February 8, Lyman Woods, East Woods
The East Woods smelled of burned leaves this morning. At work I read that the twelve months that ended a week earlier were the warmest on record. Global temperatures for the year averaged 1.5°C higher than the pre-industrial average.¹ We’ve hit the temperature recommended as a “defense line” in the Paris Agreement of 2015. Can we hold it there?

In the evening, I walked to Lyman Woods in spite of a thunderstorm looming, too antsy to stay home. It was dark by the time I reached the woods. Rain fell lightly and intermittently on the leaves and on the hood of my jacket, on the umbrella when I raised it. Thunder in the distance resolved into lightning cracks across the southern and eastern sky. The storm blew through the corner of Downers Grove as I walked home.

February 10, West Dundee, Maple Grove
I spent the morning in West Dundee with Rachel, wandering along the Fox River. There was a heron on the water. A bird blind built of planks stood on the far shore of the river; along the near shore stood a stand of tall Phragmites, a boxy, floating mass of grasses one and a half times my height. Uphill, in the Brunner Family Forest Preserve, there were pigs wallowing in the sawdust and scores of chickens roaming free, perhaps more than a hundred of them. They seemed to be living a good life.

I was back home in the afternoon. Temperatures reached 40°F. There was no frost in the ground at Maple Grove. The wild leek shoots appeared to be no further along than they were in mid-December. Scrappy, young spring beauty was tangled up in the dried leaves, thread-slender and sprawling. The sedges were not too active yet: Carex jamesii had only evergreen shoots, and only one C. albursina plant was producing fresh leaves. False mermaid, however, was germinating throughout the woods, tripartite leaflets unfolding beneath the leaves. I’d never seen it this early. False mermaid is a winter annual. It puts a root out in the winter so it is ready as soon as the temperatures warm up. The shoots follow in the spring, cracking open the rough, spherical seed and coming out hunched over, stiff from 9 or 10 months spent locked up inside. But prior to this, the earliest I’d seen false mermaid shoots growing was March 4, a week and a half before the pandemic shut-down of 2020. That makes this year’s plants three weeks to a month early.

I came across a decapitated eastern white oak seedling. Whatever got the plant pulled it out by the root and took the fleshy cotyledons, the massive food-storage organs inside the acorn that feed the seedling. The seedling was drying out on the soil’s surface, tipped with two petioles, the stalks that had borne its cotyledons. Beside it, two white oaks seedlings grew unusually close to each other. Each seemed to have only one cotyledon, and for a few seconds, I was not sure whether I was looking at one plant whose cotyledons were spreading wide on extended petioles; or a plant that had been torn lengthwise at its tip but was continuing to grow nonetheless; or maybe two seedlings that had each lost one cotyledon. These initial guesses were all wrong. I had in fact stumbled across fraternal twins: two seedlings, each the progeny of a separate pollen grain and a separate ovule, each with two cotyledons. They had grown up squeezed into a single acorn shell next to each other. The cotyledons had pressed each other into half of their typical size. Each cotyledon was rounded on the outside, molded by the shell, and flat where it abutted the others. I fit the cotyledons together like sections of a quartered tangerine. The two seedlings made one acorn’s worth of meat.

Female oak flowers have six ovules, and often more than one is fertilized. Typically, all ovules abort except for one. The result in this usual case is the single-seeded acorn we are used to. But once in awhile, two ovules mature to form a two-seeded acorn. Among the tens of thousands of white oak acorns germinating right now in Maple Grove, how many were born this year two to a cap? I don’t know, but it’s definitely a small minority. Some bur oaks in eastern Illinois produce two seeds in 20% of their acorns, but that’s probably unusual.² In our bur oak experiment on the west side of the Arboretum, I would estimate that 10 or 20 of the 900 bur oaks we planted in 2021 were two-seeded, growing like an X attached at the root crown, though I wasn’t counting very carefully. If I surveyed the white oak acorns germinating in Maple Grove this year, I might find 1–5% producing two seedlings. It bears a closer look.

Farther along, a small black cherry had fallen over and was leaning against an adjacent tree. It left a small, bare-dirt tip-up mound at its base. The falling tree is stable for now, but some time in the next decade, it will fall the rest of the way. Its tip-up is already clearing ground for someone else’s seedlings.

February 11, Lyman Woods
Thirty minutes after sunrise, the silver maples, pin oaks, and basswoods along Douglas Avenue were glowing red against violet clouds. But midmorning was already on its way, a conventional sky pinching the unearthly-colored clouds against the horizon by the time I reached Ogden Avenue.

White-breasted nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers were calling in the neighborhood adjacent to Lyman Woods. A sparse ruff of honeysuckle shoots carpeted the trail’s edge, ready to take over when the current generation is eventually cut. Below them, Fissidens moss was rimed with frost, leaves tightly imbricated in feather-like fronds. The plants bristled with sporophytes, each stalk curved, its beaked capsules tilted to the side. Together, the mass of capsules resembled a flock of Canada geese looking around in all directions.

Iris leaves along the creek had grown the length of my hand, measured from fingertip to wrist. On the slope up from the wet forest, needle ice lining the trail heaved soil clods up into boot-sole-height hedgerows. Last year’s bottlebrush grass bore a few brittle spikelets.

Last year’s narrow-leaved wild leeks are evident by their denuded scapes—the flowering stalks coming straight up from the ground—if you look closely and focus on texture. The scapes are wiry, stiff, and precisely the color of dry straw. They are not obvious at first. At the base of one of last year’s dried leek plants, I expected to find this year’s leek shoots already growing. Instead, a hairpin-shaped toothwort seedling was gingerly extricating its leaves from the ground, as you might pull a fallen feather carefully out of the mud by the base of its shaft so its barbs don’t become damaged. The entire shoot-tip, including inflorescence buds and a number of slender leaves, measured only a few millimeters across. At maturity, the leaves of this plant will spread several inches wide.

A spring beauty was growing in the shade of last year’s evergreen hepatica leaves. The tip of this year’s hepatica shoot was barely visible at the base of the leaf stalks, ready to grow but not yet moving.

A chickadee was fee-beeing and a dog barking in an adjoining backyard. I skirted the ephemeral pond where the swamp white oak grows. From the top of the hill, the pond was gray with ice in the middle and darkened to the color of forest and clouded sky at the edges. It was nearly 8:30. A fallen tree that I have been watching decompose for several years was still crumbling into a mass of ant-perforated rubble.

February 12, morning walk in the neighborhood
Red-winged blackbirds are back!

February 17, Lyman Woods
It was 12°F at 7:15 this morning. The sky was cloudless as I walked toward Lyman Woods. Cardinals and chickadees were singing. My first mourning dove of the year started a single “whoo-oo,” sloping upward, but did not call its sliding descent, the one that presages spring and carries us through summer mornings.

Iris leaves along the creek running into Lyman woods were about two inches taller than they had been on my previous walk. Red-winged blackbirds were singing from the lake. Four deer bounded away as I approached, tails flashing. Carex sprengelii shoots were greening up, stalled at an inch or two tall.

The pond near the hospital was glazed and faithfully reflected the oaks beyond it, though the corrugations in the ice made them a bit murky at their waists. Woodpeckers were drumming.

February 18, Maple Grove
It’s 40°F at 2:30, but not everything has warmed up. Brooklyn jumps into the ditch along Turvey Road only to find solid ice an inch below the water’s surface. She skitters a moment, assesses the situation, then reluctantly walks up the bank to get back on the road.

A downed log inside the entrance to Maple Grove is bright green with seductive entodon moss. I do not know whether this moss is a single plant or an entire colony. Either way, it is a tangle, a basket of yarn poured out over the log. The moss is hairy with sporophytes, hundreds of wiry bristles, each bearing an anther-sized capsule. Each capsule is erect, tapered at the base and blunt-cut with tiny teeth at the apex. I move my hand slowly over the moss. The sporophytes bend as each catches on my hand, then snap upright again. Each flick of a sporophyte releases thousands of spores.³ Together, they form a cloud that veils the log for a few moments, forming eddies behind my hand and drifting off to drop to the ground a foot away. I move my hand back and forth three or four times until the spores are all dispersed.

The forest floor is peppered with the first seedlings of false mermaid, hunched over with leaflets folded like the fingers of a glove, or stretched upward, leaflets spreading. Tightly-rolled trout lily leaves pierce the mud through a crust of ice. False rue anemone shoots are two knuckles tall with half-sized leaves. These plants are running a few weeks ahead of schedule.

But the wild ginger further down the trail—long, looping rhizomes bearing quiescent, flattened buds—aren’t budging and won’t for several weeks more.

On the walk out, I encounter friends who report that their winter aconite is emerging and about to bloom. Temperatures are supposed to reach the mid 50s this week. I’ll be listening for chorus frogs.

February 20, Morton Arboretum, East Woods, Woodland Trail
It’s barely freezing when I bike in at 8:00 this morning. The white oak litter is brittle with frost, but not sealed to the soil’s surface. False mermaid shoots are two inches tall beneath the leaves. Spring beauty shoots are white, elongate, spindly, draped across wood chips and clods of earth. They are tipped with green leaves that curl like talons, flower buds clustered between the bases of the paired leaves. The woods this morning are drenched in the roar of cars barreling down I-355, which cradles this section of the Arboretum. A fallen log is covered with bleached chicken of the woods.

A few days later, colleagues will report that skunk cabbage is blooming on the Arboretum’s west side.

February 24, Maple Grove
Snow started as I was biking home last night and had covered the ground by the time we went to bed. The snow remained, mostly, through groceries and lunch this morning. The snow is melting away by lunchtime, when I get to Maple Grove. The terrace along the east bank of St. Joseph Creek is almost free of snow, where the sun has been coming through the trees. Snow lines the shaded north edge of the bridge. A few fallen logs bear the tracks of squirrels that bounded across in the morning.

Sandhill cranes are flying overhead. I can hear them to the southwest, but I cannot see them through the trees. A minute later, I hear them to the east, then to the south, then again to the west. Always just a few, as though the leaders were calling to each other. I am surrounded. Then there is a riot of them calling to the north as a jet passes by. A freight train comes through and tries to drown them out, but a sandhill crane’s call is too distinctive to get lost in the clamor of a train.

In the south half of the preserve, where the forest cants down toward the north, the floor is a mosaic of snow, mud, matted maple leaves, lofted dry oak leaves, mosses green and sparsely forested with remnant sporophytes. Canopies of fallen trees are denuded of leaves. Other branches fell before they had a chance to shed their leaves. Decorticated trunks are riddled with woodpecker excavations.

The false mermaid plants growing now are staking out ground for colonies that will erupt in a few weeks and overtop the leaf litter, turn the forest floor grass-green. I come across a seedling as long as the intermediate phalanx of my middle finger. Its cotyledons are cranked open like a clam shell at the base of the stalk; together, they are about half as large as a mung bean. Nestled between the open cotyledons, a translucent ruff of tissue spreads out at the juncture between shoot and root. The roots themselves are frugal. They barely hold the soil, taking as little as possible from the food in the cotyledons so that the shoot can extract what it needs. And it is doing so: the translucent shoot dwarfs the root, darkens tipward to a green leaf, like water vapor condensing into a cloud. The seedling reclines momentarily against a fallen branch. A thickening near its waist betrays the branchlet that will emerge any day now.

The cranes are still heading north as I walk out. A new flock begins as a trickle, then becomes a stream pouring past the gaps between the oak and sugar maple branches. Somewhere between the false mermaid at my feet and the cranes above, a red-bellied woodpecker is tapping, unsettled, moving from tree to tree, working on a project it will never complete.

February 25, the neighborhood, Lyman Woods, Maple Grove
Temperatures rose from 34°F this morning to nearly 60° this afternoon. We have spent most of the day outdoors in one place or another, walking, talking, not doing much of anything else. The snow has melted almost completely away. Spring beauty seedlings are everywhere. The trails are muddy, the chickadees are calling, the red-winged blackbirds are still calling from the tree tops. No cranes flying today, at least not that I have heard.

February 26, East Woods, 4:45 p.m., ca. 65°F
I stop in the East Woods on my bike ride home from work. Midges are cycling up and down in the afternoon light, making paperclip-tight turns within the basal three feet of the warming atmosphere. Beneath them, toothworts are extracting their leaflets from between shards of sand that somehow leave them untorn. False mermaid leaves have overtopped the leaf litter.

A colony of woodsy thyme moss is desiccated on a dry-rotted stump. The capsules of its sporophytes are tipped with needle-sharp hoods. I moisten a clump in my hand with spit and wait for it to come back to life. Robins are chuckling. White-breasted nuthatches are honking. The old prairie is just visible below the power lines, east of the ravine where I stand.

Within a couple of minutes, the moss has started to soften up. Wiry knots give way to thin, translucent leaves, ready to photosynthesize. Mosses, like fungi, are opportunists: they jump at a little good weather, grow or form spores when they have the opportunity and stop when the time is no longer right. Give this patch a light rain, and it will pick up right where it left off, as though winter had never happened.

Plants referenced

• Allium burdickii — narrow-leaved wild leek
• Allium tricoccum — broad-leaved wild leek (when I use just “wild leek,” I usually mean this)
• Asarum canadense — wild ginger
• Cardamine concatenata — toothwort
• Carex albursina — white bear sedge
• Carex jamesii — James’ sedge
• Carex sprengelii — Sprengel’s sedge
• Claytonia virginica — spring beauty
• Entodon seductrix — seductive entodon moss
• Eranthis hyemalis — winter aconite
• Erythronium sp. — trout lily
• Fissidens sp. — pocket moss
• Floerkea proserpinacoides — false mermaid
• Hepatica acutiloba — sharp-lobed hepatica
• Hystrix patula — bottlebrush grass
• Iris sp. — iris
• Lonicera sp. — honeysuckle
• Phragmites — reed
• Plagiomnium cuspidatum — woodsy thyme moss, baby tooth moss
• Prunus serotina — black cherry
• Quercus alba — eastern white oak
• Quercus bicolor — swamp white oak

References cited

¹ The pre-industrial period is designated as the years 1850–1900. Temperature report is from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). url: https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-world-experienced-warmest-january-record [accessed 2024-02-19].
² Garrison WJ, Augspurger CK. 1983. Double- and Single-Seeded Acorns of Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa): Frequency and Some Ecological Consequences. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 110: 154–160.
³ The “thousands of spores” is a rough estimate based on reported capsule and spore sizes: the longest capsules of Entodon seductrix are 3.5 mm long; the longest spores are 21 µm, about 166th the length of the longest capsules. Buck W. 2014. Endodontaceae. In: Flora of North America Editorial Committee (eds.), Flora of North America North of Mexico, vol. 28: Bryophyta, part 2. Oxford University Press.