Category: Natural History

We were sitting on the sauna porch yesterday evening, cooling off between saunas, and the woods were alive with birds: redstarts, chickadees, ruby throated kinglets, black and white warblers, phoebes, golden-winged warblers, yellowthroats. Many were feeding low in the understory and on the ground, well within view even without binoculars. It was a very lively time of day in a quiet and calming sort of way.

Many of these birds were in the egg a month ago and have only been out in the world for a couple of weeks. They are hungry, growing, building muscle and putting on the necessary fat to take them on their first migration in a couple of months. They were extremely active, too, like human toddlers, and chatting constantly.

Now that they are out of the nest and able to manage to catch bugs on their own, it’s difficult to tell if families hang together. Perhaps the chattering is a way to keep in touch with parents and sibs. Or maybe at this stage of their life “family is history” and the chattering serves to keep a larger, mixed flock together – a survival strategy at a community, rather than family, level.

There are many more birds in the woods than just a month ago. I suspect the avian population has more than doubled, perhaps tripled. And though the evening chattering has increased, there has been a significant drop in the morning bird-song. Males no longer feel the impulse to seek mates or defend territory.

Between morning song and youthful evening chattering, there was an intermezzo of a couple of weeks duration in which the young of each species [with their own distinctive call] had fledged and were incessantly and insistently squawking as they followed parents around demanding to be fed. I found myself musing whether adult birds at this point experience stress and feel harried or are simply doing what comes naturally, responding to several aggressively demanding fledglings at once all day long.

Between the “morning song” and “fledgling demanding” periods there was another movement in the seasonal symphony, but you had to listen intently and be close enough to a nest. The nestlings usually sit quietly in their gradually shrinking piece of real estate made of twigs, grasses and potpourri; however, when a parent approaches the nest a chorus of soft squeaking and chittering erupts in anticipation of a bug or worm in their gullet. The parent deposits its harvest and departs within a couple of seconds, after which the chorus would sink into silence again.  During this movement the adults are too busy to contribute their voices to the choir.

Each species lends it’s voice to each movement of the symphony – morning song, nest chitter, fledgling squawk and mixed-flock chip – as the season progresses. Adult and young within each species has a different voice – and each changes as the year progresses.  All eastern phoebe fledglings sing their time-specific part together while adult phoebes sing theirs in corresponding time-specific counterpoint. So it goes with all the other species. It is a symphony that unfolds year after year, as intricate and glorious as those crafted by humans, if only we listen.

And there is a score of sorts.  It’s a score beyond humankind’s capacity to either plan or execute. Nevertheless our species has the capacity to alter and even destroy the symphony. We have already eliminated a couple of voices.  It’s called species extinction. We’ve certainly altered the mix of voices through habitat destruction.

The above puts me in mind of Borland’s cheerier entry for yesterday:

July is April’s hope, May’s promise and June’s growth pushing towards completion. July is mid-Summer, a season in itself. The bee and the ant now put man to shame as a sluggard. The quiet chlorophyll in the leaf makes man’s fissioned atom a puny force. The silent urgency of root and flower and leaf are manifest now, in mid-July, the power and the glory of the green earth itself.

A melodious, red-hearted song greeted me this morning on my saunter down the driveway to unlock the gate. It was a rose-breasted grosbeak at the tippity-top of a bare aspen. He was occupying a prized piece of real estate that grosbeaks often claim, especially this time of year, to announce his sexual prowess to prospective mates as well as his title to the acreage necessary to raise a family.

Below its black head, the grosbeak sports a large, red, inverted triangle on a white chest. The contrast of black, red and white geometry catches the eye immediately. Its song is a melodious warble similar to, but more musical than, a robin’s. It’s back and wings are also black with white and red highlights, perhaps making this bird the handsomest dandy of our neighborhood. The red-breasted grosbeak on a high perch is a visual and auditory harbinger of summer.

Sitting in the sun this morning it was the warm, red heart of spring. Other birds were certainly whistling and chattering their own greetings to the warmth of morning after a frosty night, but the grosbeak’s perch, color and rolling melody was like a drum major appearing at the end of the block on the Fourth of July just before the band rounds the corner. You can hear and feel the excitement of the seasonal explosion about to come.

I take this walk first thing every morning when I’m here. It’s a bit of a detour as I make my way between the hut and the shack, both one room cabins. The hut is a six-sided log cabin with a peaked roof. Years ago as we were batting around names to distinguish the two buildings a friend suggested we call it “the muffin” because of the resemblance. It is where we usually sleep.

The shack is a more traditional 16′-by-20′ cabin that sits on a bend in a small river, a few hundred yards before it enters the St. Croix. With a screened porch across the front, it serves as the kitchen and dining and living rooms.The walk between the two usually takes about three minutes.

However, most mornings I don’t make a bee-line between the two and, instead, walk down the quarter mile down the driveway to open the gate. Usually I then indulge the urge to stroll down the town road a few hundred yards more – simply to greet and, as importantly, be greeted by the morning. At this time of the year, high spring, the morning holds warm greetings from many old friends calling from all quarters of the forest, sky and river.

Yesterday was the Ojibwa budding plants new moon. Indeed, buds are opening and spring ephemerals are at their peak on the Upper Tamarack River. Ephemeral is defined as transitory or existing for one or a few days only, and is an apt term for these tiny heralds of the profusion that is about to overtake the woods. Perhaps these tiny flowers open in response to the songs of birds that are making their seasonal migration to summer breeding grounds. Both the spring wildflowers and northern nesting birds will be gone by the time the forest canopy claims almost all the sunlight to fuel its energy-transforming magic by mid-summer.

The flowers of hepatica were the first to bloom several weeks ago. They are already gone, not to be seen again until after next winter’s blizzards are history. Others, like trillium, wild geranium and Jack-in-the-pulpit are yet to flower. Nevertheless, right now the forest floor is carpeted with tiny jewels that sparkle in the increasing length and warmth of the days’ light.

Violets are the most diverse species now in bloom, treating the eye with an array of yellow, purple, lavender and blue petals raised up on thin, curved stems. Bloodroot and anemone, the early companions of hepatica, are still in bloom, but the former is already losing its petals. The demure Dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies and dainty pink spring beauties seem to thrive in moist soils near the river’s edge. Every day one or two species put out their first flowers; today it was yellow large-flowered bellworts and tiny, cream colored bishop’s caps, also known as mitrewort.

But, perhaps the most striking of all the ephemerals is not a spring wildflower at all, but the blossoming American plum, Prunus americana. This plum blooms before it, or almost any other shrub, has leafed-out. The thousands of five-petaled white flowers put forth by a single tree hang like a cloud in the understory. One here, another there – floating in the mist-like space above the forest floor.

A cousin of P americana became a common image for awakening and enlightenment in zen poetry. Here’s a poem by a Stonehouse, an abbot who retired to become a mountain hermit in 13th century China:

Most of the time I smile
old men can relax
not a care on my mind
nothing but mountains before my eyes
the P’eng soars into the sky
a leopard fades into the mist
I’m more like a flowering plum
waiting for the year-end cold

In Daoist literature, the P’eng is an inconceivably large, phoenix-like bird symbolizing transcendence, while the leopard losing its spots is a metaphor for a person who eliminates vices by cultivating virtue. Old Stonehouse seemed satisfied with the everyday and needed nothing more than the happenings of the woods outside his door.