10:30 a.m., ca. 70F, sunny

The forest canopy has closed. Spring ephemerals are dying back. Summer birds are calling and the migrant warblers are packing their bags. We are done with spring: it’s early summer.

Around 7:00 or 8:00 this morning, Rachel and Brooklyn and I walked across the bridge over Salt Creek, heading into Fullersburg Woods. There was a dense cloud of newly-hatched mayflies cycling up and down in the sunlight over the water. With the naked eye, they look as though they are bouncing in the air, flying straight upward, making a hairpin turn to drop down, then turning back up again. I trained my binoculars on them to follow one at a time as best I could. They resolve into a pack of kindergartners tearing around the playground, checking in with each other. I could only follow one for a second or two before it faded in the crowd. One flew up, arced to the left, dropped a bit and then disappeared from sight. Another nose-dived, paused, and then was gone, replaced by a neighbor. Binoculars down, they turned back into a mass of flies, chaotically organized into a machine built for slicing up the air and knocking the occasional fly into the water. Hundreds or thousands were annealed to the railing of the bridge.

I biked to Maple Grove at 10:30. Red-eyed vireos were singing. The Virginia waterleaf petals have mostly fallen, leaving 5 spidery, long-ciliate sepals clutching the base of each flower, a style withering at the tip of each capsule. The tip of each Solomon’s plume is dense with flowers. Woodland bluegrass fills in lacy along the trail margins, spikelets bobbing at the end of each branch. It is a universe of individuals today. Burdock leaves have grown as large as snapping turtles. Short’s aster won’t flower until much later in the year, but it is already thigh high. Sweet cicely seeds in the St. Joseph Creek floodplain are swollen and almost ripe, but they are still rubbery between my teeth.

At the far end of the bridge, the forest is solid blue with great waterleaf, another clear sign of summer in DuPage County. In Dane County, Wisconsin, it was always the flowering wild geranium that said we’d turned the corner to summer. But geraniums bloom too early here to call it summer. Have I changed, or have the plants? I want to believe the forests operate differently here, but I know I am far too subjective to be reliable if I haven’t written it down, too certain that my sense right now reflects the world as it really is. I’ll put this together when I have more time to walk the trails in Madison. The great waterleaf has another virtue as a seasonal marker: it is strongly ephemeral, at least this year. I will return from a trip in 5 days, on the 30th of the month, to find that the petals have fallen from two-thirds or more of the plants, leaving the sepals tangled in long, capillary hairs.

Wood peewees are singing. So are red-eyed vireos. House wrens are babbling noisily from the backyards adjoining the forest. These are all birds of summer. The great fallen ash along the trail that will bristle with common coral slime mold by late June or early July is spongy to the touch, saturated from the rains we’ve had. Today, almost every fallen, decorticated log is sopping. A tufted titmouse calls. A robin hops around. The Virginia bluebells are yellow, the enemion are yellowing, tipped with the last swelling hard achenes that angle off the receptacle as Buttercup Family fruits do. Broad-leaved wild leek leaves have dissolved away entirely. Their red scapes are arching low over the oak litter. Trout lily leaves are yellowed and limp. Annual bedstraw is flattened to the ground, the nutlets ripe and bristly and as large as BBs.

Slender young mayapple fruits are striving between paired leaves of the larger plants, inclined toward where they will fall in a couple of months if a squirrel doesn’t get them before they fall. A great-crested fly catcher calls, then another red-eyed vireo. I wander to the slope overlooking the ephemeral pond and find a knee-high colony of Hitchcock’s sedge that I have never noticed before. This is a favorite of mine: the perigynium bodies are inscribed from tip to base with scores of very fine, parallel veins; the perigynium beaks are slender and inclined shyly outward; the sheaths are reddish or brownish, somewhere in that color range, and roughened with minute hairs visible through a hand lens and prickly to the tip of the tongue. I sit among the plants for a few minutes and they come up to my chest. The great-crested flycatcher calls again. The sedges and I are surrounded by sugar maple seedlings and the occasional ash. Everyone is growing as confidently as kids in midsummer biking together down the middle of the road, ingesting energy and burning energy, taking it in and spitting it out, unconscious for the moment of how short summer is.

I walk downslope to the ditch that runs into the ephemeral pond. Cursed crowfoot has come into flower. Its yellow petals are a bit shorter than its sepals, its leaves are rounded at the tips like mittens. Along with it is butterweed, tall and abundant in the ditch. The opposite slope is all poison ivy. One plant vines extravagantly, beautifully, architecturally over the top of a fallen log, stems wound around each other and standing on end to peer out over the brush that surrounds them, looking for the next good tree to climb. I work my way between them and come across a solitary narrow-leaved leek tucked against the base of a tree, scape perfectly erect, spathe bumpy with flowers squirming inside, leaves still hanging on, pale green and squeezing the last of what they have left into the flowers before they are gone. (Two days later I’ll find this same species in the East Woods, scapes stout and inflorescences itching to open, leaves entirely gone.) Toothwort capsules are turgid and lumpy with seeds.

Sanicle inflorescences are bristling with stamens. The sedges are healthy and full: Carex grisea stout with clumps of perigynia like tiny rugby balls; Carex hirtifolia hairy and lax, hanging into the trail; Carex rosea forming stiff hummocks. A lush colony of Gray’s sedge is tipped with mace-like fruits where the water runs off between the forest and the neighborhood in heavy rains.

Jumpseed leaves are pricked with red, and the chokecherries are beginning to grow. A mosquito buzzes in my ear, but it does not sting me. Perhaps next week. A house wren is calling from the backyards that adjoin the forest as I walk back toward the bridge over St. Joseph Creek.