Month: May 2019

This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach.
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.
— from “Moment” by Wislawa Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog

Temperatures last week fluctuated between the low 50s and the low 80s. The forest canopy has filled in almost completely. By Monday the basswood leaves were the size of teacup saucers, and by Thursday the lowest sugar maple leaves were fully expanded. It is darker in the morning forest understory now than it was even a week ago, and the wildflowers have picked up on it. False mermaid has flattened like seaweed clinging to a rock. It is yellow and bedraggled, but the nutlets at the tip of each shoot are continuing to harden up, senselessly drawing what resources they can from their expiring parents. Leaves on toothwort, trout lily and wild leek are streaked with pale green or white, starting to senesce. The cotyledons on touch-me-not are yellowing. Everything that was brightest and most beautiful two weeks ago is being overrun by summer, as wild lettuce and foul manna grass reach to my knees, carrionflower threatens to climb over all the adjacent plants, and orchard grass stretches out along the road.

On the drive home Wednesday, maple and elm seeds rained down on the car as I stood at the stoplight. I met my younger son at home, and after bagels we walked the dog. Silver maple seeds were brittle and brown in the gutters. They appear all to have fallen in one 24-hour period. In the forest, about half of the sedges are going to seed: Carex blanda, Carex albursina, Carex grisea, Carex hirtifolia, Carex jamesii are all filling in. Carex blanda is a funny one, as it seems to lag behind Carex albursina, which is a very close relative and overlaps with it in our woods. I doubt that phenology is needed to keep them separate, and I wonder what developmental peculiarity or climatic adaptation accounts for this difference. Most of the other half are flowering. Carex radiata and Carex sparganioides are bedecked with anthers. It’s a good time to see the coiled stigmas on Carex rosea, tails of little springs poking out of the perigynium tips. A few have yet to go: the wetland sedges in the depressions, things like Carex tribuloides and some big husky tussock that I haven’t been able to put a name to (give me a week) weren’t yet showing inflorescences this past week. The spikes on a somewhat out-of-place upland Carex stipata Thursday morning were gliding out from between the leaf sheaths, still closed; in a wetter, lower spot, I expect it would be 3 or 5 days slower. Wild garlic spathes have emerged.

Mayapples have come into magnificent flower and are the light of the woods. Sweet cicely went from barely blooming to nearly full flower over the course of the week. Miraculously, rue anemone is still in bloom. How long does that thing last? Last year I noted it blooming as late as the 18th of May, but I don’t know when exactly it stopped, because for a couple weeks I didn’t make local notes. Fruits are continuing to swell on annual bedstraw.

The birds are jumbled up together. This past week I heard golden-winged and black-and-white warblers, northern parulas, black-throated greens, all on their way through. Beside them were the songs of summer: pewees and great-crested flycatchers, kingbirds, phoebes, gnatcatchers and red-eyed vireos, tanagers, ovenbirds, buntings and wood thrushes, orioles.

Thursday evening I took a walk in Maple Grove. The robins were chuckling their goodnights as I arrived. Dame’s rocket was in bloom in the St. Joseph Creek floodplain. Across the bridge, yellowing trout lily leaves stood out in the darkening understory beside the last flowers of a false rue anemone. An olive-sided flycatcher called an insistent quick three beers! The first flowers of great waterleaf had opened from among the hairy, spiderlike inflorescence branches unrolling at the tops of the plants. Beside them were the last flowers of Virginia bluebells. Black snakeroot was in flower. Bloodroot leaves were as large as my hand with fingers fully outstretched. The solitary burning bush along the trail backing up onto the adjacent homes was in full bloom.

I walked to the barnyard grass marsh I frequent in the northeast quarter of the preserve and, as the mosquitos were becoming pesky, received my first wood nettle sting of the year, from a plant only as tall as my knee. There has been a lot of rain this spring, and the lawn of barnyard grass seedlings was completely under water. I walked up the hill to the south, toward a fallen white ash tree that I have walked past dozens of times, but never at this time of night, and I was struck at how large a hole was left in the canopy when it fell. It has been down for a couple years or perhaps a few, and there are sugar maples ready to fill in, but the gap is still prominent, especially so in the crepuscule, when openings in the woods often appear to glow. Nighttime affects how things look, and it took me several minutes of circling the tree and peering along its trunk before I was convinced that nothing had changed since I was here last, that really this was the same fallen tree I see almost every time I visit Maple Grove. A buck snorted from 50 feet uphill and darted eastward, toward the backyards that line the preserve, but not far enough to get into them nor to be completely hidden from me.

I continued walking, heard a wood-pewee call. The sun had set as I studied the fallen ash, and it was dark now. Mosquitos were buzzing around my legs. Without warning, American toads began droning from the marsh at the bottom of the hill. They filled the air between the trees with toad-song, like monks chanting in a monastery courtyard, their monotones spilling out into the adjacent forest. They stopped, started again, called intermittently as I continued south to the main trail. The spring peepers in the marsh below the Avery Coonley School had started up, and I sat listening to them before I took the main trail north back toward my bike. As I walked, the toads started up again, and now they continued without ceasing, emboldened by the darkness, layering tone onto tone to make a buzzy, distorted chord that swelled out of the marsh and rolled through the woods like mist. The sound was everywhere, knitting together the springs of my adulthood so that, as I walked toward my bike in the darkness, there was no current spring and no past spring, no this woods and that woods, no life-I-might-have-lived and life I am living, but only one eternal May evening in this particular woods.

Then a bicyclist raced past in the dark, and a group of high-schoolers on their phones, giddy at being out at night, walked past, noisily. I retrieved my bike and headed out, surprising a few kids in the baseball field as I biked past.

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Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharinum – silver maple
• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Allium canadense – wild garlic
• Allium tricoccum – wild leek
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina
• Carex blanda
• Carex grisea
• Carex hirtifolia
• Carex jamesii
• Carex radiata
• Carex rosea
• Carex sparganioides
• Carex stipata
• Carex tribuloides
• Dactylis glomerata – orchard grass
• Echinochloa muricata – rough barnyard grass, rough cockspur
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium sp. – trout lily
• Euonymus alatus – burning bush
• Floerkea proserpinacoides – false mermaid
• Fraxinus americana – white ash
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw, cleavers
• Glyceria striata – foul manna grass
• Hesperis matronalis – dame’s rocket
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – touch-me-not
• Lactuca sp. – wild lettuce
• Laportea canadensis – wood nettle
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebells
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Sanicula odorata – black snakeroot
• Smilax herbacea – carrionflower
• Thalictrum thalictroides – rue anemone
• Tilia americana – basswood
• Ulmus sp. – elm

What sensation do you associate with a particular walk? Sometimes it is a smell. Sometimes it is a view. Sometimes it is not a sensation at all, but a state of mind, a realization you had as you walked, or the aim of the walk, or the aim you thought you had as you left the house, as Virginia Woolf’s evening walker walks out ostensibly to buy a pencil, perhaps even thinking the pencil is the aim, but in fact sets out to watch London settling in for the night.¹ For me, it is often a song that ran through my mind as I walked, or a bird song that rang through the woods. Thursday morning, it was the call of the eastern wood-pewee, my first of the year, a bird I love, one whose song Rachel wrote out in a book she made for me years ago: “pee-eh-wee… peewrrrr” — first a rise, then a pause, then a descent. It is the sound of anticipation followed by content. It is one the many background sounds of the summer woods.

The winds that morning had filled the gutters in our neighborhood with cottonwood seeds and brought the redbud blooms to the ground, where they spattered the mulch and sidewalks with purple. When I arrived at the Arboretum, I docked my bike by the oak collection and found the leaves on the blooming bur oaks the size of my palm and the redbud leaves as big as nickels and quarters. Bladdernut, viburnum and chokecherry were blooming. Almost all the tree flowers, come to think of it, were white, save for the yellowish green flowers of sugar maple and oak dangling on filaments. The white baneberry flowers were bright on stout thick stalks. The flowers on bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches, and toothwort had ripened into capsules and siliques respectively. The pearly black seeds of spring beauty were ripe and shook easily into my hand. The mayapple flowers were about to open.

The sedges were in their glory. Sprengel’s sedge was gaudy with drooping spikes. Carex hirtifolia perigynia were gravid, dragging the spikes downward on arching culms. White bear sedge perigynia were filling, nestled beside the staminate spike, resting inside the spathe like baby deer mice in a grassy nest. Anthers were just peering from behind the staminate scales of Carex rosea. Goldenseal and starry false Solomon’s seal were flowering, the brightest white stars of the forest floor right now, beside the pinpricks of light still glinting from the annual bedstraw flowers. Nodding trilliums had come into bloom, a week or so behind the big-flowered trillium. The fetid blooms of erect carrionflower had opened fully, and they smelled of sweetly rotten meat. Tendrils started forming in the past two weeks on the common vining carrionflower, which I have been taking to be Smilax lasioneura, but the flowers are a few days slower than their non-tendril-forming cousin: most have umbels of flowers squeezed tightly shut, but a few on a plant at the edge of the woods, getting a little extra light, were beginning to open and offered a hint of stench. Jacob’s ladder was in full bloom.

Sensitive fern fronds were fully open in the spruce plot. A leaf miner had traversed the leaf of a slippery elm sapling, gorging itself on mesophyll then perforating the epidermis on its way out. The stem subtending the foliage leaves of the touch-me-nots had grown so high that the cotyledons branched from the stalk at about the plant’s waist; a couple of weeks earlier, the leaves had been crammed in next to the cotyledons. Bugbane leaves were curled like wet and still-unfolding butterflies’ wings, the flowers just opening. The inflorescences of wild hyacinth were tipped with violet. Jumpseed leaves were as long as my thumb. Great waterleaf floral buds had formed. Largeflower bellwort was still flowering.

When I arrived at the frog pond just north of Parking Lot 12 it was about 8:30. I was already getting anxious for the day. I was in a hurry to get to the herbarium, where colleagues would soon be meeting me to look through Mexican oak specimens. I was hustling through, when a solitary “peewrrrr” caught me by surprise. Just the descending note of an eastern wood-pewee, I thought. I stopped to listen, but birds don’t always cooperate when you need them to. Indigo buntings were singing and blue-gray gnatcatchers were buzzing from the canopy. A great-crested flycatcher called from north of the frog pond. The burry question-and-answer of what I take to have been a yellow-throated vireo intruded from the east. A least flycatcher (chebek! chebek!) called from the southwest, enough times that I felt pretty certain I’d been hearing it all week. A golden-winged warbler sang from the road. Then, finally, the pewee started up again. Pee-uh-wee… pee-uh-wee… Half a dozen calls like this, each leaving the listener in suspense. Is it? Is it?! Yes, there’s nothing else it could be, right? But I am a casual birder, and I need a little more. Finally the descending call, “pewrr.” There it was. It’s one of several calls I look forward to each year and think to myself when I finally hear it that summer has come. I walked into work past the Big Rock Visitor Station serenaded by a northern parula warbler. I arrived at the herbarium and turned my attention to oaks for the remainder of the day.

That afternoon on the walk back to my bike, aniseroot was in bloom and wild strawberries were flowering along the trail. The next day temperatures dropped to the high 40s and we all froze. But I can’t be disabused of my sense that it’s really summer now, early summer of course, but not really spring any longer.

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Plants referenced:

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Actaea alba – white doll’s eye, white baneberry
• Actaea racemosa – bugbane
• Camassia scilloides – wild hyacinth
• Cardamine concatenata – toothwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge (I think)
• Cercis canadensis – redbud
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Fragaria virginiana – wild strawberry
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Hydrastis canadensis – goldenseal
• Hydrophyllum appendiculatum – great waterleaf
• Impatiens sp. – touch-me-not
• Maianthemum stellatum – starry false Solomon’s seal
• Onoclea sensibilis – sensitive fern
• Osmorhiza longistylis – aniseroot
• Persicaria virginiana – jumpseed
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Prunus virginiana – chokecherry
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Smilax ecirrhata – erect carrionflower
• Smilax lasioneura – Midwestern carrionflower
• Staphylea trifolia – bladdernut
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Ulmus rubra – slippery elm
• Uvularia grandiflora – largeflower bellwort
• Viburnum prunifolium – plum-leaved viburnum

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¹ From the essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf: “No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.”

Monday morning the sun burned like a crown over the car dealerships, as though the hosts of Heaven were gliding in over Ogden Avenue. When I came in the Finley Road gate, a common yellowthroat was singing from the wetland under the power lines, the first I’d heard this year. On the road through the East Woods I heard a golden winged warbler and a black throated green. These golden wings. Sweet sweet sweet sweet Susie. Just after sunrise Wednesday, there were oven birds in Maple Grove Forest Preserve, calling teacher teacher teacher teacher! A blue-winged warbler sang its lackadaisical beeeee-buzzzzz from the edge of the baseball field. The squeaky wheels of the black-and-white warblers have been going on and off around the frog pond under the buzzing of blue-gray gnatcatchers. What would the birds think if they could read and hear the nonsense we make up to remember their songs by? It would be as if they had given humans names corresponding to the shapes of their skulls seen from above, after objects that they resembled from the birds’ world. Crows egg. Kettle pond. Robins nest. And then said them in their own languages. Perhaps they do. If so, we’re missing it.

The far east corner of the woods is clouded with blooming redbuds. The songs of veery and wood thrush fill the forest around the spruce plot each morning. Virginia bluebells are pooling along the roadsides. On my ride out Friday, a hummingbird was feeding in the colony of bluebells near the top of the hill by Parking Lot 10. It moved from flower to flower, industrious, intent. In 2001 I watched a hummingbird do this same thing in Forest County, Wisconsin, where I was tagging shoots of Carex projecta to see what their lifespan is. The edge of the plot was marked with blue flags, and as I finished for the evening, and the light was growing too dark to see clearly what I was doing under the maples and red oaks, a hummingbird entered and visited one blue flag, buzzing loudly. It of course drew no nectar. It visited another, then another, growing increasing petulant as each one failed to yield any nectar, finally lighting on a wire to glower as evening descended.

A colony of celandine poppies is in full bloom along the road at the northeast corner of the woods, and swamp buttercup is flowering in every seep and hollow. Prairie trillium is in its glory right now, tall and fully flowering. Big-flowered trilliums have begun to bloom as well with nodding trillium just a few days behind, white petals still peeking out from between the sepals. Mature leaves have filled out on Hepatica. Woodland phlox is in full bloom. Jacob’s ladder flowers have unrolled while the false rue anemone has gone mostly to pieces, flowers unravelling, shedding white petals by dribs and drabs. White trout lily has turned its ripening capsules toward the sky. Capsules are swelling on downy yellow violet.

At the beginning of the week, I noticed nickel-sized leaves of moonseed along the roadside, but by Friday the vines were starting arch. Carrion flower is growing like Jack’s beanstalk, leaves spreading outward and expanding. The sedges are showing their true colors: Carex woodii, C. pensylvanica, and C. sprengelii fruits are swelling, anthers and stigmas are waving around on hairy sedge and white bear sedge (C. albursina), and spikes are growing whitish-silver in advance of opening on Carex rosea. Our two prominent winter annuals are feeling quite differently about life right now. The last week of April, the false mermaid bolted and flowered. At the beginning of this past week, the stems were stock upright and heavy with swelling nutlets, the spreading sepals clinging to spindly stems reminiscent of the submerged traps on a bladderwort in midsummer. Over the course of just five days, this plant that was the dominant green of the East Woods started to yellow and sprawl across the forest floor under the rapidly greening canopy. But that dying back is a sacrifice, not a surrender: the plant appears to be pouring its last resources into the tiny fruits paired inside the flowers. Annual bedstraw, by contrast, is turgid, aggressive, and in full flower. The little white stars on your walks over the next few days will be amassing pollen to make summer seeds.

Toads were calling this week in the pond behind the greenhouses, sometimes in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoons, sometimes not at all. One morning I thought I heard them calling from the marsh underneath the powerline, but I wasn’t sure over the din from I-88. Most afternoons on my bike ride out, I heard them calling from the Carex atherodes marsh on the left side of the road just past the crabapples, where until last year there was a great shingle oak, and on the other side of the road where the aquatic buttercups flower in June. This week I started hearing orioles piping along the Heritage Trail and in the oaks behind the research building. Indigo buntings have been singing from the edges of the fields. Great crested flycatchers are calling from the far end of the East Woods. These are birds of summer. Friday night Rachel and I came home late and stopped at Fresh Thyme. From over the parking lot came the buzzing roar of a nighthawk. A nighthawk on the 10th of May! This is a bird I learned in my 20-something Junes in Madison, when they were clearing the skies of mosquitoes over East Washington, standing guard on the flat rooftops of the old factories, marking summers as a naturalist and bike rides with books and watching the stars reflected in the lakes.

Summer is not a month early, but we are on the turn from spring. The geraniums and phloxes are in bloom and false mermaid is senescing. Starry Solomon’s plume is on the cusp of on flowering and Solomon’s plume did bloom by the end of the week. But only Monday morning I found the Solomon’s plumes just unrolling, and every third or fourth plant dotted with guttation droplets at the tip of each leaf. Stigmas appear to just be receptive on Jack-in-the-pulpit. Camassia floral spikes have just emerged, but the flowers are not open yet. Flowers are forming on sweet cicely. Jewelweed leaves have surpassed the cotyledons in length. I began seeing poison ivy leaves fully open this week, and they are still filling. The leaves are mostly out on the trees, but the red oaks and bur oaks are shedding catkin-laden branch tips like rain when the squirrels take to them. Catkins have just descended on the shagbark hickories. And while the false mermaid is dying back, this week I witnessed the finest show of toothwort flowers I’ve seen all spring.

I am finishing this up at night on the second Sunday in May. Tomorrow morning begins a week of work with collaborators from Mexico. Our talk will be of gene flow and lineage diversification, speciation, adaptation, biogeography. My thoughts will flit among populations differentiating in the Sierra Madre Occidentale, tiptoe between genomes, open and close by turns as I consider possibilities and then look for evidence. My colleagues and I will look at checklists, specimens, maps. I’ll shuttle between our conversations and a few manuscripts at various stages of revision, heavy on the oaks with a dash of sedges. The sun will rise tomorrow morning over Ogden Avenue as it does every Monday, and the week will roll once more, a week of noticing things one moment, trying to make sense of them the next.

Opening the kitchen window tonight as the boys read themselves to sleep, I hear no frogs, and of course the crickets haven’t started yet. No birds twittering tonight in our neighborhood. Perhaps they’ll be on the move again when I wake up tomorrow. It is still spring.

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Plants referenced:

• Camassia scilloides – camassia
• Cardamine concatenata – toohwort
• Carex albursina – white bear sedge
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex pensylvanica – Pennsylvania sedge
• Carex rosea – curly-styled sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex woodii – pretty sedge
• Carya ovata – shagbark history
• Cercis canadense – redbud
• Enemion biternatum – false rue anemone
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Floerkea properpinacoides – false mermaid
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw, cleavers
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Hepatica acutiloba – Hepatica
• Impatiens sp. – jewelweed, touch-me-not
• Maianthemum racemosum – Solomon’s plume, false Solomon’s seal
• Maianthemum stellatum – starry Solomon’s plume, starry false Solomon’s seal
• Menispermum canadense – moonseed
• Mertensia virginica – Virginia bluebell
• Osmorhiza claytonii – sweet cicely
• Phlox divaricata – woodland phlox
• Polemonium reptans – Jacob’s ladder
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus hispidus – swampe buttercup, bristly buttercup
• Smilax sp. – Carrion flower
• Stylophorum diphyllum – celandine poppy
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy
• Trillium flexipes – nodding trillium
• Trillium grandiflorum – big-flowered trillium
• Trillium recurvatum – prairie trillium
• Viola pubescens – downy yellow violet

Snow returned the last Saturday of April, wet and sloppy, but aside from the bent-over mayapples, the flowers hardly seemed to mind. The snow was largely melted in Lyman Woods by the next afternoon. White oak leaves were just breaking from the bud, wrapped around each other like beetles’ wings. Bur oak and red oak leaves were the size of pinky nails, the branch tips festooned with immature catkins. The white oaks were not yet in flower. Lanky, long-legged leaves of shagbark hickory strained their way out of the enormous endbuds. Poison ivy was curling off the white oak trunk like tentacles terminating in tiny, red, pubescent leaves, beautiful small things opening to the spring, lovely as flowers. Soft young hackberry leaves dripped from the branch tips. Cottonwood leaves were soft and glossy, fallen to the ground from trees all along the edge of the marsh. Gray dogwood leaves were an inch long. Missouri gooseberry had finally bloomed. Sprengel’s sedge had come into full flower along trails throughout the woods: everywhere the trees were sparse the anthers were flying, and the leaves had grown long enough to start bending in the middle, giving the plant the broken-arm look by which you can often recognize the species from across a field. Multiflora rose leaves were filling out. Buckthorn leaves were almost mature. Honeysuckle leaves were fully unfurled. Winter bittercress and small-flowered buttercup were flowering. The first floral buds were creeping out of the leaf bases on Lily-of-the-valley, the gift that keeps giving, whether you want it or not: like squill, you’re never rid of Convallaria. The leaves on annual bedstraw had grown as long as the summed lengths of the distal and middle phalanxes of my pinky. Solomon’s plume was out and easily distinguished from the true Solomon’s seal, though not yet producing floral buds. There were Jacks-in-the-pulpit spearing the leaf litter everywhere. Bloodroot fruits and leaves were swelling.

Much of the southern half of Lyman Woods was under water. I overtopped my boots getting a good look at the inner band of the leaf sheath on Carex vulpinoidea. The sheaths are corrugated, puckered crosswise, wrapped tightly around the culms or the other leaves within them. Here’s a common species I’ve seen probably at least 600 times (assuming I’ve seen it 20 to 40 times in each of the last 20 years, which seems pretty conservative). And yet I still ask myself, “any chance this is something else that I’m not thinking of?” While I worried over the plant, a Cooper’s hawk called “kek-kek-kek” from a tree above me. He flew off, and then from the overspilling marsh behind me a sora rail sang out. There are a few birds whose songs make me feel as though I were far from civilization: the sandhill crane, the woodcock, the pileated woodpecker, the sora rail. Part of the effect is association. I learned these birds in places or contexts other than where I live now, and so my rational mind, my knowing self, conditions me to feel as though I were being transported by their call. But I believe some of it is visceral, the sound itself. You don’t have to learn what Shostakovich was thinking to find his 8th string quartet haunting. You don’t have to be told how personal it is, that he encoded his name in this piece and others, to find it wrenching. The music itself does that. Your analytical mind only contributes to it.

Warblers do not have this effect on me. The weekend of foul weather may also have been a weekend of migration, for Monday a black and white warbler hit the herbarium window. It struck hard enough to get the attention of everyone in the office, but not hard enough to make it bleed. The bird landed on its back on the concrete ledge outside and laid feet up, a caricature of a dying bird. We removed the screen, reached out onto the ledge, turned it upright. The warbler rested immobile with his eyes wide open. It was cold outside, so we cut foam for the bird and slid it out onto the ledge. He did not move toward it and was alert, twitchy even. I was reluctant to pick him up and slide him onto the foam, for fear he’d writhe out of my hands and fall. Then his eyes started to shut as though he were expiring. There wasn’t much we could do, so I reached out again to pick him up and place him on the foam. As my fingers brushed his feathers, the bird jumped straight off the ledge and flew recklessly about 20 feet into the European beech whose reflection had undoubtedly lured him into the window in the first place. He disappeared. I’m hopeful that he recovered quickly. We taped hawk silhouettes to all the windows and put the foam away.

Monday and Tuesday, there was nothing but rain with nowhere to escape to. The DuPage River overtopped its banks and filled the elm collection nearly to the road. I took a walk on Tuesday that started dry and ended saturated, and still there was plenty to see. White trout lilies had started going to seed, stigmas thrust out of the fruits like adders’ tongues (which of course is not my image: that is one of their common names). The capsules of Dutchman’s breeches had started to swell. Spring beauty were fruiting, and the first flowers were coming out on Solomon’s seal. Largeflower bellwort were in bloom. Cystopteris fronds were unfurling. Things dried and warmed up near the end of the week. Friday, great-crested flycatchers were calling in the sunny morning of the East Woods. There were geranium leaves as big as my palm, some with flowers. Sugar maple leaves were drooping like handkerchiefs at the tips of spindly branches. Wild sarsaparilla was knee-high, hairy sedge was blooming, large white trilliums were coming into flower if they had a good view of the sun. If they didn’t, they were still just showing a little petal between the sepals. The first bloody thumbprints were showing on jumpseed. Woodland sunflowers were ankle-high. There was a bouquet of Christmas fern by the frog pond and a scattering of earth stars along the edge of the chipped trail.

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Saturday’s snow and the rain at the beginning of the week gave us a little extra time for reading. Robert Moor had tweeted a quote the night before the snow from a book review by Nicholas Lemann, in which Lemann writes, “The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless.” Lemann is writing about Jeremy Treglown’s Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima. It made me wonder again what distinguishes the nonfiction I have been most interested in this past few years from the fiction I was reading almost exclusively when Rachel and I first got together. Scientific writing — by which I mean scientific articles, mostly peer-reviewed stuff, reporting new findings — is not what I’m talking about. Like most academic writing, this kind of writing is about conveying information efficiently, interpreting it to explain how the world works, advancing hypotheses, pushing knowledge forward. That’s mostly what I’ve been writing since starting graduate school 20 years ago, and it seems obvious to me that structurally and in subject matter it differs from the fiction I was writing and reading as an undergraduate.

But when it comes to essays, the line is fuzzier to me. Essayists take as their subjects some portion of the world that they are uniquely poised to report about. They describe it, ruminate on it, compare something they’ve seen here with some other thing they’ve run across over there. What comes out of it is a new understanding, hopefully, arising in the reader as a consequence of the juxtaposition of images, stories from the world. I think this account of essays is fairly non-controversial. But that’s exactly how I would describe the fiction and poems I like as well. Essays and even book-length works of nonfiction operate to my eye much like poems. They are occupied with, as Billy Collins put it, comparing “everything with everything else.” You can read them for information, of course… but you can read them just as much for the change in perspective they effect in you, irrespective of whether you remember a thing from them. Dylan Thomas wrote, “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” Isn’t it the same with non-fiction? and for that matter with fiction? Fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same boat: they take as their subjects worlds that they are uniquely situated to see. They are obliged to describe them accurately. The worlds they are describing just happen to be in different places.

Why write another nature essay? I don’t think it’s to teach you something. If it were, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time writing about common knowledge, things that are familiar to me and many other people: robins, flowering buttercups, Carex woodii coming into fruit on a knoll I’ve walked past for fifteen springs, come to expect it on, always look for it and always find it, always grateful. I don’t think it’s primarily to get you outside, either. If these essays are to do anything, it’s to add something new to the world. John Burroughs saw it similarly. Look at what he writes:

Or one may say, it is with the thoughts and half thoughts that the walker gathers in the woods and fields, as with the common weeds and coarser wild flowers which he plucks for a bouquet, — wild carrot, purple aster, moth mullein, sedge, grass, etc.: they look common and uninteresting enough there in the fields, but the moment he separates them from the tangled mass, and brings them indoors, and places them in a vase, say of some choice glass, amid artificial things, — behold, how beautiful!

I can’t see the difference between fiction and nonfiction as a distinction between the basic and the applied. There is very little of “now I want you to learn something from what I’m saying” in anything I write after 10 p.m. on weekdays or Sunday mornings before the boys are up. Each one of these little essays is me muttering, “Don’t forget this.” They’re phone calls to Rachel telling her she’s got to see this thing over here. They’re notes for my boys. They’re notes to myself, to pull out of the drawer when I’m 90. I don’t know precisely what they are, but I know they’re not fiction, and I know they’re also not applied. They’re just what I want to think about, and it’s happenstance that I want to keep thinking about these things I see in the woods. In a sense, the essays I read and the things I write are only accidentally nonfiction. They are about the world, and they are true. But fiction is as well. It’s just about a different world.

*

A week after our freaky late-April snow, DuPage County is warming up, and leaves have been filling out all weekend long. Saturday night, a week after the snow, I sat in the backyard by the fire. It was getting hard to read. Arcturus was just visible in the east, the only star I could see. There was a party in the neighborhood, and I leaned my head back to listen to the music. Queen was playing, and “We will Rock You” mixed with the chuckling of a robin. There was some other sound I didn’t recognize. Then I realized that the robin was not a robin at all, but a wood thrush. Could that be right? A wood thrush in our neighborhood? I listened for a few minutes, and it was unquestionable. I’d never heard one on our street, but now I wonder whether every year they come through. Is there a lineage of wood thrushes that comes and sings in our backyard every May, right as trees are filling up their leaves for summer? Was I the only one to hear it? These things happen: surprisingly ordinary things that are surprising in one way go unnoticed by everyone but you sometimes, which makes you wonder how often they go unnoticed by everyone in the world.

Take this as you like. If you want it as information, you can have it. A wood thrush on Otis Avenue is certainly news to me. A late-season snow, the order of flowering week by week, what day the black-and-white warbler hit her herbarium window: it’s all information. And at the same time, that won’t be why I care about it when I’m 96, and knowing about it isn’t enough for me. This is non-fiction, but it’s not applied. It’s the first week of May. That’s the main point I’m trying to make here.

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Plants referenced

• Acer saccharum – sugar maple
• Aralia nudicaulis – wild sarsaparilla
• Arisaema triflorum – Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Barbarea vulgaris – winter bittercress
• Carex hirtifolia – hairy sedge
• Carex sprengelii – Sprengel’s sedge
• Carex vulpinoidea – fox sedge
• Carya ovata – shagbark hickory
• Celtis occidentalis – hackberry
• Claytonia virginica – spring beauty
• Convallaria majalis – lily-of-the-valley
• Cornus racemosa – gray dogwood
• Dicentra cucullaria – Dutchman’s breeches
• Erythronium albidum – white trout lily
• Galium aparine – annual bedstraw
• Geranium maculatum – wild geranium
• Helianthus occidentalis – woodland sunflower
• Lonicera x bella – honeysuckle
• Maianthemum racemosum – Solomon’s plume
• Podophyllum peltatum – mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s seal
• Polygonum virginianum – jumpseed
• Polystichum acrostichoides – Christmas fern
• Populus deltoides – cottonwood
• Quercus alba – white oak
• Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
• Quercus rubra – red oak
• Ranunculus abortivus – small-flowered buttercup
• Rhamnus cathartica – buckthorn
• Ribes missouriense – Missouri goodeberry
• Rosa multiflora – multiflora rose
• Sanguinaria canadensis – bloodroot
• Toxicodendron radicans – poison ivy

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¹ Richard Powers, “What Does Fiction Know?” Places Journal, August 2011. Accessed 05 May 2019. https://doi.org/10.22269/110802