Month: January 2026

Morton Arboretum East Woods, 8:45 a.m., 15F, clear skies, ca. 2" of snow on the ground

Temperatures have dropped into the mid-teens, and the road through the Arboretum is streaked with thinly-sanded ice and snow from yesterday. It is cold enough that the ice is barely slippery if I bike attentively. Still, I think increasingly about how fragile this body is that I’ve been issued for a few decades. Through my 30s, I careened down hills as fast as I could, whether I was on my bike or roller skates. Then I hit a rock with my bicycle and broke a tooth. They never do grow back. This morning, I go slow and cautious to Big Rock visitor station, lights blinking at both ends, and tie up my bike.

A red-bellied woodpecker is barking as I walk onto the moraine. A medium-sized song bird has left footprints in the snow amid a scattering of hop hornbeam fruits. It lighted at one edge of the trail and headed initially straight across, then made a long jump about the length of its body and pivoted to scratch at the ground. I presume it was eating something here, likely the hop hornbeam seeds. It bee-lined to another spot about a third of the way across the trail, where it angled right. It made a counterclockwise loop, stopping midpoint to peck at the snow. It closed the loop, made another long, straight path, then another loop, picking at the smorgasbord all along the way. Then, it jumped and flapped, and the tips of the primary feathers on its left wing scraped sharp, concentric, 45-degree arcs in the snow as it flew away. I may have just missed it; these impressions appear to be fresher than the tracks of the squirrel that galloped downslope past me hours before I arrived.

Chips and leaves scraped up after the snow stopped falling are frozen hard. The sun rising over my right shoulder is lighting up the woods ahead of me, highlighting oak branches cleaved from the canopy in the late fall or winter and reclining on the forest floor. Broken branches lack the volition to elbow their old, dead leaves out of the way. Their young buds are frozen. Flowers pollinated last spring are desiccating. Their cambium will not begin to grow again this spring, packing on layers of phloem and, eventually, bark toward the outside of the trunk, building rings of water-carrying wood. But the thick residuum of its life is still locked up in a fallen branch. It will bleed sunlight back onto the forest floor for decades.

Dog tracks paralleling mine seem a bit large for a coyote, though I don’t know for sure. One other person has walked this trail since yesterday’s snow, out and back again, and perhaps this was their dog. I note this with my gloves on. Canada geese call from over Hidden Lake, and I write what I will later misread as, “Canada geese our hidden life.” Tracks of a raccoon plodding overnight or in the early morning run diagonally across the trail to a red oak, then cross back into the brushy woods in the opposite direction.

The snow is mostly blown away from the ridgetop of the moraine, forming grout between the paving of wood chips rather than a sheet over the top. I take a shortcut down the north slope toward Big Rock. The forest opens to prairie. Teasel stands ramrod straight. Indian grass is inclined and goldenrod knocked down by the season. Fallen stems form a network of raised veins beneath the snow, roofs over vole nests and pathways. A pileated woodpecker pounds loud and slow behind me, like someone chipping at a tree with a hatchet.

I follow coyote tracks through the field to a foxtail- and brome-dominated opening, grasses short enough for a few plantain to raise their inflorescences. Water pools and is frozen clear all the way down to the soil, encasing for a few days a cubic foot of old field. Two willow trunks curve up and away from each other in the shape of a letter ‘U’ and become brushy at their apex. A short Kentucky coffee tree grows with two bur oaks. All appear to have been planted at the same time in this opening. Perhaps one will still be standing in 250 years, but only one.

The coyote path follows the water through a ditch of wild rye and sunflower. The water flows back into the forest. It cradles the base of Big Rock as it turns to the north and courses through a culvert beneath the trail on its way to Hidden Lake, where Canada geese are still calling. To the northeast, chainsaws are running and smoke is rising from burn piles.

I walk back through the woods toward the parking lot following the coyote tracks. Wind is rattling the oak leaves. A downy woodpecker makes a long, descending, whinnying call. The sun is bright in my eyes as I continue down the south slope to my bike. White-breasted nuthatches are calling in all directions. Juncos are pipping in the open field.

I’ll leave work at 4:30 this afternoon, before the sun sets, so that I can see the icy patches on my way out. Juncos will fly off from the roadsides in both directions as I go.

Trail north of Big Rock visitor station, 8 a.m., 35F, cloudy

Clouds are banked up in the southeast and interleaved with sunlight as I bike in this morning. The woods are breezy when I arrive at Big Rock Visitor Station and lock up my bike.

Annual bedstraw has grown no larger in the week since I noticed it poking through the fallen leaves. About 20 plants are scattered sparsely over an approximately-half square meter. Further down the trail, fallen oak leaves are scraped up along the trail, exposing spring beauty shoots and seedlings. I pinch the soil around the base of the tiniest of them to pull it out, lay it in my hand and flick the dirt off it. The stem is a little larger than a tubifex worm, overhanging the edges of my fingertip by a few millimeters. The cotyledons—the seed leaves, the ones that have been curled inside the seed—are about half as long as the stem and only slightly greener than it. They resemble white cotton dipped into a dye bath, allowing the color to migrate up onto the apex of the stem, which fades to white. The shoot is bent at the intersection between cotyledon and stem like the bend of a wire hairpin, the kind that comes 100 to a pack, curved to incline sharply backward. At the base of the stem, a bundle of root hairs holding soil in place, then a few straggly roots. This plant is throwing it all into the shoot right now, racing to get above the leaf litter in time for spring. (By contrast, the annual bedstraw seedlings germinated in the fall, and each sports a ponytail of roots to get it through the winter.) I lay the spring beauty seedling on the knee of my corduroys to get a photo. The stem is narrower than the wale across which it lies.

A white-breasted nuthatch is calling, but nothing else that I notice. Scrapes of open soil have opened perpendicular to the trail from rain washing downslope last week. The ditch is flowing today, ice-free, riffles below the larger stones visible from where I stand about 30 feet up. A sugar maple stump a few inches in diameter, sawed off about a foot and a half above the base, lies on its side along the trail where it’s been chucked. I tip it up: the severed roots are blackened by soil and moisture and netted over in white mycelia.

The trail turns north. Through the trees to the east I can see the open floodplain beneath the high-tension lines. There is a section of unplowed prairie there that was destroyed in part when ComEd put the power lines in decades ago. I know one of the volunteers who works down there, and she is a singular individual, driven and knowledgeable. Prairies like this are saved and worked back to health by people who spend hundreds of hours educating themselves on how to do this work, then thousands of hours doing it. My eyes shift back to the woods below me. The entire slope is a mid-winter mess of bedraggled pokeweed, bleached stems falling all over themselves and each other down to the edge of the floodplain. Robins are chirruping in the bottomland, where there moist soil holds invertebrates in abundance. A single call note: probably a junco.

Upslope, a 60-foot white oak collapsed at its base as it fell over. The broken ends of the fallen tree and the base of the stump are riddled with insect burrows, I believe from ants. The stump is split in half, the upslope side still 10 feet tall and clothed almost entirely in a reticulum of black honey mushroom (Armillaria) rhizomorphs. The tree must have snapped at the weakened base as the trunk began to fall. The trunk sheared upward to where it is broken off now. The falling trunk cantilevered for a fraction of a second and then fell straight down onto the ground, so the slivered end of the trunk came to rest about almost as far on the other side of the trunk as the standing edge of sapwood remaining. This is what I infer. Much, much less likely: the tree fell over and then was hoisted up by a giant, shifted back toward its base about 10 feet, and set back down; the giant worked carefully and disappeared without leaving a trace. The length of tree is bird-and-insect chewed, weathered. A tiny artist’s bracket is growing on one side. The tree rotted in place, serving the forest for years after it died. It’s been down on the ground at least long enough for a squirrel to leave an empty acorn shell.

A fallen tree further along the trail is striped with bright green moss and snow that has fallen, melted, frozen again to form icy aggregates. It is dusted with white chips from a sugar maple that was sawed up next to it. Beggar’s ticks are spindly and grabby in the understory, stealthy and lackadaisical but efficient enough: I think I’ve eluded them altogether on this walk, but later in the day I’ll pick about 50 burs off my shoes.

The trunk of a tree that fell decades ago is gone. It must have been sawed up and removed; I can’t imagine that it decomposed in anything less than 30 or 40 years. What is left now is a tip-up and pit beside it, about two-and-a-half feet between the soil surface and the base of the pit where pokeweed grows and enchanter’s nightshade branches and oak leaves spill in. The edge of the pit is rimmed with slabs of bark and sapwood that mark the stump’s perimeter. These remnants of the hulk that stood here for more than a century are growing turkeytail rosettes in abundance.

On the walk out, I run into a group of six volunteers hiking in to burn brush piles. We talk for a minute about an instrumented forest plot nearby, marked with several blue leaf-litter baskets and a weather station that looks like a Mars lander. In the parking lot, I talk with two of the field crew about what I’ve been seeing, and they tell me about the work they’ve been doing in there: removing sugar maples, removing some of the ironwood, leaving the oaks and hickories and daylighting the woods for the ephemerals. How much more spring beauty will we see this year and next because of their work?

7:45 a.m., part clouds, a little wind, 45F

On my bike ride into work this morning, a field crew is burning brush piles in the woods. Flames rise several feet beyond the tops of the human-high piles of branches ranging from as narrow as my pinky to as thick as my forearm. One of my colleagues fans a recalcitrant fire with a leaf blower. Another transfers brush from a truck onto the fire. We greet each other, and they graciously hold up their work for a few moments as I squeeze past them.

I tie up at Big Rock visitor station and walk the trails to the north. Spring beauty shoots continue to emerge in the cool, damp dark beneath fallen leaves. Today the etiolated stems I find are as slender as a tangle of embroidery floss, so fine that I wonder if they are seedlings. I dig them out and find a dark, toothlike corm the size of a spit tangerine pip. This is the plant’s persistence from one year to the next. About a dozen short roots come off the corm. I later read that this species is nonmycorrhizal, leading me to wonder whether I have broken off long-haired roots as I dug this out of the ground. The short leaves at the shoot tips are bent sharply backward like a dancer stretching before a performance. Further on, I’ll find one with flower buds bundled into a knot the size of an ant’s head. A white-breasted nuthatch is calling.

Cotyledons and first leaves of what I take to be annual bedstraw are pushing up through windows in the litter. I have never noticed the cotyledons before, or forgotten them if I have. They are ovate in outline and nearly as large as my pinky nail, a surprise for a plant that will have long-slender leaves at maturity. Right now, they are short, fat, sharply apiculate and toothed along the margins, their upper surfaces scabrous with tough little hairs. This plant germinated in the fall or winter and has been growing for awhile. I dig one up and lay it in my hand to photograph. The roots trail across my palm, almost as long as the stem angling across my fingers. There is no corm or bulb to get these plants through the winter. They live on wits, good fortune, and the law of big numbers: every plant is at enormous risk of seeing its lineage snuffed out this season, but the species as a whole will be here long after we are gone.

Leaves are mussed up by squirrels tussling and digging up acorns. The ditch below is still, standing water skimmed with ice that covers only about a third of its surface. Some plant I don’t recognize that smacks of a Eurasian ground-cover grows rigid, tall, evergreen along the edge of the trail. I photograph it and upload it to iNaturalist, and the machine learning engine suggests woodland phlox. I accept the identification, then find that I photographed the same species in the same location almost seven years ago. There is some chance it’s the same plant.

A dead tree stands six inches in diameter and snapped off a few feet above my head. A woodpecker excavated a few holes near its base sometime in the past month or two, strewing white wood chips. The holes are too small for a pileated woodpecker. They seem a bit large for a downy or even a hairy woodpecker. I put my money on red-bellied woodpecker. All are common enough in these woods. Whoever it was dug deep. Did it find a warren of beetle larvae?

A small colony of bleached American pokeweed is still standing after the snows and winds of winter, stems dark-streaked perhaps by fungi, leaning against one another, one overtopping me. Beyond them a red oak has tipped over, huge, about 150 feet tall and as big around as any in the East Woods. Some of its larger branches fractured on impact, but the canopy lies in only a few pieces, still clothed in the past year’s leaves. The roots have pulled up clay and rock. Thick shards of bark are embedded in the ground, sloughed off hastily as the tree blew over.

Later in the day, while I am working through oak specimens in the herbarium, rain comes down in torrents, beating against the side of the building. I bike out in the early dark. It is warm and raining, but more slowly, rattling against my hood as I pass the brush piles that have burned down but still glow orange in the falling rain. I bike to the exit gate. Outside that gate, anything could happen. I unlock it and bike home to Rachel and the boys.

I am writing this the next morning, recalling my ride from notes and photographs. It rained all night, and I study the puddles in our backyard as my tea steeps. I lose a half-hour of writing to reading the news, about the U.S. invading Venezuela, about ICE agents shooting and killing a woman in Minneapolis, about health care. I think of these lines I learned earlier this week, from Bertholt Brecht:

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Are the brush piles still smoldering, rain hissing against the glowing logs?