Category: Uncategorized

Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer?
— from “The Swimmer” by John Cheever

I left the house this morning about 5:30. The moon was brilliant off of Orion’s left shoulder ¹. Venus had just risen in the east, but the glow on the horizon was only the light from the city. There were field crickets calling, no other insects or birds calling. We had a good solid afternoon of rain on Saturday, but little precipitation in the weeks before that, and our neighborhood has mostly browned in the past week. There was a scattering of leaves on the asphalt, a little slipping and rustling under the tires as I biked.

Inside the Arboretum gates, the tree crickets kick in. It’s about 5:45 when I tie up my bike at Parking Lot 8. The moon is bright enough to cast shadows, bright enough to botanize by in some places. I take the trail east, counterclockwise around the edge of the East Woods. This stand of sunflowers has bothered not just me but Janice Sommers and Rich Scott… I’ve written about it twice previously, and in the moonlight and by feel, I still come to the conclusion that this colony could be Helianthus decapetalus or H. strumosus, or a mix of the two. This part of the woods is exceptionally nice and open, grassy and rich with late summer wildflowers. The white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum) has all gone to seed. The trail is lined with spent and brittle stems of lettuce (Lactuca) species, what I have assumed was L. serriola but am now not sure… I’ll have to look more closely on the walk back to my bike this afternoon. Joe-pye weed has largely gone to pieces. There are yellowed stems here and there of Elymus virginicus and Hystrix patula (or Elymus hystrix if you prefer… this is a messy genus), and green tufts of Pensylvania sedge still obvious.

The forest floor is mottled with moonlight and shadows. At the top of the hill, the trail runs along the south edge of a big open field. I notice for the first time how wide the trail is that leads out into it, I believe just for the field crew… it’s as wide as a dirt road. The opening in the woods frames a small Hill’s oak tree, Chicago’s oak oak. I walk out through the field. There are a few small Hill’s oaks and a few white oaks out here, and lots of short stems of flowering Queen Anne’s lace. Were the oaks planted? They’re small, and one of the Hill’s oaks has buds a bit longer and more angular than I think of as typical for the species, at least in our woods. The undersides of the leaves on this individual are also a bit on the hairy side. Any chance this is mixed up with black oak (Quercus velutina)? I’ll have to ask Kurt about this. Walking downhill to the road, feet getting dewy, I start to see the first light of day in the east.

I intersect the road near Parking Lot 8 and pick up the trail going north. A couple of minutes down the trail I notice a great white oak leaning southward on the west side of the trail. The tree is pitched at perhaps 60 degrees, and it’s massive, long and perhaps a meter in diameter, maybe a bit less. In any case, it’s remarkable it doesn’t tear right out of the ground. I walk around it and look to see if it is perhaps propped up against another tree. As far as I can tell it is not. How far do the roots go to hold a tree like this up? Eventually it will fall down, but it may well outlast a lot of other trees in this section of the woods. Back on the trail, I find that the walk pitches downhill much more than I have noticed before. The trees are almost all standing upright, in spite of the slope.

I pass the road again at Parking Lot 11 and get to the section of trail overlooking the ravine that runs east from Big Rock Visitor Station. A squirrel is making a ferocious racket down where the chorus frogs start singing every year. I stand there listening to him for about 10 minutes, and in this time the morning swells up with sunlight. The moon is still casting cool light down from the southwest while the sun is coming in from the east, yellower. As I am standing there, the two come into approximate balance, the amount of light just about the same from both of them, but differing in quality, the moonlight whiter, the sunlight yellower. If I were telling this to someone who had never seen moonlight, I would liken it to the effect you get when you’ve replaced one lightbulb in the room with a cold, unpleasant white fluorescent bulb while the other lamp has a nice warm incandescent bulb in it… but this would not do the moonlight justice. At this moment, as the squirrel is careering around the treetops breaking up the oaks and dropping acorns and branches, I am sorry to see the crisp edges of the shadows from the moonlight begining to give way to the sunlight. Turning, I find the leaves of a Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum racemosum) have become variegated in some places along the trail, yellow and green.

In the woods just east of the Visitor Station, I get my last good view of Sirius through the trees. A thin mist hovers over the prairie to the west as I pass through. Birds start calling somewhere between the frog pond and here: goldfinches, towhees, even, to my surprise, a song sparrow. Haven’t they left by now? The walnuts have lost almost all of their leaves. Milkweed and dogbane leaves are mostly yellow, and many have fallen off. The sugar maples are in some places brilliant yellow, in other places half browned. The indian grass is tall and orangy-yellow. The prairie is as done for the year as the woods. We’ll start this morning collecting biomass from our prairie experiment, as many of the species have moved everything back underground.

This weekend I had a long, good bike ride with my elder son, David, and the view from the top of Frost Hill impressed us both. I head in that direction. I walk up through the Illinois collection past white oaks senescing. By the time I reach the bench at the top of the hill, the sun is cresting. I sit and eat an orange, watch the mist burn off of Meadow Lake. It’s time to plant our garlic. Today I have to turn the corner on a book chapter I’ve been writing about the prairie, what’s happened to the plants in the past year. It hasn’t turned out quite like we thought it would, and I’m curious to see what things will look like a year from now.

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¹ By Orion’s left shoulder I mean the lower, dimmer one, Bellatrix (whose name I always forget), which assume is his left shoulder. Why left? Because I always imagine Orion facing us, though he can of course face whichever direction he likes.

Early morning two weeks ago I was writing in the kitchen. It was three days before the equinox, still dark out. The windows were open. At around 4:15 I realized I was hearing the lisps of songbirds flying overhead, so I stepped outside. The previous night I had had an email from my friend Jay Sturner, who told me he’d heard about 200 thrushes in just over an hour the week before, flying over the house. I’d forgotten about fall migration. The sky was hazy and moonless. Orion was clear in the southeast over our garage, but many of the stars were obscured. The sky above our backyard was filled with bird calls, little songbirds on the move.

This morning outside the research and administration building, the grackles are flocking up. Cedar waxwings are whistling to each other. The honeybees in the Cildren’s Garden are still patrolling for pollen. At the west edge of the Children’s Garden, honeybees foraged in the witchhazel flowers while a drab, fall-colored palm warbler casually took out a moth. The warbler seemed utterly unconcerned about me, looking around in the witchhazel branches for more to eat.

Wednesday night last week I drove west on Butterfield to my elder son’s track meet, going 10 miles an hour in the traffic. Alongside Hidden Lake Forest Preserve, over the sound of traffic and the news, the tree crickets were singing at full volume. They never seem to sing their hearts out, but they never stop. By contrast, I don’t believe I’ve heard a cicada in the neighborhood all week. The last one we saw is sitting on our piano.

Our prairie experiment is riddled with unplanted frost aster, every third plot with one or two gangly, long-limbed plants that we pull out as we walk by. The prairie and our garden at home have turned the corner: the height of blooming is several weeks past, but many species are still flowering. Everything is coloring or browning up. It’s still a month or more before they give up the ghost, but with the temperatures down at night and the garden looking like this, I feel it’s finally fall.

On Saturday I was pulling burning bush from the edge of our yard, herbiciding a mulberry sapling that couldn’t be pulled, and the cicadas were calling. It was 11 a.m., and their song from the treetops was a pulsing, intermittent hum like some part of the human machinery. This could have been the amplified sound of blood coursing through capillaries and run through a distortion pedal. The crickets harmonized higher in tone but lower in the trees and from the shrubs and prairie plants in our yard. It was the cicadas that filled the neighborhood.

The sound of the cicadas the past few days mixes with my impressions of Dr. Lonnie Smith at the Chicago Jazz Festival from Friday night, seated majestically in the middle of the stage behind the Hammond B3. His sounds are still in my ears. Through the legs of the organ I could see the Leslie speaker turning slowly. Smith was wearing a white tunic, white pants, a yellow scarf to the floor, and a yellow turban. The organ sounded as though he were breathing it, notes rich with harmonics, 91 tonewheels spinning inside the machine against their pickups reminiscent of the cicada’s buzzing tymbals. “Play life,” he tells his students. He filled the night air with cascades and explosions and waves. The moon was bright overhead. Throughout the trees in Millennium Park the cicadas were listening, silent, and only the katydids responded.

The Hammond B3 is particularly close to the human voice, breathy and corporeal. When you start a Hammond organ, you feel as though you were firing up a living thing. You hold a starter switch beneath the keyboard until the motor driving the tonewheels comes up to speed, then you flip the power switch on. The tubes warm up slowly, so if you are holding a chord it fades into full volume. Each key generates sound by turning on a mix of nine different tonewheels, each spinning adjacent to an electronic pickup, generating 9 different notes mechanically, analogous to the stridulations and buzzings of a cicada or cricket. The resulting harmonics give the organ a throaty, complex sound. Run through the Leslie, which introduces a high-energy Doppler-effect warble, the organ emits a throbbing, soaring, lifelike sound. In at least one of his interviews, Smith referred to that moment that the Leslie kicks in by saying something to the effect of, “and then Heaven opens up.” I’ve never heard a better description.

But the Hammond organ takes in not just the droning sound of the cicada, nor its harmonics. In the right hands, it evokes a sermon as much as a song. Dr. Lonnie Smith is 75 years old and a master of the instrument. Watching his face, you see him discover what he is playing as he plays it, by turns firing ideas into the world and resting to catch the next wave, or playing out note by note what is coming to him. He possesses, like any artist, a lightning rod tuned to the sounds of his instrument and the skill to translate the pulses and thoughts that run through him into physical stuff. Like a great preacher or lecturer, he absorbs everything he has experienced or read or heard and shapes it for us. He leaves us delighted.

I am writing this four days after seeing him play, thinking over and over what he was doing up there on stage. Perhaps this analogy between the organ and the cicadas has nothing to do with the Hammond B3 or with Dr. Lonnie Smith. It is my effort to hold onto this moment, and perhaps it is no more than that. As I write this, the crickets are wrapping up for the night and the goldfinches are starting up. Two nighthawks appear to be roosting in the pine tree next to our house. Venus is dimming in the east. The cats have come in to eat and sleep. I have a paper to work on, and the boys will be up soon. But my ears are still filled with organ music.

And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands

— T.S. Eliot, Preludes

Last week I drove up to Wild Rose, Wisconsin to attend Boy Scout camp with my older son. The highway out of Downers Grove passes malls and walled corridors past suburban homes, then forest preserves and the state line, and then Milwaukee. North of Milwaukee the landscape opens up into farmland, and I entertained myself watching the bur oaks along the road. Most are in fencerows, but in one or two fields I saw great open-grown trees right in the middle of the planted corn. Why are they there? A fencerow oak I can understand, but what farmer wants to have to work around an oak? Perhaps this is just fondness for trees, or perhaps these were in some ways another man’s oak, untouchable for one reason or another. I suspect my grandpa would have removed such trees, though he loved the peach trees in his backyard and the pines around his pond. At a rest stop, impressive sugar maples grew with American elms. A few miles on, white pines and spruces suddenly appeared in the forest along the roadside. We had crossed the tension zone into the northwoods.

The soils up at camp were pure sand, forested with black and white and red oaks, white pines, red maples, paper birches. Nice secondary growth forests abutted plantations of red pine, planted like stickpins stabbed into the head of a brush. To a boy from the suburbs of Milwaukee, even the common flora of a northern hardwood forest is refreshing: indian pipe and pine drops were in bloom, the spent leaves of Maianthemum canadense and starflower were visible here and there, the understory was peppered with blueberry and huckleberry and wild sarsaparilla, Carex projecta and C. arctata were common. Saponaria officinalis and Berteroa incana and Monarda punctata were weedy along every sandy trail. Ferns were present in abundance: bracken fern, cinnamon fern, royal fern, sensitive fern, Christmas fern, marsh fern, lady fern, Dryopteris carthusiana and D. intermedia. There were clubmosses (Lycopodium digitatum) and reindeer lichen. The forest floor was strewn with oak galls. A black, red and white caterpillar devoured an Asclepias exaltata not far from a red pine that had been excavated by a pileated woodpecker. An ovenbird called from the forest floor.

In the mornings, towhees began singing at around 5 a.m., followed shortly by mourning doves, crows, waxwings, bluejays, wood-peewees. This was not the scout camp of my youth, but enough like it to feel like home. This morning, arriving back at the Arboretum about the same time of the morning, I was greeted by wood-peewees and field sparrows. Between travel and work, I hadn’t been in the East Woods for two months. A least flycatcher called from the frog pond north of the road between P11 and P12. A wood thrush was singing 15 minutes later from the brushy wetland between P8 and P10. Hackelia fruits and the flowers of Joe-pye weed and black snakeroot are everywhere in the woods right now. American bellflower has been blooming most of the summer and is near its end. Phytolacca americana, American pokeweed, is halfway through flowering, and some inflorescences bear from base to tip purple fruits, then green fruits, then the last of their white flowers. Jack-in-the-pulpit fruits are still green. Bur oak acorns are emerging from their caps, not ready yet, but it looks as though this will be a good crop. A couple of giant puffballs are growing hairy along the trail’s edge through the maple collection.

The field west of Big Rock visitor station pooled with fog. Looking eastward into it from the trail through the beech collection, I was reminded of a meadow in Colorado, just off the Continental Divide, where I collected sedges in 2000. I had parked on a roadside and inspected a prodigious bed of pinecone scales, years I presume of work by the resident squirrels, then walked down through this meadow looking for Carex microptera relatives. They aren’t hard to find, but hard to know sometimes when to stop collecting. The meadow seemed to go forever, pinching closed for a moment between pines and then opening back up into a new field. Would there be a new species down here? How about 100 feet further on? All along the way in such meadows I become distracted by Veratrum and lilies and sedges I’m not even working on, lots of things with droopy heads and beautiful black scales (some in the crowd may recognize section Racemosae from the description). You might never need to stop in a meadow like this.

I retrieved my bike and biked the wrong way down the road into work, as I usually do on these early mornings before the Arboretum is open. A thin blanket of mist hovered a couple of feet above the entire field between the tree breeding nursery and Bur Reed Marsh. The suspended mist brought to mind the first lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table

What is it about this unsettling poem that I find comforting? I read it when I was in my early 20s, and I reread it while I was up at camp with David and his troop last week, and my dear friend John Merchant shouted lines from the last stanzas at me when we were running across a frozen lake in Madison in the early 90’s. “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” sounds so different yelled at you across the frozen lake at night when you are still waking up as a human than it does read alone beside your tent by candlelight when you are in your mid 40s and your son and his friends are playing cards at the picnic table across the road, and you can hear him laughing and know that he has gotten this far and is happy, smart, and kind. As I Mr. Prufrock’s life seems to be crushing him from behind, mine is buoying me up this morning and sweeping me through the woods. It hardly seems fair, but art and natural history are what they are, and what a poem is is not what it was when it left the poet’s fingers.

I have neglected to bring my key to the building, so I start writing these notes from the picnic table outside. Alma and P.J. eventually let me in, and I start my day, having arrived by way of the Rocky Mountains and the northwoods and the stacks of Memorial Library, past a colony of DuPage County woodland sunflowers in full bloom.

When I arrive this morning, the wood peewees and indigo buntings are going strong. Mosquitoes are lethargic but persistent. About 5:10 a great crested flycatcher lights in a tree above me and starts screeching. 5:20, the light starts to creep down the trees on the west side of the field by P10. I walk the same path as always, the same way, clockwise round the field to P8. Hog-peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), not visible a week ago, is now bounding over the wild ginger, Impatiens, and Ranunculus hispidus at the southeast corner of the loop trail. One is creeping up a single stem of wild onion (Allium canadense), which is just on the verge of opening. It strikes me as particularly insidious. This is how one gets its start, then suddenly there is a carpet of the stuff bouncing around the understory. The leading stems are downy-pubescent, and I find on putting one under the scope that the hairs are of two lengths, long spreading hairs and shorter, slightly deflexed hairs. There is some variation, but it really seems to be hairs of just two main lengths. Why do such a thing? Ground hairs and guard hairs I thought were a mammalian trick… maybe they do something useful in the plant world as well.

Along the south leg of the trail there are a yellow-throated vireo and wood thrush singing. It seems we’re all the way into summer now. Saturday night, my older son and I made a late-night run to the grocery store for cat food, and the nighthawks were out. I learned nighthawks in 1994, the year I graduated, took ornithology, worked up at the Apostle Islands, came back to Madison and started working as a ranger. My wife Rachel and I have always considered nighthawks to be our bird: they marked the start of all our summers together in Madison, and when I hear that splattery sound for the first time each June I am back there watching the birds darting back and forth high overhead, slurping down insects, perched on top of old factory walls on East Washington, singing us to sleep. Nighthawks tell me summer has officially begun.

Galium circaezans is in bloom along with first flowers of common cinquefoil (Potentilla simplex), the sinuous spathes of green-dragon, flowers of Sanicula odorata. Maianthemum stellatum is going to fruit, and M. racemosum is in flower throughout the woods. I find a few fruits on dying Enemion and on Ranunculus quinquefolia. There is moonseed along the trail, climbing up the sunflowers. Two weeks ago I realized that I didn’t understand the distinction between Helianthus strumosus and H. divaricatus. After looking at the specimens and talking with Jerry Wilhelm about this, I see that we’d have to call much of what’s in the East Woods H. divaricatus. Today, walking through, I think I am seeing both, and a gradation between the two. This will take some looking to get clear in my head.

On the walk out, I pass through an area where the red oak catkins carpet the trail. I come again through the woods where the Virginia bluebells are so thick, and I realize what is so odd about this area. It is as open as the woods I kicked around in when we lived in Leeds in 2004, where there was no shrub layer that I can remember and the forest was more parklike. It’s a strange area, now filled with bright green touch-me-not. It is nice today, this openness.

My family and I were in Door County, Wisconsin this weekend. I was leading a couple of field trips at the Ridges Sanctuary Festival of Nature, and I hadn’t really botanized in northern Wisconsin for about 10 years. Spring peepers are still going strong up there, and the woods are dripping with black throated green warblers. The trees are about as far along as ours, but the understory is perhaps 2 weeks behind us, especially on the east side of the peninsula, which is on Lake Michigan and much colder than I had realized compared to the west side, which abuts Green Bay. Several of the northern wildflowers were in bloom, things I haven’t typically seen flowering in my summer visits north: gaywings, labrador-tea, goldthread, arctic primrose, dwarf lake iris (everywhere! a magnificent species that is like a weed up there), floral buds on pitcher plant and starry Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum stellatum). The sedges were not far along. Carex leptalea, C. stricta, and C. aquatilis were only in flower. There were early fruits developing on Carex arctata, C. debilis, C. viridula (I am not 100% sure on this species, but pretty sure), C. eburnea, and almost mature fruits on a few species: Carex pedunculata, what I believe was C. peckii, and C. castanea along the bike trail, where it was fairly exposed. Carex comosa wasn’t even showing flowers. By contrast, the C. eburnea in our front garden has nut-hard achenes and darkened perigynia, and our C. sprengelii is starting to shed fruits.

On returning to the Arboretum yesterday, I found spittlebugs on Lactuca, Rumex crispus, some Asteraceae not yet in flower. This morning I realize they are everywhere: on Canada goldenrod and Symphyotrichum not yet in bloom, on yellow sweet-clover (Melilotus officinalis) in flower, on basal leaves of Queen Anne’s lace. I’ve surely missed them on other species. Erigeron is in bloom, along with Medicago lupulina and the common oldfield clovers, Trifolium pratense and T. repens. Maianthemum racemosum is in full bloom. Inflorescence bracts have started opening on Allium canadense, the wild onion that lines the roads through the East Woods. The sedges of section Ovales are in fruit (at least Carex molesta and C. normalis, and probably others that I am not seeing). White bear sedge (Carex albursina) culms are arched over with ripe achenes. Uvularia grandiflora is in fruit, Virginia bluebells are yellowing and dying back. The leaves are fully out on the trees.

At 6:30 the east end of the woods is dominated by indigo bunting, red-eyed vireo, eastern wood peewee and robins. A bluejay calls and a common yellowthroat sings from the field. By 6:45 the sun is relatively high, but it’s still dark under the maples. Thalictrum dioicum and Osmorhiza claytonii fruits are ripening. Thalictrum thalictroides fruits are almost ripe, and cleavers (Galium aparine) has fallen to the ground laden with hard, ripe, bristly achenes. I bite one, hoping that it’s spicy — it’s not. Why did I think it would be? At 7:00 a pack of coyotes yips and howls from the east prairie. I am on the hilltop overlooking the ephemeral pond that was full of chorus frogs six weeks ago. The coyotes stop after 30 seconds. I wish I’d been there to see what got them riled up. A great crested flycatcher and red-bellied woodpecker start calling. Mosquitos are everywhere, but not quite as bad as last week, and much better up here on the hilltop than down in the woods. I hear what sounds like the call note of a black-billed cuckoo… I follow it but do not find it, and I’m not sure.

I walk down toward the Big Rock Visitor Station and up along the Heritage Trail. Hop hornbeam fruits are the length of squirrels’ toes, soft and just forming. Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) is fruiting, capsule soft and hairy, enclosing a few translucent ovules. Notchbract waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum) is in full flower throughout the woods, and it looks beautiful. Many sedges are ripening or almost dropping their perigynia: Carex rosea, C. sparganioides, C. normalis, C. hirtifolia, C. grisea, C. cephaloidea, C. jamesii. I have my eyes on the ground, scanning for sedges and daydreaming, when a deer bolts off to my left. I look up. I haven’t been paying attention. This section of the woods atop the moraine, looking down over the kettle ponds, is magnificent: oaks opening onto wetland to the south, an open field to the north, the perfect balance between shade and sun. The shallow pond down below, which I swear I walked through as a dry depression this winter— I think I can’t be right on this — is covered with duckweed. Something moves on the surface, then a frog calls. I follow it and wait. It calls once more but I don’t find it, and after several minutes I let it be.

I ride out the service road that runs along Hidden Lake. Awful dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) is blooming. Back at the visitor center, I finish writing up my notes and wait for the cafe to open. A green frog calls, and now that I listen to it, I think this is what I was hearing also up at the pond along the heritage trail. Plant scraps are out of my pocket and on the table in front of me. The sun is bright, mowers are going, walkers are coming into the Arboretum. I feel exactly as I did when I was a kid and it was summer, and I had the morning to myself, and I’d look at the clouds and decide it was a good day to bike down to the dirty river by our house and horse around. The cafe is open now. I’ll get a coffee, read through these notes, and get back to oaks.

It was raining when I arrived this morning. I locked up at Parking Lot 11 and walked toward the Virginia bluebells. The forest floor there is a bed of Impatiens now, upslope and down. In the cloudy dawn, the East Woods there is impressively open between the trees. Robins were chuckling and water was running alongside the trail. Prenanthes alba is in full bloom, along with Maianthemum racemosum. The leaves are fully out on almost all the trees now, but still soft.

The rain picked up. I walked into the spruce plot. Sensitive fern is opening up, fronds a bit larger than my hand. A chipping sparrow was singing overhead. A bit further on, just west of the spruce plot, a wood thrush was singing. Why have I been hearing the wood thrush in this particular spot of the woods this spring? At the road crossing to Parking Lot 8, the woodland sunflower is about knee-high. This particular site Jason Sturner collected from in 2006, and it was determined as Helianthus decapetalus. I would be inclined to call everything I see here this morning Helianthus strumosus. Taking a look at the two in the herbarium, and at Jason’s 2006 specimen, the leaf traits (petiole length, pubescence on the underside of the leaf, toothing on the margins) appear to me to intergrade, and we don’t have flowers yet to distinguish the two. Wilhelm and Rereicha’s 2017 book doesn’t recognize H. decapetalus from DuPage County, either. I’ll leave the 2006 specimen for Jerry to look at if he is in today.

On the walk out, I hear a scarlet tanager again, the same place where I heard him last week. There was a beautiful scarlet tanager in the woods at Greene Valley Forest Preserve Saturday evening at around 6 p.m., and a blue-winged warbler calling from the edge of the field. Monday as I got off the train in downtown Downers Grove at 5:30, there was a field cricket calling from the tracks. It seems so early in the year.

When I arrive just before 5:00 this morning, it is almost 70 degrees F, slightly cloudy, and the birds are singing: red-wing blackbirds, common yellowthroat, wood thrush, robins. I lock up at Parking Lot 10. Mosquitoes are abundant but a little lethargic. By 5:00 a.m I can hear field sparrows, chipping sparrows, towhees, eastern wood peewees, tree swallows, and what sounds to me to be a blue-winged warbler to the northwest in the field edge. I take my cue from that and leave my pack under the bench to walk north along the trail toward Big Rock Visitor Station.

I don’t end up finding the blue-winged warbler, if there was one (it’s a hard call to get wrong, but a bit soft, and what I heard was only the tail end… I reserve judgment for today), but the great-crested flycatchers begin soon and sound warlike all during my walk. By the time it is light enough to see clearly in the understory, blue-gray gnatcatchers and house wrens and chickadees are calling everywhere. It feels like summer. The touch-me-not cotyledons are yellow, Carex albursina is in full fruit. Sweet cicely (Osmorhiza claytonii) and Sanicula odorata (the old S. gregaria) are in bloom. In the spruce plot, a veery and a ruby-crowned kinglet are calling. Spores are developing on the undersides of the Dryopteris carthusiana fronds. A bumblebee is foraging in the Virginia waterleaf flowers.

I work my way around the trail to Parking Lot 8. Camassia are still in outstanding bloom, perhaps the most beautiful display I’ve seen since I started working here in 2004. Carex cephalophora, Carex radiata and Carex rosea fruits are developing, and Carex tenera is in first flower. I worry a bit about the sedge class I’m teaching five weeks from today… will the sedges be past by then? But I think I worry about this every year, and every year that I teach the class, it works out fine. Further east on the trail, the sweet-scented but pernicious lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis) is in bloom. I see only one plant, and I know from experience that there’s no sense in trying to pull it: it will need a concentrated effort or herbicide to be rid of this. In a wet depression of poison-ivy and Ranunculus hispidus just south of the trail, Carex sparganioides and C. grisea are in bloom. A red-eyed vireo calls.

I reach the top of the hill overlooking the field near Parking Lot 10, near where I parked my bike. I’ve been thinking this morning about something that the ethereal Simone Weil wrote. She poses a sort of thought experiment in one of her essays, asking whether it is really people’s personality or essence that makes them important. Imagine, she asks, that we were to do some violence to a person that did not change his or her personality: would we think this was alright, simply because we hadn’t wounded the personality? The answer she arrives at (and I hope we all do) is “no.” What matters is the whole person, everything about him or her. I sit on a bench, and the mosquitoes are going to town on my arms and forehead. The sun is almost showing over the trees. Rubus is in bloom, Smilax is almost there, and the fruits on the yellow, battered Floerkea seem, miraculously, to still be ripening, drawing every resource they can from their withering parents to get all the way to germination time several months hence.

As I am walking to my bike, I hear a few “chick-burr” calls and then the unmistakable gravelly, robin-like song of a scarlet tanager. On the bike ride out, what I take to be a barred owl flies across my path (perhaps it is a great-horned owl, but it seems far too rounded for that). It’s still almost unfathomable to me that I get to be in the field hearing individual birds, finding individual trees, each with its own history. What first excited me about learning to recognize plants is that suddenly, knowing a species by name, I could recognize where its individuals like to live. “Names,” Richard Feynman tells us, “don’t constitute knowledge,” but plants, like people, are easier to get to know if you know their names. With sedges, I fell in love with all the funny places they prefer to grow. With systematics, I still thrill at the thought that each specimen in our herbarium, each DNA sequence, every data point, represents one tip of a phenomenally rich tree of life. We are always being asked why what we are studying matters, and frankly I study the things I do for few of the reasons we typically list: not because of ecosystem services, or their economic value, or how understanding This Particular Taxon will shed light on This General Question. From these secondary values, it may turn out that every individual is replaceable. I study them because I really like all these individuals, the individual oaks and sedges and flies and bumblebees and owls and tanagers and ovenbirds and ants. Not so much the mosquitoes, but the rest of them.

The morning is cloudy, ca. 55 degrees at 5:00. When I arrive, red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, robins, and a common yellowthroat are singing from the wetland next to Finley and I-88. I lock up at Parking Lot 10 and hear a towhee, a chipping sparrow, a house wren. For a moment I think I hear a chorus frog, but I suspect it’s in my imagination only. Have twice wrongly declared that the chorus frogs seem to be done for the year, I’m wary. Last night they were singing beautifully along Park Street at about 8 p.m., and last week they were raising a ruckus out by Ware Field. It may be that chorus frogs just switch to singing later in the day when mating season is past. I’ll make no more declarations today.

I recognize a depression by the trail’s edge first by the mat of yellowing false mermaid in a pool of swamp buttercup (Ranunculus hispidus). There is a patch of wild ginger, one of geranium, scattered Solomon’s plume (Maianthemum racemosum). A mosquito lands on my cheek. A field sparrow has just started singing. It’s 5:20.

South of the trail a little further on is a sea of trout lily. The carrion-flower is in bloom. I just started noticing Joe-pye weed this week, about thigh-high. Further in, a light-green patch of lady fern (Athyrium filix-femina) is full size, and nearby is a clone of Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica), a nearly perfect circle about 1.5 m in diameter, nearly the same color as the lady fern (remember that I am color-blind, so take this for what it is worth), exceptionally wispy in texture. There are a couple of little advance units moving out from the edge into the woods. Why has this conspicuous colony formed here and not elsewhere? There seems to be no difference in topography, no difference in shade or anything else. I presume the sedge just got here first.

It’s almost 5:30. Chickadees are singing from a few directions, and I hear a tree swallow in the field between the trail and the Arboretum drive. Five minutes later, a phoebe starts calling. Jack-in-the-pulpit fruits are beginning to develop. There is a stand of woodland sunflower about knee-high. Just past them there is a lower wet area. A few trout-lilies are still in bloom here, while most of the rest have gone to fruit; I noticed a few in flower in the lawn out by the daffodils on the west side last night, as well. A patch of Carex hirtifolia is well behind the rest of its colleagues, prominently staminate. An ovenbird calls from a honeysuckle thicket about 30 feet away. It’s my first of the year. I listen for a bit to make sure it’s not just wishful thinking, and there he is again. I walk to Parking Lot 10 past a flowering Carex grisea, debate taking the trail toward the spruces to see if the thrush is singing again this morning, but decide in the end to walk through the oak collection.

It’s nearly 6:00 and the woods are bright, every bird waking up. A blue-gray gnatcatcher is picking at the catkins in one of the giant, spontaneous white oaks at the entrance to the oak collection. I think I hear a yellow warbler twice, then I don’t hear him again and I don’t see him either. I don’t think it could have been anything else, but I’m not certain. The oaks are mostly leafing out. Numbering among the few exceptions are a few little southern trees whose marcescence was so conspicuous this past winter. They are a couple of blackjack oaks and a couple of post oaks, and their leaves are still hardly bigger than the first segment of my thumb. These are southern oaks: why aren’t they leafing out early? I’m going to have to ask Christy Rollinson and Bob Fahey about this.

In the marsh, the Carex lacustris perigynia are well along. There are more fruits than I expect: in a ca. 2m x 2m patch right by the boardwalk, I count 23 fruiting culms. I am counting quickly and just leaning over the railing, so likely my count is off by a few, but typically I don’t find more than a few fruiting individuals in an entire colony of this species. On the north side of the boardwalk, Carex stipata and Cardamine bulbosa are flowering. A common yellowthroat calls from the edge of the wetland, and the red-winged blackbirds are chasing around the treetops. At west end of the boardwalk, Osmorhiza claytonii is in flower, the first I’ve seen. The plants in the woods haven’t flowered yet that I’ve noticed today.

It’s 6:30, and I’m now almost as far from my bike as I could be. I truck down the trail only to be stopped in my tracks by an exceptional stand of Camassia scilloides. The first plants are in flower, and Cindy Crosby reports the first flowers this week. There are more to come. Further on in the marsh, Ranunculus flabellaris is flowering, and foliage of Cicuta and Plantago is several inches out of the water. On the north trail leading back toward Big Rock Visitor station, Viburnum prunifolium is blooming. Black-throated green warblers and wrens are singing here and there. By the time I cross the bridge, it’s 7:15. On the ride into work, there are geraniums in abundance along the roadside, Prunus americana in bloom, and some little warbler with white tail patches that dives into the shrubs and refuses to come out again. Birds.

When I arrived this morning, the sun was just close enough to the horizon that I could ride the road without a light on, but slowly. Redwing blackbirds and robins were singing. By 5:20, it was light enough to botanize. Wrens were singing from the opening at the east end of the ravine that runs along the south edge of the woodlnad trail. A white throated sparrow had started up, and a field sparrow called from down near the east prairie.

The ravine that runs out toward the east along the south end edge of the woodland trail opens out at its east end into a low green opening, flat. I have never explored this ravine, so I headed down into it. The south-facing slope was a carpet of wild ginger, with clumps of Carex jamesii that I believe came into flower just in the past week and is already beginning to fruit. This is a unispicate sedge, an important Carex lineage of which we don’t have many species in our area, and perhaps they simply go more quickly from flower to fruit than I had realized. Carex blanda was in fruit as well. The flat opening I have visited before, but only its edge, and from the south edge. It is much like I had seen from that side: a carpet of false mermaid, now all sickly yellow and matted down with fruits well developed, flowering swamp buttercup, and Prenanthes alba and Smilax beginning to bloom. Cleavers (Galium aparine) is fully extended and in fruit, sprawling against fallen logs. To my surprise there was a labelled black walnut in there, quite large. Was there previously a trail down there or some interpretive stop? I’ll have to ask. I wandered around a bit and then headed back up to the trail.

The sun was coming in through the East Prairie. I headed around the woodland trail toward the Big Rock shortcut, and decided to take a shortcut myself up through the Rubus and Rosa brambles. Everything is coming along nicely, not a lot new going on in the world of flowers. I came across a stand of fowl mannagrass (Glyceria) that I had never noticed, a good sized patch of it. How do I miss these things? It’s not so far off the trail that I have a good excuse. In the epheral pool beside it was a nice stand of Carex tribuloides, one of my all-time favorites, but not yet in flower. I reached my bike and heard a yellow warbler calling from the wetland. It had been a nice walk, not a lot new to report. I figured I would get in, write a short note, and get on to a morning meeting I have today at Chicago Botanic Garden.

As I was heading back to the research building, a warbler was calling from a tree high overhead. The sun was illuminating the topmost boughs of the trees surrounding the fields west of Big Rock Visitor Station. Warblers often get active at this time, when they are first warming up for the day, but they are also usually so high in the trees that I can’t see them well. I stopped to try to find him. He was singing loud enough, and I could pinpoint him in one tree for several songs, then moving over to another. I couldn’t think of what the song was… perhaps just the call of a yellow-rumped warbler? Aside from the black-throated green I heard last week and the yellow warbler I heard this morning, and perhaps some blue-grey gnatcatchers—I’m increasingly doubting any gnatcatchers I think I’ve been hearing this spring as just wishful thinking—the yellow rumps are all I’ve seen this season. Perhaps that was what it was. I turned my bike and started to head out.

At that moment, I heard from the north side of the road the wild monkey call of what I at first thought was a northern flicker, but immediately suspected was far too loud. Pileated woodpecker? I turned to watch. A big black bird swooped off further into the woods. There was no other choice: the bird was almost crow sized, though I couldn’t see anything but black, and it was definitely the woodpecker I had heard. I kept my eyes on the tree he had landed in and biked up to where I could see more clearly. I leaned my bike against a tree and started walking up the southwest-facing slope through the savanna at the edge of the woods, overlooking the unnamed kettle pond wedged between the road and the heritage trail. The woodpecker flew further into the woods, and I lost sight of him. I walked through a stand of shooting star in bloom and heard him hammering. I looked up and around, trying for several minutes to find him. The sound of a pileated woodpecker drumming or drilling is, like everything else about him, very much like a downy or hairy or red-bellied woodpecker, but much bigger. I couldn’t place the sound, which reflected off the trees all around. I had a great view of the trees around and didn’t really think I had lost him, but I couldn’t figure out where he had gone.

Then suddenly I caught sight of him on a downed log that had fallen perpendicular to the trail. “Excavating” inadequately describes what he was doing. He was tearing into the tree, woodchips flying, adjusting back and forth in abrupt little quanta of movement, drilling his way precisely in toward something he dearly wanted and knew was in there. How could he know from a distance there would be food in there? And yet he must have. He hammered at the wood for 5 seconds, turned his head to look at what he was doing, adjusted, hammered away again, never stopping. He was quiet for a few moments, dipping his long bill into and out of the hole he had been making, then drilling again. When he was eating, I know that it must have been silent except for the sound of his bill against rotten wood, but as I recall it now, it’s as though the drilling never stop.

After about 5 minutes at a distance of at least 30 feet, I started walking very slowly toward him. I tried to time my steps to coincide with when he was buried in his work, up to his eyeballs in wood, but he was looking everywhere at once. What vigilance! If I were to try to do this, I would get nothing done, yet he was somehow wholly focused on what he was doing while simultaneously keeping his eyes on the entire woods at once. How is this possible? He seemed not to be overly concerned about me as I inched my way closer. I got to within about 18 feet. He was throwing everything he had into this, as though he were digging to save his life. The crest on his head and his neck muscles and his bill and his straight back were aimed only at the task of opening the log and getting the goods out. How was there any energy left to keep even his heart running? I wondered briefly what he might do if I got too close. I have no doubt about what a creature like that could do to a person’s skull.

A woodpecker on the bole of a tree uses its tail for stability. So, it turns out, does a pileated woodpecker on a rotten log. He dipped in and out dozens of times while I watched him, made numerous precision turns here and there, ate his fill. Then he raised his head and seemed to consider his situation for a moment. Perhaps it was half a second… perhaps it was 5 seconds. He flew off to a nearby tree and rested for a moment, then he started to work on that tree, drumming and pounding. I don’t know if I had perturbed him, but I wasn’t too concerned about it. A bird like that won’t wait long after I’m gone to come back and finish what he’s started.

I walked to the log and found to my surprise not one hole but two. I believe he made both, and in the course of the roughly 10 to 20 minutes I had been watching him. One was circular hole about one inch diameter. To its left was a hole about 2 inches long and 3/4 inch wide. Both were about an inch or so deep, burrowed into rotted wood. Again I wondered what had brought him to this section of this particular log today. It did not differ obviously in color or texture from the rest of the log, at least not to me. But I am not a woodpecker, just as he is not a plant systematist. He had bet right. Looking inside the larger hole, I saw one ant hobbling around, aimlessly. Have you ever seen an ant hobble? or move aimlessly? Neither have I, except when it is injured, and this one appeared dazed, the lone survivor of a thoroughly unexpected attack. Ants are remarkable social creatures, but I suspect that ants don’t have the intellectual wherewithal or social infrastructure to record these kinds of catastrophes and communicate them to others. Presumably, no ant has grown up hearing stories of a flood that devoured the world, of hordes of locusts that destroyed ancestors’ crops, of the plague. If there were such stories in ant lore, this lone survivor’s tale might well impact the arrangement and organization of colonies 1000 years hence.

Of course I know the ant I was watching certainly was not the lone survivor of the woodpecker, but I can’t help thinking these things. The ants’ misery aside, I walked out through the shooting stars thoroughly buoyed. It wasn’t yet 6:30, the trees on the far side of the field just illuminated on their upper halves, and I had the whole day ahead of me. Field sparrows and house wrens were singing. On the ride back to the office, I found bladder-nut (Staphylea trifolia) in bloom. I arrived, ate my breakfast and sat down to write. I need to leave momentarily for Chicago Botanic Garden, where I’ll spend the morning talking about how to mine oak genomic data for molecular markers that we may use for the next several years to tease apart evolutionary relationships from patterns of gene flow among white oaks and their relatives. One of them may be the very tree the pileated woodpecker is perched in right now, or, more likely, working on.