March 10, 2026: Woodcocks and spring peepers

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.