Robins and white-breasted nuthatches are calling as I arrive. Along the trail, in the soil, the worms have left bouquets of leaves they stuffed down into their holes like greedy little Santa Clauses. I pull one out, and the leaves are skeletonized, the flesh digested and the veins ragged, stunned.
Honeysuckle buds are swelling but not yet open, fuzzy and elongate. (I think it’s probably all Lonicera maackii along this trail.) Sedges of all colors and creeds are sending up shoots. Spring beauty leaves are darkening and hardening up, winding upward through the leaves like charmed snakes. False mermaid seedlings are beginning to get a little rowdy in the gaps in the leaf litter. The lower nodes have become visible on the taller plants; any day now the plants will put on lateral leaves, and flower buds will emerge on short, arching stalks, closed, tough as nails. Then the flowers will open, the seeds will set, and the mother plants will die, more faithful than the faithful, leaving their seeds to float off into the future, each a Moses alone in the bulrushes.
Garlic mustard shoots that got missed last year are ganging up, wrinkled and dark, tough, a little self-satisfied. They’re not demons, I know, but I don’t like them. I saw a slope in southwestern Wisconsin once many years ago that was solid garlic mustard with a couple of Solomon’s seals poking up. On one hand, I want to say, “good for you. You’re just doing what you were born to do.” On the other hand: so many interesting species snuffed out beneath them. I pull the shoots I see on my walk today, lay them on their sides up high enough that they’ll desiccate before their roots can find their way back to the soil. I know objectively that this is a blip: give them 100,000 years, maybe a million–no time at all, in other words–and they’ll just be a part of whatever becomes of the eastern North American forests. Still, I pull them out and set them aside so I know they’ll die, and I feel that small sense of accomplishment you have when you find the match to a mismatched sock or you dunk a can in the recycling bin on the way out of the house. You go on with your day. Nothing wrong with weeding, I suppose, but I don’t care much for my attitude.
On the walk out, I take a minute to watch from the bridge at where St. Joseph Creek has spilled over the floodplain, sweeping away the leaves to the base of the hill, scouring the soil, lodging stems and leaves against the tree trunks. The water is still turbid and running fast.
A tufted titmouse and cardinal call. It’s 1:42. Virginia bluebells are coming up glaucous along the edge of the trail. I walk home, recalling that our garlic is several inches tall at home and looking good.
It is a warm, dark morning, about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday was 70 degrees. Robins are singing in the neighborhood as I bike to work. The chorus frogs are raising a din from the marsh between the forest and the berm as I arrive. I flush a bird off the road. Stout and plump, it flies direct toward the lower branches of the trees along the roadside and is gone. Woodcock? Pigeon? I don’t know. No sound as it flies.
I ride up the hill past the forest trail that cuts across the road, past the rectangular field where blue-winged warblers will be singing in a month and a half. In the forest to the west of the opening, a small flame is burning, a remnant of the recent prescribed burn. I lean my bike against a tree to look closer. The flame is eroding the base of a trunk that has fallen against a standing tree. The trunk is tilted upward at about 45 degrees with its butt on the ground. I think I remember seeing this same tree before, when it was still leaning against its stump; but my imagination is often better than my memory, so I take my recollection with a grain of salt. It seems as though the bole of this fallen tree has been burning slowly upward from the base. A steadily-lengthening line of ash trails from where the tree first broke off and tipped over to the now-flaming end. It is more than hour to sunrise, but the moon is high, and in that light the ash is a bright gray, nearly white, against the blackened leaves. Is this tree righting itself, slowly, as it burns? burning upward from the base to stand straighter by the day? If so, this dead tree may be standing upright again in a week or so, the ghost of its bottom half pale from the stump to its charred base.
A twig pokes me in the eye as I retrieve my bike, and for a second I imagine a dribble of vitreous liquid down my cheek. My imagination is often stronger than my memory. I’ve poked myself in the eye so many times walking through the woods that my cornea should be pock-marked by now. I ask every eye doctor I see whether perhaps I’ve done some violence to my eyes. I see floaters all the time, I tell them. I am losing my sight, right? Remarkably, they always tell me I’m doing fine, don’t worry. They’ll see me again in a year.
I bike past the oak collection and the tree breeding nursery. A killdeer calls. The chorus frogs are singing with fervor from the wetland that drains westward between the buckeye collection and the woods, where the grasses are growing happily thick and unkempt.
Crowley Marsh is a ruckus of chorus frogs this morning with a sprinkling of peepers. Fog is pooling. I park and walk the trail, listening for woodcocks. The peepers rise and fall in concert in standing water that reflects a rippling trail of moonlight. Willows stand in the water up to their knees. A huddle of bur oaks marks the edge of the marsh. One peeper trills, solitary, then is joined by a choir of peepers. They go on for 30 or 45 seconds and then are still. A minute passes. They start up again.
I walk up and out of the fog. A second family of chorus frogs is making noise at the north end of the marsh. A song sparrow sings. Standing above the marsh, I can clearly see the upper margin of the fog. As I descend into it, I cannot tell when I am passing that line. I walk back out and try it again, thinking of Nan Shepherd watching the Cairngorms from a nearby mountain: “Coming steeply down its front, one watches the high panorama opposite settle into itself as one descends. It enchants me like a juggler’s trick. Every time I come down I want promptly to go back and see it all over again.”
Back in the marsh, I can tell it is foggy only by the fact that things grow indistinct more quickly as I look farther away. I’m not hearing woodcocks, so I get back on my bike and ride slowly around the road, which dips down through a cold pocket filled with fog and up over a warm rise. I flush another bird off the road.
At the edge of the Japan collection, I hear the wind whistling through a woodcock’s primaries as it flies upward. I was not expecting to hear them here. I lean my bike against a ginkgo. Woodcocks are twittering overhead, then one peents. I walk a trail into the collection following a loudly peenting male. I keep my bike light in my hand, hoping to see him. He is calling like it is the last dance of the night. So I continue walking and do catch a glimpse of him, but only as he flies off, and not to do his mating flight, but to relocate and keep peenting. There are perhaps 3 or 4 woodcocks here, I can’t tell for sure, but it seems to be fewer than I usually hear at Crowley Marsh.
I back out and watch the fog thickening up over the collection. At 6:44, the last woodcock peents. The light measures about 0.2 foot-candles, brilliant compared to the 0.01 foot-candles Aldo Leopold wrote should suffice to stop the woodcock show in the morning. I give it 5 more minutes and still hear nothing. The woodcocks are done for the day at 28 minutes before sunrise.
The day passes with meetings, writing, data analysis, lunch with my lab group, a conversation with my son. Temperatures drop by about 15 degrees. Rain falls and then stops. I bike out when it looks like there is a break in the weather. I watch for the smoking tree, and I find it, an ash smoldering slowly down to a nubbin. Instead of burning upward from the end to standing, it appears to have cracked in half when it fell. Instead of smoldering away from the stump—which is knee-high and charred black—the trunk appears to have burned down to a trail of cinders _in situ_. What struck me as the only explanation this morning seems utterly implausible to me on this chilly, sunlit afternoon. Trees generally do not burn themselves slowly upright. I want things like this to happen. Stranger things sometimes do. I’ll return Thursday morning and see it all over again, and perhaps I’ll find it standing just a little straighter. But this afternoon, the remnant of a prescribed burn will do.
I bike out and make it home as the thunder starts. Rachel and I eat the beautiful dinner she has made. Rain starts to fall.
Snowdrops are flowering in the neighborhood just east of Maple Grove. At the entrance to the forest preserve, a small flock of juncos is crossing the trail from south to north, gleaning insects or maybe picking little stones from the path to seed their gizzards. They move through briskly and systematically while a white-breasted nuthatch calls. Earthworms have tucked bundles of oak leaves into the soft, wet soil alongside the trail. Two deer are standing in the back lot of one of the adjoining houses. Brooklyn hardly gives them the time of day.
I am thinking about false mermaid, as I always do this time of year. I brush fallen leaves aside looking for it. Seedlings are growing patchily all over the woods, like handfuls of mung beans strewn around and germinating on the damp soil. The first green leaflets are spreading their stubby little fingers. I pull a few seedlings to look closely at their roots, which number about 6 at this stage and have short, spare, bristly root hairs that are hardly noticeable without a hand lens. They pull easily out of the mud.
The tips of trout lily leaves have begun to show above the soil’s surface. The leaves are pale green and tightly rolled. I dig one up and find it is buried to its chin, two centimeters of leaf-roll below ground arching scimitar-like upward from a blackened tuber that reminds me of a very large, muddy grapefruit seed. Its base bristles with roots. The leaves at this stage exhibit none of the mottling that will develop as the leaves unroll and begin to photosynthesize. They are not etiolated, but simply pale, the chlorophyll in place and ready but not yet abundant. Give them a couple of weeks.
An eastern bluebird is warbling from a low branch on a slender sugar maple. It scans the ground from its perch. Then it drops abruptly. I was about to say that it plops to the ground, but that’s not right. The bluebird is not the kind of bird that plops. It does not generally sally or soar or plunge, either. It is neither sleek nor fierce, but neither is it bulky. It is practical, descending diagonally and in control, not a stone falling but a sturdy bird moving easily and without fanfare. There is no showmanship, no more energy expended than necessary. Just enough to make the drop precise and effective. It is back up at the branch of a nearby tree within two seconds, watching the ground again. Broad-leaved wild leek shoots have broken through their sheaths.
A group of eight mallards is bumming around on the ephemeral pond in the middle of the woods. There are two hens and six drakes, and the guys don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They are horsing around, quacking at each other. One glides toward a hen and looks like he’d like to say something to her, then he slides away and quacks again at one of the other guys.
Beyond the mallards are six wood ducks, four drakes and two hens. This is a more serious group. They are gliding around whistling. They are attentive. Something sets them off: a group of four takes off low through the woods, skimming the top of the water and following the slope closely uphill, navigating deftly between the trees until they gradually, gradually emerge over the tree tops. The other two follow them out, squeaking and whistling, sliding upward through the forest along the same low-angled, sinuous path between the trunks, as effortlessly as a bicyclist gliding between rows of cars stopped at a red light.
The ducks breach the canopy and circle over Maple Grove. Brooklyn has been sitting so patiently, but these ducks whistling overhead are too much for her. She sits at attention and faces toward home, whimpering. We leave.
3/8, 9 am, 40F, sunny
The next morning we pass the church parking lot on the way to Maple Grove, and a car exactly like ours pulls in. Brooklyn is nonplussed. She will not move for about 5 minutes, convinced that this is our car, and that Rachel has arrived to take us home from this walk which has suddenly, to Brooklyn, become the most terrible walk. No matter that the boys looking out at her are not our boys. Never mind that the man driving is not Rachel and also not me. This must be our car, and Brooklyn intends to go home in it.
We make it to the ditch with a little cajoling. Brooklyn plunges in and gobbles at the water. After a minute of this, she stands up straight and looks at me. I sense she is sizing me up. Then she runs out of the ditch and darts in the direction of the car. I call for her and she ignores me. She stops all of a sudden, conflicted: obey or head home? Brooklyn does not like to be far from any of us, so it upsets her to be caught halfway between me and the car that she is certain holds Rachel. Against her better judgment, she waits for me. She reluctantly lets me guide her back toward the woods.
It’s a beautiful morning. Robins, red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, red-winged blackbirds are all singing their hearts out. Hairy-leaved sedges (_Carex hirtifolia_) are arching upward along the trail, an inch or two out of the ground already. _Carex tribuloides_ shoots sheathed in last year’s brown and desiccated leaf bases are three inches tall.
A golden-crowned kinglet is whistling in the low branches above us, moving everwhere. He flies to an elm whose buds are swollen nearly to capacity, about to burst open. They may be open along the margins, because the kinglet is moving between them, apparently picking at insects. He is an efficient worker. He moves from bud to bud sequentially, then moves to another branch. He moves from base to tip. Then, somehow discerning that his work on this tree is done, he moves to another tree. I admire such single-mindedness.
The bullet-shaped shoot tips at the ends of every rhizome in a mayapple colony have pierced the soil and, together, demarcate the margins of the stand that will unfurl a few weeks hence and remain through most of the summer, shading the ground beneath. Wild ginger shoot tips are tipped with overlapping leaves folded closed like little envelopes. Spring beauties are developing backbones and standing up a little straighter. Their leaves are about an inch long.
Another group of mallards occupies the ephemeral pond. The wind is blowing hard and steady, and a tree bending back and forth over the pond whistles and squeaks like the family of wood ducks that was here yesterday. Woodpeckers are calling: hairy, downy, red-bellied.
As Brooklyn and I walk home, a flock of 17 or 18 cranes is heading noisily southward. They pivot and head back toward the north. Perhaps they were just giving the town a look. We arrive home to find our neighbors’ silver maple in full flower.
Around the first of March each year, like clockwork, I hear sandhill cranes migrating. I can be indoors or outdoors, in the city or in a forest preserve, even typing at my desk with the windows shut: no matter where I am, their prehistorical grawks and rattles reach me from a mile or more overhead. Something about their needs and abilities seems to tie their migration tightly to day length. Perhaps they know that, needing only the resources of their breeding grounds to get them through the next season, they cannot rely on the weather in the south to tell them when to leave. Perhaps, too, they are large enough that they are not as dependent on tail winds as the song birds are. These are guesses. Whatever the reason, sandhill cranes do their work faithfully each spring, helping to turn the hands of the clock around the year.
Averaging about the same date but far less reliable are the chorus frogs. While I often hear them the first week of March, I have heard chorus frogs as early as mid-February, after an unseasonable thunderstorm. Some years I don’t hear them until the second half of March. This variance in their start-date makes intuitive sense: chorus frogs are cold-blooded, hibernate in the soil, and move to the water to sing. Air can warm up very fast indeed, swinging 20° or 30° Fahrenheit in a single 24-hour period. But water and soil warm more gradually. There can be frost in the soil where the frogs are hibernating when the air temperature should be warm enough to get them revved up. I am writing this at the end of the first week of March. I biked into work and home again every day this week, listening. I came in early a couple of days hoping for woodcocks (didn’t hear them). Then yesterday afternoon a heavy rain fell for about a half hour. On my evening ride home, the chorus frogs were going full-tilt, scores of them singing over each other, saturating the air with sound, overflowing the margins of Crowley Marsh.
A single, tentative spring peeper was singing with them. This is often the case: scads of chorus frogs singing a couple of weeks before the spring peepers start in earnest, but one spring peeper warming up with them. These two species are close relatives but sound to my ear nothing alike. I never doubt the call of a chorus frog: one or two notes, and I know exactly what I am hearing. The chorus frog’s song has been dully but memorably described as being like the sound of a thumb drawn along the tines of a thick-toothed, high-quality comb. I would never have come up with that description. I don’t love it—the real thing is so much juicier than the sound of a plucked comb—but I haven’t come up with anything better.
I always doubt the first spring peepers of the year. Whereas the first chorus frogs come on strong and almost all at once, warmed up and ready to go, the first peeper I hear each year is solitary and a little hesitant. It squeaks loudly once or twice and then recedes to a squeaky murmur. Then nothing. Maybe it intuits the risk of being the sole singer in a world of attentive predators. Singing in the choir, you are at low risk of being singled out. A soloist is always in the spotlight. Though even the soloing spring peepers are all but invisible to at least this botanist. I wandered out into Crowley Marsh looking for the frog, but I didn’t find it. I never do. It could have been anywhere. These frogs are ventriloquists.
When the frogs are going strong, I like to walk a section of moraine that separates two ponds at different elevations. The wetlands are different temperatures, and the colder frogs on one side sing a bit lower and a bit more slowly than those on the other. If you put them together, would the females at one temperature respond to the calls of the males at another? Probably so: chorus frogs appear not to care much about the frequency of calls, nor in fact any of the particular details. You can speed the calls or slow them, transpose them up and down, make them louder or softer, and the female frogs will respond.
This is all to say that frogs arrive each year primed to go. Herpetologist Jim Andrews has written that spring peepers are “only minutes away from breeding” when they settle in for the winter, and I suspect this is true of chorus frogs as well. They perch on the edge of amplexus, ready to call in a mate or respond to the call as soon as conditions are optimal.
And so, against their best interests, they knit the seasons together with fall songs that echo the songs of spring. In about 7 months, during a day of moderate temperatures, generally a few weeks before the cranes start moving back through town, the peepers will start singing again. It will be mid-October and I’ll be listening to the first-year white-throated sparrows warbling around in the shrubs, trying out their fresh, new voice boxes, and I’ll hear a spring peeper squeaking. And on a warm day in November, I sometimes hear chorus frogs again.
