Burn Baby Burn

I have never seen such a complete burn of grasses at Dick Young Forest Preserve and Nelson Lake as they got this year. In some areas there are nothing but singed twigs of pasture rose sticking up through the prairie. At twilight you could see the backlit wings of robins flitting about the bare ground from a distance of 300 yards. As my wife and I walked along the trail on the edge of the west woods, juncos and song sparrows moved in visible waves out onto the blackened flats. You would never know what kind of plants grow on these fields from looking at them now.

Likewise the marsh and ground surrounding it are an entirely new landscape. I'm a bald man and the preserve looks like my head right after a close trim. If you want to get a real feel for where the ground ends and the wetland begins, now is the time.

But I would advise being judicious as well. The sandhill cranes are setting up shop to nestfor the season somewhere in the marsh. It is better to respect their needs and let them have the room they need.

There were plenty of birds to be seen on our 3 mile loop around the lake. Lots and lots of Fox Sparrow. Have I said I love these birds? Yes, I know I have. But I love these birds. They are so classy in both appearance and song. What makes their voice so appealing is that they vocalize almost as if they are modest about their singing, like the tenor in the church choir who has this pure, wonderful voice but does not like to sing solos. There is also a definitive wildness in the clarity of a Fox sparrow's song because we know they will leave us in a week or so. Off to the real North. So it is worth listening, because their song is a rare treat, like ice cream at a roadside stand in Wisconsin. Better because of circumstance. Right now there are thick pockets of Fox sparrows all along the west side of the marsh and also the southeast hedgerow just past the washed out "bridge" as you head south of the viewing platform. Fox sparrows are early spring perfection.

There were also huge numbers of rusty blackbirds on the southeast side of the lake (seen here in a small pic...) I'm not talking just 40 or 50 rusty blackbirds. There were 10 or 15 batches of 40 to 50 blackbirds roosting in the scrubby trees along the south shore. My wife muttered, "Sounds like fall." So she remembers. She's not a birder, but she remembers that call. We hear them in late October and November on our walks. Something in their voice and that clustering blackbird habit reminds her of approaching cold weather. She remembers way more than she lets on sometimes. 

I love that woman.

Out on the lake sat a large, mixed raft of scaup, ring-necked ducks, a lone redhead, patches of ruddies and buffleheads all doing their diver duck thing. Some sitting around, others acting horny and displaying. I was surprised to see so many ducks. A group of four common mergansers circled the lake and settled down. Must be twilight, I thought. In the distance we also saw a group of six white pelicans swimming in a row. A few minutes before my wife had noticed them flapping around. "Why do they always act like that?" she wanted to know. "I dunno," I told her. "That's what pelicans do." As if to mock me, they now were behaving in such a civil manner. 

"Where are the redwings?" my wife also wanted to know. 

"I think we're seeing less because the burn was so complete," I told her. "They've got nothing to hang onto."

We have seen four Phoebes as we circled the lake. The last was singing a quiet song to itself, it seemed. In two weeks there will be other flycatchers joining the Phoebes. Willow and Alder are both found at NLM. So are Least, in the woods, and Wood Pewee, which sing even during the hot daylight hours of summer. "Peee-ah-weeee." With that song I expect the slap of a hand on a mosquito as well. Then kingbirds complete the mix, out in the fields, and Great Crested in the woods. That's a fairly complete set of flycatchers, accented at some point during migration by possible yellow-bellied, olive-sided and a rare occasional western kingbird when the wind blows them up from Arkansas or Kansas or wherever the wind blows from... 

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Now it is still early spring. "There are not many signs of spring here," my wife observes while walking up the small hill through the west woods. She is a plant lover. She knows spring beauty, anemone, trillium and the like. Those are her "birds." She raises some of them in our "woodland" garden out behind our house. It is a nice little imitation of the wild woods. In May she picks woodruff and makes an airy German punch. She is a German girl, you see. They like punchy things, those Germans.

Our walk concludes as the sun is setting and a huge moon rises in the east. "Look," Linda says (did I tell you my wife's name is Linda?) "The sun and moon are even," she says, holding her hands out parallel to the ground. "One in the east and one in the west." She is correct. The sun and moon are perfect opposites in the east and west sky. "The weatherman said to look for beautiful sunsets because a volcano erupted in Alaska," she tells me. I look at the sun. I have seen a lot of beautiful sunsets at Nelson Lake Marsh. This one looks normal. But who is to say if it could be a little redder than usual?

The whole world is connected. We get a red sun because of airborne particulates in the atmosphere. The sun is burning billions of miles away. Its heat dissipates perfectly on its way toward earth, so that this little ball in infinity is a fit place for us to live. The sun melts the April snow with ease. The snow was here just a couple days ago, white and sodden. Now it is gone and the black earth absorbs more of the sun's energy during the day. Burn baby burn. It all keeps us alive.