowing at that age what they were, but knowing, that is the sound of summer, watching the sky to see if it would rain. Buckthorn fruits are developing on the shrub that overhangs the bench. A carved stone on the ground reads, “Celebrate a moment of meditation with Big Jer. Find your spirit. Share your passion this blessed day. In memory of Jerry Sellers.”

Cottonwood fluff piles up against the bases of trees and the edges of exposed roots, floats in the middle of the trail like a child’s craft cloud of stretched cotton balls. The berm crossing the trail is a forest of wild garlic about to flower, shoots as long as my middle finger, some a third again as long. Ash seedlings are blistered with mite galls. A spindly, hairy wood sorrel nearly a foot tall has a single flower at the tip. Further along, the forest is lit up with wild garlic plants, each tipped with a bright spathe that is roiling with flowers waiting to emerge.

House wrens are calling from the yards backed up to the forest. A robin clatters through the brush beside me, babbling loudly. I take the walk north through the forest, distracted, not paying attention to much, waist-high in sunflowers as great-crested flycatcher sirens go off intermittently in the canopy and indigo buntings sing repeated descending notes. The poke milkweed I noticed a few weeks ago bears an umbel of floral buds from each leaf node.

I walk down to the marsh. Red-winged blackbirds are calling and multiflora rose is in full bloom, practically choking out the shrubs adjoining the water. River bulrush is barely taller than the boardwalk, but in full flower. Spike-rushes are blooming. A wood duck squeals as it flies away over the open water. Swamp sparrows chip in the marsh, common yellowthroats whistle their three-beat song, red-winged blackbirds call and stare me down. A warbling vireo sings a sustained, exuberant song from deep within the brush. A deadly nightshade is in flower. Carex granularis, Carex annectens, and fowl manna grass are all setting seed.

An entire slough of reed canary grass is in flower. Spittle bugs hang gummy on every stem. I squeeze one off of its stem, separate off the spittle, and the big is dark on the back and sides, very distinctive. iNaturalist tells me it is a diamond-back spittlebug, a generalist. Bulrush is flowering. Gray dogwood is flowering. Hawkweed is about to flower. A Hill’s oak hangs onto bouquets of frost-seared leaves.

Halfway up the hill into the woods, on a west-facing slope, a sun-exposed cluster of wild garlic are coming into full bloom. Every second or third plant holds a single flower up to the sun, bulblets crowded around its base. This the future: a few days hence, all the wild garlic will look the same. The shoots coming off their inflorescence bulblets extend to six inches or longer. Embedded among the onions is a large clump of Carex tenera with inflorescences arching. Two steps further along the trail, there is a patch of sanicles in full flower, bristling with stamens. One has a single spittlebug adult on it, wings over its back like a cape, perched for action; and some other insect dragging a plume of cotton behind it. They are wary. I touch the cottony one thinking it will be docile, dragged down by the waxy exudate, but it jumps away. I touch the spittlebug, and it disappears into the woods.

A female mallard walks ahead of me up the trail, waddling, looking over her shoulder a little nervously and then flies off. A cream violet is blooming, a tall stemmed thing. Lanky annual fleabanes are flowering everywhere they can get a toe into the ground. The goldenrods along the trail are all globbed with spittle. I take one messy cluster my fingers and it resolves into two spittlebug larvae who immediately begin exploring my hand in opposite directions. They appear also to be diamond-back spittlebugs, the same I found on the reed canary grass in the marsh, though here we are in the shade of the oak forest. They pump their abdomens intermittently as they walk, which I at first I suspect is to extrude foam, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect. They walk, each in its own direction, stop to pump their abdomens, go on. After five minutes of nothing more than this I grow a little impatient, so I put them back on a goldenrod on walk on.

A wood pewee calls. Red clover is blooming. I cross the trail and find a patch of Atlantic camas in fruit, seeds still pulpy inside the rubbery capsules. A mosquito stings me while a great-crested flycatcher calls frantically from the adjacent forest. Golden Alexanders is flowering in the understory. Butterweed is lush in the shady understory. The forest opens up toward the marsh, and daisies are flowering. The forest gives way; a privet is flowering at the top of the hill. Swamp sparrows and song sparrows are singing in the cattails. Glossy buckthorn is blooming. Yellow sweet clover and black medick are flowering along the trail, typical weeds.

Back in the forest, honewort is in bloom, along with a thicket of goutweed. It is 6pm, and a wood thrush starts singing. Or perhaps it has been singing, only I haven’t been there to hear it. The wild iris is flowering, and Carex sparganioides is fruiting. I walk out, sit back at Jerry’s bench to pull off my permethrin outer layer, and head home for supper.

4:30 p.m., ca. 70F, sunny, a little wind

I was away this week for two nights in Washington, D.C. I had forgotten how exciting the city is. Decades intermix on the Metro, the 1970s shoulder-to-shoulder with this week, everything belowground hurtling toward a future that’s being carved out right now by pairs of young people on their phones and individuals lost in a book or staring ahead, thinking. Then, the train stops, and I ascend to street-level slowly on one of the unimaginably long escalators and step off at Capitol Hill.

I walked toward my hotel, passing a small, planted overcup oak, then a small bur oak, then a southern magnolia in magnificent flower. I checked in and took a slow meander past the Capitol Building; stopped at Olmsted’s Summerhouse to get out of the heat for a few minutes and fill my water bottle; walked westward across the National Mall; lunched in front of the Chagall mosaic in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden; walked past the Washington Monument and followed the west edge of the White House property past the fighting arena being erected in on the south lawn for the President’s birthday, looking for all the world like a giant bounce house; browsed Second Story books for an hour; then headed back to my hotel for the night.

The next morning, a colleague and I walked to the Natural History Museum for the 23rd National Botanical Symposium, at which we would both be speaking later that day. The topic was “American Botany: 250 Years of Discovery.” Our route to the museum took us south of the Department of Labor, where, had we been walking just a block further north, we might have seen an enormous banner with an image of the President staring us down above a caption reading, America 250: American Workers First. He was missed at the symposium. About 300 attended in person, 200 online, making for a day of good conversation about plant exploration, collections, the evolution and conservation of plant diversity, the future of the forests and prairies we know, the long history of humans living and thinking with plants. The panel discussion ranged widely. Afterwards, the group walked to a reception at the National Botanic Garden.

After about an hour of conversation I wandered out of the main room and, unexpectedly, had the conservatory to myself: the desert room with bristling euphorbs, prickly pears and Parodia, Ferocactus and Mammillaria, Brighamia sprouting from pumice with Portulaca, duckweed strewn across the surface of a pool. A mesmerizing carnivorous plants video played on a loop, showing a sundew coiling slowly around a fly, engulfing it, then a Venus flytrap leaf closing while the insect inside struggles for a second and then gives up. I walked on and found myself in front of two titan arums towering beside each other, a handsome and intimidating couple. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Their pleated spathes cradled the base of each spadix. I studied them for a few minutes and felt myself breathing as easily as I had in several days. I walked back to the main room and chatted some more before we left for supper.

On the flight out the next morning, the plane banked so that I could see the capitol below and the Washington Monument with the White House so small to the north of it, the armature of the mixed martial arts arena perched on the south lawn like a tarantula about to crawl beneath the south portico to sleep away the afternoon. I returned home about noon. My son and I had lunch, made a grocery list, did groceries, had an afternoon snack. I napped for a bit, then Brooklyn and I walked to Maple Grove.

Goutweed was flowering in the shaded yards of Denburn Woods. Brooklyn had a swim in the ditch, then we walked into the forest. Bent-tipped achenes were packed onto the receptacle of a hooked buttercup. The last flowers were clinging to the north edge of the honeysuckles that form a wall along the path in from the neighborhoods, flaccid leaves as big as poppy petals. Clusters of four-petaled flowers clung to the margins of a privet backed up against the honeysuckle. A man about my age passed me with two dogs, brown moppy types, warned me that they might bark and uttered a stern “leave it! leave it!” to his dogs, in reference to Brooklyn and me. We continued minding our own business.

Wild geranium were going to seed. Their fruits were stiff, stout crane’s bills braced below by four rubbery nutlets. Fruits of large-flowered bellwort were swelling but still pulpy. An oriole was piping. Robins were frisking around on the forest floor. A house wren called.

In the five days that I had been away from this forest, roughly 80% of the great waterleaf flowers had shed their petals, leaving the sepals tangled in long, capillary hairs. Virginia waterleaf fruits had swollen up against the cups formed by the collar of sepals at the base of the flowers, clothed in long guard hairs and a dense coat of short bristles. Bulblets had begun to germinate in the inflorescences of Canadian meadow garlic, spathes bright white in the dark understory. Honewort had begun to produce sparse, delicate sprays of white flowers. A colony of long-bristled smartweed was flowering along the trail at the base of the Gray’s sedge I had noted earlier in the week. Virginia bluebells had gone from languishing to almost completely died back. Brooklyn and I walked home slowly, in no hurry.

As I write these notes two days later, the sun is going down and robins are hopping around our yard. It is dark enough under the tree, where I am sitting, that I can just see the outlines of things: socks balled up next to the chair (mine), a pair of shoes abandoned (mine), gardening gloves I tossed on the mulch, a short stack of books, my reading glasses. I pack up my things to head inside. As I do, a white dot the size of a pea glides past my foot to the edge of our chair and rests there. I flip on my phone light: the white dot is a spider with a bright, swollen abdomen. She perches on all fours, raises herself so that she is arched over the wood chips for a moment, then flattens herself. She waits just a moment and then slides beneath the chair, and then she is off in a world all her own, where she will spend her night tucked comfortably into the mulch while we sleep warm inside.

10:30 a.m., ca. 70F, sunny

The forest canopy has closed. Spring ephemerals are dying back. Summer birds are calling and the migrant warblers are packing their bags. We are done with spring: it’s early summer.

Around 7:00 or 8:00 this morning, Rachel and Brooklyn and I walked across the bridge over Salt Creek, heading into Fullersburg Woods. There was a dense cloud of newly-hatched mayflies cycling up and down in the sunlight over the water. With the naked eye, they look as though they are bouncing in the air, flying straight upward, making a hairpin turn to drop down, then turning back up again. I trained my binoculars on them to follow one at a time as best I could. They resolve into a pack of kindergartners tearing around the playground, checking in with each other. I could only follow one for a second or two before it faded in the crowd. One flew up, arced to the left, dropped a bit and then disappeared from sight. Another nose-dived, paused, and then was gone, replaced by a neighbor. Binoculars down, they turned back into a mass of flies, chaotically organized into a machine built for slicing up the air and knocking the occasional fly into the water. Hundreds or thousands were annealed to the railing of the bridge.

I biked to Maple Grove at 10:30. Red-eyed vireos were singing. The Virginia waterleaf petals have mostly fallen, leaving 5 spidery, long-ciliate sepals clutching the base of each flower, a style withering at the tip of each capsule. The tip of each Solomon’s plume is dense with flowers. Woodland bluegrass fills in lacy along the trail margins, spikelets bobbing at the end of each branch. It is a universe of individuals today. Burdock leaves have grown as large as snapping turtles. Short’s aster won’t flower until much later in the year, but it is already thigh high. Sweet cicely seeds in the St. Joseph Creek floodplain are swollen and almost ripe, but they are still rubbery between my teeth.

At the far end of the bridge, the forest is solid blue with great waterleaf, another clear sign of summer in DuPage County. In Dane County, Wisconsin, it was always the flowering wild geranium that said we’d turned the corner to summer. But geraniums bloom too early here to call it summer. Have I changed, or have the plants? I want to believe the forests operate differently here, but I know I am far too subjective to be reliable if I haven’t written it down, too certain that my sense right now reflects the world as it really is. I’ll put this together when I have more time to walk the trails in Madison. The great waterleaf has another virtue as a seasonal marker: it is strongly ephemeral, at least this year. I will return from a trip in 5 days, on the 30th of the month, to find that the petals have fallen from two-thirds or more of the plants, leaving the sepals tangled in long, capillary hairs.

Wood peewees are singing. So are red-eyed vireos. House wrens are babbling noisily from the backyards adjoining the forest. These are all birds of summer. The great fallen ash along the trail that will bristle with common coral slime mold by late June or early July is spongy to the touch, saturated from the rains we’ve had. Today, almost every fallen, decorticated log is sopping. A tufted titmouse calls. A robin hops around. The Virginia bluebells are yellow, the enemion are yellowing, tipped with the last swelling hard achenes that angle off the receptacle as Buttercup Family fruits do. Broad-leaved wild leek leaves have dissolved away entirely. Their red scapes are arching low over the oak litter. Trout lily leaves are yellowed and limp. Annual bedstraw is flattened to the ground, the nutlets ripe and bristly and as large as BBs.

Slender young mayapple fruits are striving between paired leaves of the larger plants, inclined toward where they will fall in a couple of months if a squirrel doesn’t get them before they fall. A great-crested fly catcher calls, then another red-eyed vireo. I wander to the slope overlooking the ephemeral pond and find a knee-high colony of Hitchcock’s sedge that I have never noticed before. This is a favorite of mine: the perigynium bodies are inscribed from tip to base with scores of very fine, parallel veins; the perigynium beaks are slender and inclined shyly outward; the sheaths are reddish or brownish, somewhere in that color range, and roughened with minute hairs visible through a hand lens and prickly to the tip of the tongue. I sit among the plants for a few minutes and they come up to my chest. The great-crested flycatcher calls again. The sedges and I are surrounded by sugar maple seedlings and the occasional ash. Everyone is growing as confidently as kids in midsummer biking together down the middle of the road, ingesting energy and burning energy, taking it in and spitting it out, unconscious for the moment of how short summer is.

I walk downslope to the ditch that runs into the ephemeral pond. Cursed crowfoot has come into flower. Its yellow petals are a bit shorter than its sepals, its leaves are rounded at the tips like mittens. Along with it is butterweed, tall and abundant in the ditch. The opposite slope is all poison ivy. One plant vines extravagantly, beautifully, architecturally over the top of a fallen log, stems wound around each other and standing on end to peer out over the brush that surrounds them, looking for the next good tree to climb. I work my way between them and come across a solitary narrow-leaved leek tucked against the base of a tree, scape perfectly erect, spathe bumpy with flowers squirming inside, leaves still hanging on, pale green and squeezing the last of what they have left into the flowers before they are gone. (Two days later I’ll find this same species in the East Woods, scapes stout and inflorescences itching to open, leaves entirely gone.) Toothwort capsules are turgid and lumpy with seeds.

Sanicle inflorescences are bristling with stamens. The sedges are healthy and full: Carex grisea stout with clumps of perigynia like tiny rugby balls; Carex hirtifolia hairy and lax, hanging into the trail; Carex rosea forming stiff hummocks. A lush colony of Gray’s sedge is tipped with mace-like fruits where the water runs off between the forest and the neighborhood in heavy rains.

Jumpseed leaves are pricked with red, and the chokecherries are beginning to grow. A mosquito buzzes in my ear, but it does not sting me. Perhaps next week. A house wren is calling from the backyards that adjoin the forest as I walk back toward the bridge over St. Joseph Creek.