Thursday morning, 10 members of our lab group converged on Warren Woods Ecological Field Station in Berrien County, Michigan for our fourth collecting trip. Over the past year and half, we’ve been collecting herbarium specimens for the field station and our own herbarium to document the flora of the site and build up a teaching collection. WWEFS has the sort of bottomland forest that, even if it’s been cut over, still yields something interesting on every visit. The sandy soils on the ridges are forested with beeches and oaks, beechdrops and dwarf ginseng. The slopes are sedgy and ferny. The floodplain is filled with silt that has run down the slope and that pulls at your boots after big rains, but sand is still exposed in the bottom of stream flowing through. Ashes and elms grow in the bottomland with paw paws, fountains of sedges, skunk cabbage. The fallen logs are mossy, and many are sodden and host diverse gardens of grasses and ferns and forbs.

As we collected, a female ebony jewelwing–Calopteryx maculata, the genus name coming from the Greek for “beautiful” and “wing”–flew a slow flap-pause, flap-pause bouncing flight that seemed choreographed in part to showcase its white-tipped black wings. This damselfly species is spectacular and, in my experience, only and almost always in forests of just this kind. Several times I have seen it flying through a forest I was in for the first time just before I found a wet depression or a river. When we lived in southern France for a semester, I would bike the back way to work, sometimes following a creek through a sandy woods. There, too, I would see a Calopteryx looping by, presumably a different species. The ebony jewelwing is an icon of these river-bottom forests I love best.

Red-eyed vireos sang incessantly. Mayapples fruits were unripe, but most had been chewed off or simply fell early. Rain of the previous week brought out jelly fungus running the length of downed logs and a red raspberry slime mold exuding thick cytoplasm. Carex prasina and C. laevivaginata inflorescences had shattered; Carex grayi inflorescences were full. Narrow-leaved wild leeks were flowering. We collected what we could find in flower and washed the muddiest sedge roots in the shallow-running river.

We lunched indoors, then we walked out to a wet meadow along the road where water was standing and poison ivy grew everywhere. Marsh pea flowered alongside the gravel road. I waded into the water and came out with a rush, returned for a Carex vulpinoidea, went back in for three big flowering dogbane plants. We pressed them and then got more from along the road: sassafras, slippery elm, a couple of ashes, another sedge (Carex cristatella). A tree frog called as we pressed. I walked back to the car to get the pruning shears, and a green frog called from the marsh, like the sound of a plucked cello string. We drove home in late afternoon, past the flocks of billboards for lawyers (“Top dog gets you top dollar!”), who must make their money on traffic just like this. It took us about twice as long to get home as it had taken to get there.

Friday morning, the first robin of the day babbled noisily in our backyard at 3:00 and then was silent. By 3:20, a few robins were singing in other yards, and by about 3:30 they were going in full force everywhere. The morning traffic started up on Fairview Avenue around 4:00. At 4:50, a cardinal whistled in the tree outside our window. A minute later, a mourning dove sang. Two minutes later, a second cardinal. I wondered whether we might be nearing the late-summer pivot point, when morning robins in our neighborhood will give way to morning cardinals, but it’s still too early. Give them a few more weeks. Everyone quieted down then. At 5:00, our neighbor’s sprinkler went on.[1]

I read and wrote for a bit, walked Brooklyn, had breakfast with my son, then biked into work. I locked up at Big Rock Visitor Station. Silvery burs were forming on the branch tips of licorice bedstraw, and green burs the size of tiny sweat bees were loose in the inflorescences of the sanicles. Lopseed spikes were flowering from the bases upward, many wearing a single ruff of flowers at the waist. The lower flowers were reflexed and ripening to pale fruit. Down the trail, black hairy sweet cicely fruits were hardening up. Enchanter’s nightshade were in full bloom: tiny, white, four-petaled flowers with plump inferior ovaries blew like trumpets on the spikes. Bottlebrush grass spikelets stood perpendicular to the stem but still hinged at the base and mobile, dribbling anthers from between the scales.

Rain was threatening. The mosquitoes were making pests of themselves. They buzzed in my ear and all around my face, balled up on my neck as I slapped them. Inflorescences on joe-pye weed were bunched as tight as cauliflower florets. Short’s asters two months from flowering were chest high. Leaf miners had carved trails through the jewelweed leaves. Solomon’s plume bore tough berries the size of BBs. A wood pewee sang, and a red-eyed vireo continued singing, as it’s been doing and will continue to do all summer long.

There is an impressive patch of broad-leaved plantain at the intersection of the Woodland Trail loop going counterclockwise toward the east and the return loop from the north. They must be getting everything they need in this weather: their leaves were almost as big as frisbees, and their flowering spikes were knee-high. Beside them, the first flowers were forming on pale jewelweed, self-pollinated fruits turgid and lumpy beneath. The Canada wild onions were tipped with papery-sheathed bulblets that detached easily. Collecting a handful was like gleaning tiny onions. The narrow-leaved wild leeks were already setting seed, perhaps a full two weeks ahead of the Berrien County leeks we had seen the previous day. The seeds were enclosed tightly in a fleshy knot at the tip of the spathe: scratch the flesh, and the black seed coats shone through the wound. The crowns of yellowing rue anemone leaves formed splashes of light in the understory. Woodland tick-trefoil was flowering.

A flicker called. A light rain pattered against the canopy. Red-eyed vireo and indigo bunting sang. Hog-peanut twined along the trail over hackberry seedlings, asters, bottlebrush grasses. The wind picked up, and as I walked further east, it dropped down to meet me, cool and moist on my face, pushing the mosquitoes away temporarily. There’s been a lot of cutting in this forest in the past year, and the outcome is nice right now: beneath the oaks grows a thick lawn of zigzag goldenrod, joe-pye weed, Short’s aster, a goldenrod whose name I never remember, apices of twining hog-peanut, ash seedlings, daisy fleabane. Most of the mayapple fruits were nipped off or fallen, the unripe fruits perhaps pilfered by squirrels. Though I’ve never seen an animal take one.

Wild ginger seeds buried inside the ripened ovaries have darkened to a deep chestnut brown. A bed of clearweed grew soft and glassy on the naked soil. Rubbery fruits about the length of rice grains and half as thick were forming on the honeworts. A colony of 100 or more pokeweed plants at the east end of the Woodland Trail loop, ranging from belly-height to roughly seven feet, were sprouting spikes of small, white flowers.

The mosquitoes became incessant, crawling in my ears and nose and buzzing around my eyes. I picked up my pace. A house wren called from the field beneath the ComEd lines. A white-breasted nuthatch sang. Ahead of me, a man was sitting on a bench, conducting business quietly on his phone. He was wearing loafers with no socks, and I thought of the mosquitoes that must be feasting on his ankles, but I didn’t want to stare. He appeared unperturbed. He stood and walked slowly behind me as I walked past the bench, still talking quietly. I passed a colony of pale jewelweed, then a patch of Agaricus mushrooms that had opened to a diameter of about six inches, with thick caps that split along the edges as they’ve grown, dark gills beneath, a short, distinct ring around the stipe. One patch of two or three caps was decomposing lushly, smelling like death.

Twenty feet behind me, I heard the man in the loafers raise his voice to ask a question that sounded rhetorical. Then I smelled something rotting again and stopped to look for it. Thirdy seconds passed as I searched, standing still. The man passed me, walking slowly and perfectly erect, a slight lift at each step, almost floating along the trail. His hand was on his head as though he were caught mid-thought. His call was over, his lips were slightly parted, and he was scanning the woods as though he had never seen this kind of place before, or perhaps as though he sensed he knew it and was just trying to place it. Yet he also had the look of someone who is utterly at home here, and perhaps everywhere. He was in no hurry. I admired his focus and his cool, but I could not tell: was he here, or was he a thousand miles away, talking through a design or a plan or closing a deal, still asking questions? The mosquitoes calmed down and the rain completed. I retrieved my bike and went into work.

That night at 8:30, the first cicada I’ve noticed this year sang a long, pulsing song from the far end of our block just as the lightning bugs were coming out. Saturday evening, Rachel came home after a month out east. We walked Brooklyn and worked in the yard. Rachel pulled the garlic. The bulbs are the size of racquetballs. Glade mallow has taken over the rain garden, and it is magnificent.

Note: [1] This bird sequence actually combines Friday and Saturday mornings. But the sequence is general enough that it may well have happened on Friday as well, and I just missed part of it.