February 8: Lyman woods

9:45 a.m., 32F, overcast

To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method… Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter.
– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

I enter by the hospital. Robins are chuckling. The snow has been alternately subliming, melting, refreezing. Squirrel and raccoon tracks have hardened into the crust. Rabbit pellets warmed by the sun have settled into craters. Fallen red oak leaves curled by the alternate forces of moisture and drought have carved silhouettes in the snow as they melt into it.

House sparrows are chirruping from the brush between the forest and the hospital parking lot. Buds on a gooseberry have started to expand. They form tight rolls a few millimeters long, bases sheathed in brown scales, their distal halves green, their young leaf-tips loose, making the edges look a bit frayed. This gooseberry is the first shrub I’ve seen breaking bud this year.

Tree bark contrasts starkly with the snow. Imbricated plates of bark on a black cherry, each curled at the margins, on a tree that died years ago and has rotted almost to nothing. Deep furrows on a black walnut, broken up into blocks. Smooth tracks running the length of a red oak. Hackberry cork split into deep ridges, layered like dolomite cliffs turned on edge. White oak bark salted with desiccated fruiting bodies of smooth patch fungus, cups extruded from the tree when the days were warmer and wetter, now clamped shut. Two trunks of a basswood arched over in parallel, striped, shoots sprouting from their backs and heading for the canopy, branch tips still hanging on to pale floral bracts and a few seeds.

A cottonwood less than a foot in diameter with corky furrows has crumpled about ten feet up, given up in a wind that bent it until it couldn’t go any further. Thousands of vessels and phloem fibers and sieve tubes snapped, leaving the inner bark to hang like crepe. Thousands more did not. So as the tree tipped downward, unbroken wood that folded as the tree went down layered against the wood that cracked, until the tip of the tree hit the ground and, 15 feet closer to the canopy, snapped backward, severing the crown from its base.

A red-bellied woodpecker is barking at the juncture between the forest and the marsh. It moves upward in short jumps, which seems a risky move to me, jumping with both feet and then landing. How does it not tumble backwards? The bird probes the trunk with its stiletto of a bill. It stops and drums against the tree, six or a dozen rapid strikes. It looks with its left eye, it looks with its right. Ed Yong writes that the left side of a bird’s brain, which controls the right eye, is specialized for focus and categorization. This bird, however, isn’t displaying any obvious eye preference.

After getting to about 20 feet up, the woodpecker drops to the base of a nearby black walnut and flies back up with a walnut in its beak. It lodges the nut in a crevice of a bent-over elm. The bird probes it, dipping in and out, seeming to find something in there. It flies off to another elm, where it pounds vigorously at the crotch of a branch and appears to find a few more insects. It pulls them out and scans its environment as it ingests one, then two more.

The woodpecker flies off. I watch it go, and my eyes come to rest at the broken top of a tree where two white-throated sparrows are hopping around.

I walk to the edge of frozen Lacey Creek. I follow other people’s footprints off the edge of the pier and out through the cattails to the open marsh. Joel Greenberg writes that before European settlement, most rivers in the Chicago Region were like this: broad, slow-flowing wetlands that might dry down in summer but rarely flashed into anything. Many today are ditches that swell within minutes to hours of a rainfall, sweeping soil and trash downstream in every storm.

The snow is creased parallel to the flow of the river. A crack not much wider than a crack in a plaster wall runs as far as I can see up- and downstream. I have left the people tracks behind. Two lines of cottonwoods grow towards each other at the south end of the marsh. There are cattails in all directions. The hillside ahead is a mound of bur oak savanna edged with a ruff of black walnut. I follow deer trails through the marsh and pass a squirrel excavation in the grasses at the boundary of the wetland. I walk upslope, take a minute to get the view from the bench on the hillside, and begin my walk toward home, clockwise around the open water.

There are more fallen red oak than I remember, hulks lying on top of the snow, their bases offset from the point where they broke off if they were long enough to scrape the ground when they struck, or right at the base of the tree where they fell if they are shorter. A hairy woodpecker calls. A rock dove flies over the forest toward the southwest. Someone is striking a metal pipe with a hammer behind the houses that line the back of the preserve. I watch for a minute but cannot figure out what this is about.

I follow the barking trill of a red-headed woodpecker for about ten minutes and find it climbing a dead ash tree. It noses its way into an excavation, moves to the broken top of the tree, and head-pumps and squawks noisily for a minute until it flies off to a red oak and is gone.

As I near the hospital, a gray squirrel crosses my path, running full speed on the ground and then detouring up along the side of a white oak as casually as I might run along the top of a curb. His head stays upright, his body sideways, cantilevered out over the forest floor. I imagine running down the hallway and, on a lark, taking to the wall for a few steps, because why not? You can see just a little better from up here, and besides: what fun is it to keep your feet on the ground all the time?