July 19, 2026: mid-summer

The robins have given up on the early morning, and once again I’ve managed not to catch them in the act. Each year I wake up on a July morning and there are cardinals singing, not robins, and I can’t tell you when the robins stopped their morning racket. This year I’ve got it down to a two-week window: on June 26, the robins were working noisily in the backyard by 4:00 in the morning; on July 12, I realized at 5:00 a.m. that the cardinals were starting up, but the robins never had. I’ll try to narrow it down a little more next year.

A few notes from the past three weeks:

The morning of June 30, two green-spored parasols are unfurling lushly in an immaculate lawn at the intersection of Grant and Lee. That evening, as I bike home they are completely open, as big around as the husks of flayed grapefruits. By the next morning they’ve been kicked off their stalks and are dessicating belly-up on the grass. I’m sorry not to watch them grow old and putrid in place. I bet they’ll be back again next year.

On the evening of July 3, the trail into Lyman Woods from the hospital parking structure is crowded with ash seedlings. Emerald ash borer, which will do these in before they can reach reproductive age, is in the meantime working its way across the European Union, a fact I learned the day before. A flooded section of trail through Lyman Woods is draped with hog-peanut. Wood nettles are waist high. Leaves on a hispid buttercup are as big as dinner plates. Woodland tick-trefoil is fruiting, floral buds on the Joe-pye weed inflorescences are closed but raised high enough to look me in the eye, blackberry fruits are hard and green, and narrow-leaved wild leek seeds are developing inside green sheaths that, scratched away, reveal the black seed coats. False nettle spikes are erect and full of flowers. White grass tugs at my legs. Poison ivy spills onto the trails. Heal-all is flowering light blue. Beanlike follicles are developing on poke milkweed, slender and elongate and standing erect at the ends of sinuous peduncles. The forest is mosquitoey and saturated, filled with songs of indigo buntings, cicadas, great-crested flycatchers, eastern wood pewees. Everything is lush or rotting. A great big Carex sparganioides in full fruit is leaning across the trail. A red-bellied woodpecker barks and a flicker calls. House wrens noisily occupy the backyards.

Maple Grove is sunny and 80F when I arrive the evening of July 11. Two cicada species are singing full blast, and I resolve to learn their songs as soon as I get home. Tall bellflower is sprawling and gangly, blue flowers emerging from bullet-shaped buds. Bottlebrush grass goes to pieces at a touch. Elderberry flowers are ripening into berries. A common gall midge has laid its eggs in the midribs of some of the jewelweed leaves, and they are swollen and turgid. Common coral slime mold (Ceratiomyxa) sporangia have withdrawn and are visible only in little patches here and there; the little rice grains of white carnival candy slime mold (Arcyria) have emerged in their place. The fallen log where I learned Cribraria several years ago has rotted almost entirely into the ground, only about 6 inches left to go.

Broad-leaved wild leek is on the cusp of anthesis, floral buds white and tensed to open. A week later, the flowers will all be open, fireworks on the forest floor. Upright hedge-parsley is dotted with tiny white flowers. Fowl manna grass spikelets fall by the handful, husks clattering on the leaves. A plumpish, soft mayapple dangles from between the paired leaves, its stalk broken. It will not ripen.

In the last half-hour of my walk, a wood pewee and a great horned owl call. Fireflies twinkle in the shrub layer, waist high and below, reminding me of a night almost 35 years earlier when a friend and I stood temporarily lost on a recreational portage in a waist-high pool of fog in a northern Wisconsin bog, pricked with fireflies, until we were saved by a group of co-counselors singing “hava nagila” to lead us back to camp. Cicadas are still purring as I walk cross the bridge over St. Joseph Creek toward home.

Then the next morning, June 12, Rachel and I canoe Silver Lake at Blackwell Forest Preserve, and water milfoil is in bloom. Fish are everywhere, Chara is brittle and stinking beneath the water’s surface, there are ducks galore. Rachel watches a green heron hunting, then we both watch it fly off. We work our way around the lake. I spend several minutes listening to the contented nibbling sounds of ducks floating and grazing along the shoreline.

Today, I am reminded that even if they are quiet in the mornings, the robins are not done with us. One lost its composure about 10 minutes after the 4:50 cardinals this morning, chittering for about 2 seconds. And at the end of our walk around the neighborhood, Brooklyn and I came across a robin in the middle of the sidewalk, picking at a tightly-rolled woolly bear caterpillar. The robin flew off as we approached. I rolled the caterpillar around gently, but it did not uncoil. I picked it up and pulled at it a bit, and it wriggled its feet just perceptibly and held tight. It appeared to be just fine. I set it in the grass before Brooklyn and I went in.