Ah, but the voice sounded vaguely familiar. Something from the past, and for so long so silent, yet, there it was. We were in the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge near dusk with an old friend who I was showing off Minnesota’s two native cacti on one of the flatter outcrops, the brittle prickly pear and the ball cactus, when the sounds of the nearly forgotten voice seemed both clear and so close. Those clear “tsweeeeets” invited me to first look around, then above us where three common nighthawks were casually circling high in the prairie sky.

It had been years, really, since I’ve heard or seen them; so long ago that I could barely remember our last meeting. Yet, here they were, mere miles from my Listening Stones Farm. “Hey, guys. Look up,” I said, pointing upwards toward the birds circling above the prairie grasses. “Nighthawks. Watch them. Pretty soon one will dive so fast and deep you may lose sight of them. They’re one of my favorite moments in nature.”

This I knew from experience due to our last moments of sharing time together, for it was during my years on my second newspaper job in Dubuque, IA., back in the late 1960s. My apartment was on the top floor of an old Federalist building right on the main thoroughfare through the beautiful Mississippi river town, kitty-corner from the public library and just half a block from a funky little jazz piano bar. A deck ran a half block in length, from my back door to the alley, and come spring through the first days of autumn, the deck became sort of a sanctuary where I could lay back with a frosty beer to watch nighthawks circling high above on the river side of the towering limestone bluffs before making one of their characteristic, breath-taking dives. Some claim they can hear a “pop” in the midst of a dive although I can’t substantiate that, not with my hearing.

Those dives were fascinating in beauty, and mesmurizing at the same time. In those days the numerous nighthawks plying the sky would hold my interest for many long evenings as I lay on my back to await those blinding dives of hundreds of feet, only to sweep upwards at the last possible second near the rooftops. Yet, there they were, once again gliding seemingly effortlessly high above the outcrops in the evening sky, wings spread wide with those characteristic white wing patches under each wing and the white band across the throat. 

Then, as promised, in an instant, one suddenly dove with lightning-like speed toward the ground, sweeping upwards at the last second before it seemed it might bury itself deep into the rock-strewn prairie. According to the guide books, “Chordeliles minor” is called a “common nighthawk,” although thanks to those incredible dives they seem anything but common. Besides being “uncommon,” the birds are neither nocturnal nor hawks. Their closest relatives are actually whip-poorwills and nightjars. Most members of the nightjar family are actual night fliers, yet perhaps the these dusky fliers were muse for Edward Hopper naming his famous lonely nighttime cityscape diner painting, “Nighthawks.” 

Once again I found them just as fascinating and mesmurizing on this odd summer night as before. Experience told me there was no possible way to record the beauty of their breath-taking dives with my camera. Not back then. Not now. If not for showing off the seemingly ever present cacti on these flattened outcrops we would have missed them, and those spiney little plants discouraged me from laying on my back once again, hands clasped behind my head, legs crossed, to witness such acrobatic, or perhaps poetic, beauty in flight after some 50 years.

Despite their supposed range that covers most of North American, from the Yukon to the Gulf of Mexico, according to my Edward Brinkley “Field Guide to Birds of North America”, life hasn’t been kind to nighthawks. Studies indicate that their population has decreased some 60 percent since my years in Dubuque. Apparently there are various reasons for their decline, ranging from a move toward a chemical happy mono-cropping of agriculture that has effectively reduced their once abundant insect diet, along with a move from the former tar and gravel rooftops of the old factory and downtown rivertown buildings they used for nesting to the more efficient whitened, reflective roofing. In Dubuque many of those old buildings have since been demolished. Nighthawks used the gravel for nesting and privacy.

According to Gretchen Newberry, who wrote her doctorial thesis on nighthawks while at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, nighthawks are now seemingly only abundant in patchworks of grasslands that have not been farmed, and the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge, with 11,500 acres of outcrops and prairieland, fits that description. 

Indeed, there are seemingly a higher acreage of prairielands along the upper Minnesota River than you’ll find just a heartbeat away from the river as it meanders from Big Stone Lake to the bend northward at Mankato. Newberry wonders if urban nighthawks stumbled into an ecological trap, as roofing materials changed and became unsuitable for nesting. She doesn’t assume that they will find their way back to their natural nesting areas, or even if there are enough of those areas remaining to sustain a sizable population. Gravel patches placed on roofs by kindly naturalists hasn’t worked, either.

So, is our prairies the sustaining answer? With less than a percent of native prairie remaining in Minnesota, and a continued move in neighboring South Dakota to convert grasslands and prairie to cropping land, nighthawks along with numerous other grassland bird species are most likely facing a continued downward trend. 

In her study of rooftops, Newberry found that only 10 percert of her studied nests survived from egg to fledgling. Most died as eggs, but many died in the first one to two days of life before they could awkwardly walk to shade. Even adult nighthawks are challenged to walk. Nighthawks are also considered semi-precocial — they’re not as naked at hatching as songbirds are, with those legs are not ready to run like a crane. They’re somewhere in between. 

Newberry includes the nighthawks with swallows, swifts and bats as aerial insectivores — animals that fly around most notably at dawn and dusk to forage for insects. “That’s their guild,” she explained in a TED talk, “a group of animals that make their living in a similar way.”

So as we stood next to those rugged flatter outcrops in the refuge, we were perhaps standing in their last sustaining habitat in our prairie region, for the granite and gniess outcrops provide both both camouflage and a flattened areas for nesting — similar, perhaps, to the graveled rooftops along those Mississippi River towns like Dubuque and La Crosse back in the 1960s. And the stagnant old Minnesota River that winds through un-canoeable, log-strewn stretches of water in the refuge seem perfect for those mosquito populations that sustains Newberry’s guild.

Will future generations find the same joy and beauty I have in watching nighthawks lazily soaring in a colorful dusky sky before suddenly making a breath-taking dive for mosquitoes and other available insects? On this evening I found I was just as spellbound in my 70s as I was back in my 20s. I find many reasonable attractions to this beautiful sprawling refuge, and thanks to an unexpected stop to show off a couple of native Minnesota cacti, for one brief evening I reconnected an equally challenged “old friend” so unexpectedly. I couldn’t have been happier! It was, above all, such a sweet remembrance.

At first I thought she might be joking; that I could be so clever and imaginative, that I could come up with something as ever reaching as “forest bathing.” Now I wish of having had my camera at hand to capture the look on Roberta’s face when former exchange student, Lucy Hille, grew suddenly excited about the possibility of doing some forest bathing like she does on occasion in her native Germany. My suggestion was meant as a possible highlight on a forthcoming saunter along the lake-side trail in the Bonanza portion of Big Stone Lake State Park.

“Really?” Roberta asked in surprise. “You have forest bathing in Germany?”

“Oh, yes,” Lucy answered. “In German we call it waldbaden. It’s where you can get away from the city to go into the woods to meditate away from fast life and noise.” She backed that up by saying it was being practiced by cultures around the world thanks to the Japanese practice they call “shinrin-yoku.” Of course, this has nothing to do with a bar of soap, nudity (although that is certainly possible) or fluffy towels. It is most simply a mind game.

So waldbaden, or forest bathing, is learning to meditate in nature, and became part of our beautiful, sunny summertime morning. Next to us the waters of the 26 mile long Big Stone Lake were calm, with very little boat traffic. A slight breeze seemed to ease through the trees although there was a calmness to the lake surface. We were barely into the woods, yet far enough along that the car wasn’t visible through the leaves, when I brought our little progression to a brief halt.

That is when I stopped us to suggest we simply close our eyes and breath deeply, to push aside any tension we might feel, to ease it down our spine and backbones, to let any troubles we might be feeling to ease over our ribs like water trickling through a rocky stream. A yoga instructor used that visual metaphor nearly 50 years ago and I still use this mental image in my meditation. Although hearing is my weakest sense and sight my strongest, sometimes I fail to bring out sensory touch and smell. “Taste,” I teased, “will happen back home with a round of chocolate chip and mint cookies.”

Lucy, of course, thought that would be a wonderful closure of her brief visit prior to venturing off to a week in the BWCA, her fourth visit to the wilderness mecca.

 On this saunter we began channeling in sound, sight and touch, with special thanks to feeling the breeze. Although sights on this trail were tampered significantly with the derecho last summer with so much dead and decaying oak trees, it is still a beautiful hike. Along the way a tree that had been battered by a pileated woodpecker was pointed out, and the wren “compound” that was defended so feverishly just weeks before, was incredibly quiet as we passed by. Indeed, silence seemed to dominate both in the timber and in the lake. Typically bird songs from the overreaching canopy escorts you through the entire lakeside trail. Not on this morning. Perhaps the migration was further along than we had noticed.

Ah, but the other sounds came to us. A small rivulet that typically stops us even in the depths of a frigid winter morning did so once again. Roberta sat on the small wooden bridge as the spring-fed waters waxed poetically beneath her feet, and we all seemed to close our eyes to soak in the soothing sound. If my introduction to our bathing had been dismissed, here it was vivid and beautiful. Like ocean waves, the small spring-fed rivulet seemed to ease the soul.

Elevating out of the ravine and up a steep hillside, we then encountered a huge acreage of invasive staghorn sumac. Lucy and I stopped to pull seeds from a remnant seed head to roll the tiny balls of succulent flavor in our palms with our fingers. The outer testa coatings eased from the seeds and were caught in the breeze to leave the hard seeds in our palms. Had we wished we could have ran our fingers over roughened tree trunks and broken limbs, yet the sumac seeds seemed to do the trick.

As for our other senses, one would have needed to bend to catch any aroma from the few mushrooms we encountered, or from the few blossoming flowers along the trail. Overwhelming the sense of smell was the scent of algae along the nearby shore. When we reached the upper end of the trail to sit momentarily on a picnic table, the algae scent was quite strong.

I took a moment to remind us to once again close our eyes and renew our deep breathing. Doing so never hurts when you’re deep in the woods and bringing alive so much of the sensory options around you. Mentally resetting tends to take you even deeper into the meditation, and when I’m alone forest bathing I often stop to “re-set” the meditation. 

As we began our saunter back down the trail the momentary conversations were done so quietly, almost under breath, it seemed. Since my familiarity with this trail was so vivid I was sorry for the near utter silence, for hearing the songs of birds seem so typical of such hikes and this time it seemed the popping of stepped on acorns dominated. Such moments reminds me of the quote attributed to Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

That was our trail for this moment in time, and Lucy and Stepan were there for their first time. For Roberta, perhaps her second or third such saunter. Sometimes you have to remind yourself of such truths, and truthfully, over the years no two saunters have ever been the same. Different things to see and hear, to smell and touch, along with our individual levels of meditation.