We were on the way home from visiting our sixth Minnesota State Park in the past two weeks when we saw the sign pointing toward the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. Just a short jog off our Google-assisted path home, so why not take a chance for once again photographing some Sandhill Cranes. Yes, I’m an obsessed “crane chaser!”

So we headed a bit south and west toward the seven-mile motor loop that meanders through this haven of “Cranesville” with high hopes and a quest for a picnic lunch. Yes, our anticipation was high, for we had made the earlier decision to postpone the last state park on our planned trip, one that was relatively close to Crex Meadows just across the Wisconsin border where Sandhills are often photographed. Visiting Sherburne was a nice salve for sore feelings.

What we found was a lazy afternoon in the Refuge. Numerous swans at rest and preening in cattail hideaways. Resting cormorants in the skeletons of long dead trees sunning themselves to dryness. Kingfishers posed on woody spikes with watchful eyes. Long-beaked Green Herons poised for murder and mayhem. Beautiful wild flowers painting the adjacent prairies and glowing global teacups of white water lilies floating on the calm surfaces of the wetlands. 

And not a single sighting of a Sandhill Crane. Not one.

“Off to the grain fields and prairies north of here,” was my shared thought, for we had passed three on the trip out not too far north, and actually along the highway we had just driven from. My suspicion was that the trio was a mated couple with their fully grown colt, and they were stoic and beautiful in the small patch of prairie next to an oak grove. Had we not been in a rush we might have pulled off for a picture, so we moved along.

Was this absence another sign of our dwindling summer? The weekend before we left on this excursion to hopefully complete my personal photo journal of the Minnesota State Parks, we had delivered a print to a farmer friend who has been quite kind over the years in suggesting nature sightings on his land. Next to his farm site we photographed power lines filled with seemingly hundreds of Redwing Blackbirds that had congregated as they do before migration. That we’ve seen the small family flocks of Canadian Geese flying around Listening Stones is another sign of a waning summer, but what really caught my attention was the bright blue, starred blooms of asters in the woody fringes of the state parks. It seems so early. Too early.

But yes, we are more than halfway through August so fall is quickly approaching, and nature is opening its annual gallery of these many seasonal changes that await us.

Our wildlife loop through Sherburne was almost shocking for it was my first time in the many loops I’ve made through there over the years without seeing a single Sandhill Crane. Spring, summer or autumn we’ve always been greeted by cranes, and once it was before we even reached the welcoming signs and kiosk less than a mile past the gate. After Thanksgiving last fall we spotted hundreds in two different groups along the edges of distant wetlands. Not this time, and we scanned the distant landscapes thoroughly with the 600 mm lens.

Regardless of species, the spring hatch has now grown mature enough that the parents are offering “flying lessons” to gorge up for the upcoming migrations. We must include the Sandhill Cranes among those offering such important lessons, for before long the prairies will be winter quiet. 

Around the house the number of barn swallows has nearly tripled in the past couple of weeks, as the young seem just as adept at flying above the prairie for mosquitoes and other insects as their matured parents. A few years ago I recall sitting on the deck with a class of cold tea looking at all of the swallows perched on the clothes lines and the several perchable edges of the outbuildings. Our prairie was noisy with the loud chatter of a late morning. We had gone inside for a quick lunch and when we returned a little later there wasn’t a swallow in sight. All were all gone. And the silence was deafening. In a midday instant the migration had parted.

Sherburne was sort of like that on our drive through late last week. Yes, it was a lazy and warm afternoon. There was barely a ripple on the surfaces of the multiple wetlands, so besides the feeling of laziness it was also incredibly calm. Peaceful in a way that makes your breathing easy.

It was almost like we were intruding on sacred natural moments, viewing scenes we weren’t supposed to see. In terms of humans we were almost all alone for we saw only a couple of cars, and only one had eased around our camper and pickup. Perhaps the “regulars” already were aware that the Sandhills were off feeding away from the refuge. My guess is that if we had been there hours earlier around dawn or even later in the evening we would have seen the beautiful skeins flying in, necks and legs straight like an arrow in flight, silhouetted in a sky in the full color of a brilliant sunset. Just not then, not in an early and easy afternoon.

Perhaps the asters had given us the clue all along. I was somewhat shocked to see them already in such a mature bloom, and I suppose the shorter hours of daylight should have been previously noted … and perhaps it was by folks more astute about the constant messages sent by nature. Those blue blossoms have rarely lied. and our summer is nearing an end.

Yet I missed the poetic stalking, that unmistakable purposeful stride through tall prairie grasses; that watchful and protective eye of the tall standing male as the female and colt garner food nearby; that unique call of the wild that Aldo Leopold claimed was not the call of a mere bird, but a “trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” Yes, that bird.

My songwriter friend, Charlie Roth, penned a beauty about this time a year ago that he called “I Don’t Want to Live in an Angry World,” a song with such a catchy chorus that even on the night he introduced it to a live audience most were singing along with his simple but catchy and timely chorus by the end. A room of harmony that maybe even surprised Charlie. The song was about politics and how he thought it was time to do away with the anger on either side of the divide and become friends again.

I found myself mentally humming his chorus as I looked up at the angry heavens the other day, of a planet that is in dire need of human hope and help. After all, we’re the ones causing this climatic turmoil. Our skies are alive with that disgusted anger. It seems the planet is not just angry but pissed, and she is letting us know from the plains of Africa to the mountains of Canada, from the deep South to the Pacific islands. We are living in an angry, climactic world.

Although we have so far escaped the dreaded tornado activity being experienced in the South, and obviously the horrendous hurricanes and typhoons of the heat-bearing oceanic regions, our skies have been burdened with layers of smoke from the uncountable fires from the Yukon to LA, and although our stormy weather has been somewhat wet and traumatic, we’ve been lucky so far. 

Still, that anger is there, above us, and the heavens aren’t shy about showing that rage. This week we’ve suddenly been bombarded with dense dark clouds bearing lightning and deep, bass thunder that has shaken our very foundations. Huge rain storms have ravaged nearby communities, and baseball sized hail pounded the crops and homes less than ten miles north of here. Nearby Granite Falls had about five inches of rain in an hour or so last Sunday. Many of our saturated farm fields have standing water in the rows of their commodity crops, and the wetlands are full. Nearby the rivers were just nearing bank-side when these latest storms cruised through.

Let’s pick a single day, say July 31, a day that began here in the western Minnesota prairie with some clinging early morning heat accompanied with crushing humidity. Normally I’ll laugh at my significant other for what she terms as scorching days of heat and humidity. Having grown up with it, and having worked in the hay fields and haylofts during those formative years, most of our summer days have been in the mid to high 80s with mild humidity — in fact, before Wednesday I spent the afternoons kneeling in the garden pulling weeds to make way for a cover crop. Yes, there was a lot of sweat pouring but there was also a nice breeze both afternoons.

Wednesday, though, was different. A humid haze hung like a dense curtain on the fringes of the horizon. Sweat came with minimal activity, like walking from the deck to the studio. Then, around 10 a.m. I stepped out of the studio to notice a huge, deep black cloud hovering just above the woodland and northern prairie. Within moments we were enveloped in darkness, as lightning and rumbling thunder rolled in along with the first rain. It was a hasty affair, lasting mere minutes as the prairie winds quickly moved it right along toward the east. Nearly an iinch fell and you could sense the pressure relaxing.

Having a photograph to make in town, I left the farm via the Lake Road, got my photograph and started back home. As I was passing the supermarket along First Avenue I noticed a pod of pelicans just above the lake, and was able to grab a couple of nice images as they turned mid-air to ease to a landing on Big Stone Lake. A moment of peace in the turbulent skies.

This early storm was merely a prelude to what occurred overhead by mid-afternoon. I actually shouted to Roberta to come and look at the overwhelming ominous cloud capturing the sky above us. Our only lightness was a thin strip of a collar between the blanketing cloud and the horizon. This dense, rollicking cloud seemed to blacken the entire prairie. 

Lightning lit deep within the rollicking layers. Lightning seems to be a prelude for all of the stormy events regardless of country or continent. It’s said that lightning is actually a neutralization between our dominate poles, equalizing the natural pressure of the atmosphere. Between the clouds and the lightning, it was both frightening and awesome to behold. But, was there any equalizing going on?

This theory was verbalized by a speaker at a Gathering Partners’ annual gathering of the Minnesota Master Naturalists a few years ago. He noted that without thunderstorms and lightning, the earth’s atmosphere electrical balance would likely disappear within minutes, adding that the science community isn’t really sure what would happen on earth if this balance wasn’t maintained. As it is, somewhere on earth this neutralization though lightning is ongoing, 24/7, 365 days a year. On this day it was our turn, happening right above and around us.

Yet, another hypothetical and unanswered question that concerns scientists with the warming of the planet is what happens if the currents in the warming oceans were to suddenly stop. We are entering a time on perhaps the only livable planet in the universe where we have many unanswered questions about our future as a species, and perhaps our neglect is what is feeding these angry skies.

On our travels on this eventful day we followed the continuing storms with my camera, concluding in the nearby Bonanza section of Big Stone Lake State Park as the evening sunset painted nimbus clouds in an array of puffy beauty, like little cotton balls adorned with foundation makeup of a movie beauty. These clouds provided a momentary sense of artistic flair compared to the giant cumulonimbus clouds that we experienced mid-afternoon, the one that completely blanketed the prairie as far as we could see, clouds rolling and rising, churning with a grasp of what I read as anger. Pent up, deep-in-the-gut retching anger in the skies.

I couldn’t help but think of that chorus in Charlie’s song while looking at those deeply dark and churning clouds. As tired as I am of living in a politically angry world, being surrounded by a world reeking of ever worsening patterns and events within a global climate change that threatens all of humanity worldwide, there are those who choose to ignore the threat or dismiss it as some sort of a “liberal ploy” This causes an internal rage within me, a rage that seems awakened by the turbulent skies above us. I don’t want to live in such an angry world. I really don’t.