Ah, the beauty of nature, of how when you least expect a gift of the natural world something magically appears  … even on a stretch of state highway alongside a freighter track. We were returning from a shopping trip miles from home, rolling alongside the BNSF tracks west of Appleton, MN, when we were suddenly engulfed by a murmuration of thousands of red-winged blackbirds, and an old dream, a visualization of a lifetime, suddenly came to life. 

Few remain alive to recall such moments nowadays, although some of the old guys of the prairie will talk about how their fathers and grandfathers spoke of red-winged murmurations so thick the collective birds would block out the sky. One of those guys, in his sixties at the time, was in our Master Naturalist’s class back in 2012, and as our small group worked together on a capstone project the conversation drifted toward murmurations, for it was spring and we were starting to see some come through our region of the prairie. “When I was a kid,” he said, “old timers around Redwood would talk about seeing clouds of redwings so thick they would blacken the sky.”

Such times were back when there was more than one percent of the wetlands remaining in the now extinct “prairie pothole biome.” Another old timer, back about 30 years ago when he was an aged county commissioner, spoke of similar times when he chastised me for my writing positive commentary about the “sloughs”, by saying, “You don’t have any idea of what it was like before ditching and draining. No way to farm. Nothing but damned mud and mosquitoes. You couldn’t get away from either.”

There were also birds. Millions of birds, from waders to grassland species like bob-o-links and meadowlarks, all adding color and song to the then wide open prairie. Red-winged blackbirds were there, too. Millions of them. That was then … back then before the numbers of all of the prairie birds began shrinking due to the destruction of the grass-blessed prairie and wetlands, red-winged included. Back then, come migration, murmurations formed with hundreds of thousands of birds, and when rising from the wetlands and prairie. they would block out the sun, the sky and the clouds. I’ve dreamed of having that visualization come to life ever since that conversation at the meeting and figured there would never be such an opportunity. Then this happened. On a state highway. Alongside a railroad track. A magical moment of nature.

Did they block out the sun, sky and clouds? At times, perhaps. Enough that the visualization held promise.

I’ve witnessed some huge murmurations around Listening Stones and due south about an hour or so, though hardly a flock as close and huge as this one — until this surprise nature offered us the other day, a gathering of the colorful epaulet-patched blackbirds so thick they seemingly blackened the sky.

How do you even count so many birds? If we guessed a half million we might have been close, or perhaps, even short by a few hundred thousand. Here, just west of Appleton, along a stretch of State Highway 7, balanced between some shallow wetlands with numerous cattails, a recently harvested grain field, numerous and spacious trees and a semblance of the old prairie. Yes, perhaps even a glance back to those undrained and unditched patches of prairies of old. If this hadn’t been real it would have been a mirage. A dream. Yet, I have photographic and witnessed proof.

We stopped to both watch and take pictures for nearly an hour before deciding to head on home. Then, about ten miles down the road, I pulled over and suggested to Roberta that we return just to hopefully catch the birds in the sunset about an hour or so distant. “We don’t have anything else going,” she said, “so let’s do it.” A u-turn later we were back on the other side of Correll on the way toward Appleton. The murmuration hadn’t left, seemingly nervously rising and settling, then rising as an uncountable curtain of birds. Depths of blackness, with some quite close, and through them in the distances, thousands upon thousands more. It was like a dream come true, and I thought of those who through the years have shared this odd dream of mine.

At one point several hundred landed on the highway surface, temporarily halting traffic until one brave motorist decided enough was enough and slowly crept through the birds causing them to rise once again. This caused them to then turn north along the graveled Ct. Rd 51, and we followed as closely as we could. At times it felt as if we could simply reach through the window and touch one or more of the birds since the flights were so close. Over the years I’ve seen many pictures of distant choreographic-like flight patterns of murmurations, and was hoping that might happen in a colorful sky. We wouldn’t be so fortunate. While we captured images of the distant murmuration dances, none were captured as it might have been with video. 

“Imagine what you are seeing are sandhill cranes rather than redwings,” I suggested to Roberta. “Huge birds, coming in around sunset over the Platte. This is like the crane migrations in miniature.”

Twice through those few hours highway patrol officers passed by our car as we sat with our hazard lights blinking along the highway, and one even slowed before offering a knowledgeable wave and continuing along toward Appleton. Yes, I’ve been warned before about the illegality of stopping along a highway to take pictures, so perhaps he was aware of the magic in the sky. Maybe he wished he could stop and watch, too. Yet, he waved and moved on eastward.

Not only had we parked along the highway, we were often outside standing either in front of or behind the car gazing at the sky, watching as the birds lifted in gigantic clouds from the prairie and trees, seemingly exploding up into the sky as a unit though there were umpteen thousands rising at once. Dancing in movement as though they might touch the clouds, before swooping low to kiss the spine of the prairie, or laterally as if they alone owned the heavens. Clusters thick with points of blackness, each a bird. Yes, it was magical.

Eventually the sun began to slide behind the evening clouds as the sky dance continued above us, and around us, blackened dots of red-winged blackbirds dancing in choreographic feathery clouds as nightfall claimed the prairie. Sometimes we are blessed with the pleasures nature offers us, and perhaps the secret is that we notice.

An old fly fishing friend, Rick Nelson, penned this “original Haiku” earlier this week:

While Rick acknowledged it might not ring true to purists of the Haiku world, it sums up both of our thoughts of late as we watch and listen to yet another winged species speed south through the flyway.

Another murmuration had settled in earlier yesterday morning, ever briefly, in the woods surrounding our home and studio. Leaning against the studio door to listen, the sound is much like what you might hear in a large stadium before a game as voices intermingle into a tangled and indiscernible murmur. This was at least our fourth murmuration of autumn, yet none were as large a massive one with thousands of birds we passed over the weekend nearly 90 minutes south on the King of Highways along the Yellow Medicine River outside of Ivanhoe, MN.

Our’s was large enough, so on the way in for lunch I came with the camera, stopping to watch for several moments has they rustled in the treetops of the grove. Suddenly, for some inexplicit reason, they seemed to rise as one, lifting from the depth of trees into the air to fly high over the house before making a wide ranging loop before returning directly overhead to once again fill the same treetops. It was a loud and anxious sounding murmur … until an hour later it was suddenly gone. The silence they left behind was deafening. 

A few days before it was a huge group of ring-bill gulls. I had stepped out of the studio for a brief break and saw several hundred high above the house, seemingly circling as if undecided on which way to fly. Then, suddenly, they veered toward the east and the large wetland just over the rise of our prairie. Wave after wave. By mid-afternoon they were gone. Not a gull in sight.

A few weeks before there was an uncountable number of white pelicans in the west pool of the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge grouped together for what seemed like a quarter mile in length. Stacked up against one another so thickly they created what seemed like a feathery bridge some 50 feet across and stretching for a good 400 yards along the tall, marshy grasses. We’re fortunate to have the pelicans here through the summer, and I suspected as I photographed their collective long trough of a feeding frenzy that I was witnessing a pre-migratory feeding. By the next morning there wasn’t a single white pelican, save a straggler or two, to be seen. They were gone.

About the same time we observed a migratory grouping of great egrets at the Refuge, many standing tall on branches of a canopy of trees. Others lined the shallows stalking for a meal. By nightfall they had left the refuge, shallow waters and all.

Swallows and other species have lined the high wires next to harvested grain fields, sometimes bunched in a line that stretches for several hundred feet. We had left for some business downriver and found dozens of such gatherings on power lines from here to Montevideo. They were gone by the time we returned a couple of hours later. 

It seems like those wings of flight were waves goodbye. One species after another, taking to the skies en masse. There seems to still be much mystery concerning migrations. Those swallows, for example, will cover much of North America throughout the summer “breeding” period before suddenly leaving to cover most of South America during the summer of the southern hemisphere. Is the clue of mass migration dependent on the hours of dwindling daylight? Rarely is it available food, according the writing of Donald R. Griffin in his book, “Bird Migrations.” Often, due in part to climate change, there often remains plentiful food around when the migration occurs.

We have learned to track migrations with radar and other observatory and tracking tools of science, although there is no instance of delving into the brains of birds. How can you? Among my wonders is how birds of a certain species suddenly begin to congregate? Where? How is the collective decision to suddenly leave communicated? How much has global climate change affected both the summer and winter site selections? Some suggest migration routes are several thousands of years in the making, yet in many instances those routes have changed. How do they find a helpful, high atmospheric wind current to boost a migration across a vast majority of the Midwest basically overnight? With so many birds that the migration is tracked by radar? It’s all a great wonder. A tantalizing mystery that dates back to Aristotle who correctly recognized some aspects of bird migration in his Historia Animalium in the 4th century, BC.

As amazing as it is to watch those skyward skeins and poetic dances of murmurations, those symbolic “goodbye waves” of the collective wingtips, there is this vast silence these migrating birds leave behind … voices full of energy, and perhaps even wonder. My woods seem incredibly empty once the last of the stragglers have flown away to join an orchestrated movement toward often a quite distant wintering home. I then wonder if another will happen through here yet this autumn, or will this be the silence that takes us into winter. 

About Rick’s Haiku, the naturalist and thoughtful fly fisherman says, “I know it doesn’t follow strict Haiku rules. But I was reading an article on Haiku this spring and the premise was, “Write a three line poem about something that touches you.” Rick was touched deeply by the migrations through his Bismarck homeland as I am here home on my Listening Stones prairie as we await “spring’s cheerful hello.”

(Writer’s Note: This piece was written as an exercise this past weekend at Douglas Wood’s “Writers in the Woods” workshop held at Osprey Wilds Environmental Learning Center near Sandstone, MN.)

I am haunted by old trees; trees that reach skyward with form and grace. Darkened, aged arms like that of a classical ballerina; poetic, and for some, reaching through thick canopies in search of their last leafy breaths of life.

Around their gnarly, roughened old trunks, or around broken branches easing biologically into the forest duff, an under story has already come to life. Perhaps seedling offspring from years of dropping acorns or other seeds.

Yet there they stand, defying the supple youth surrounding them, with a grace and form that attracts me, especially now as I am about to enter my eighth decade.

Perhaps my haunting is in hoping I can finish my own life with as much grace and form, with such strength.

These thoughts began a few weeks ago in Norway when I slipped on a slick slope above a rolling river, banging the back of my head on a rock with such force that my glasses flew off along with both hearing aids. My camera lens was shattered along with any sense of youthful verve. My diagnosis was a Class One concussion. Where I almost always felt agile with some semblance of youth, I’ve since found my being in the wild now filled with fear and awkwardness. I have a vulnerability I’ve rarely felt.

Recently as I walked an uneven and somewhat rugged and hilly trail along the lively and rushing waters of the Kettle River in Banning State Park, I found myself constantly struggling in search of safe passage, of reaching for rocks and nearby trees to keep myself upright and safe. Even with slow and deliberate effort to climb down an incline for a photograph, I felt so alone and found fear I had seldom felt before that fall in Norway. I was aware of my aloneness and continued to search the nearby trails for others in the event of another fall.

Along with this vulnerability, I’ve felt as if I had lost my sense of adventure and wonder, and despite the multiple comments of “you don’t move like someone your age” and similar shared thoughts of loved ones and friends, there it was. Where my mobility had rarely been a concern, I was now frightful and even scared in the uneven terrain. I was feeling old, an age showing itself in my gait. 

Then this morning I awoke more rested, and en route to breakfast we ambled along another rocky, uneven path. Although the path didn’t offer many of the same adventurous and challenging features of the Banning trail, I slowly began to feel perhaps righted in a way, less frightened. Perhaps it helped being near others.

Then came our assignment: to head into the nearby nature and return with perhaps something to write about. While many headed toward a trail meandering through a big woods, instead I found myself ambling alone through the remnants of an old forest nearby, one with old trees. Aged trees. Gnarly trees. Trees with character and graceful form. Trees still with shimmering leaves, golden in the morning sunlight. Trees that had grown old and stood brazenly strong among both seedlings and younger brothern, with sturdy trunks and long, well defined poetic limbs still reaching ever skyward toward the heavens with both beauty and grace. They were holding course and standing their ground despite their obvious age.

There came a smile, and a deep breath or two. I was among friends.

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. 

Jakob Becvar came to visit with what he called his “safari eyes.” Those eyes sure came in handy on a saunter we made on the lakeside trail at Bonanza Education Center earlier this month. Seems we had unwittingly entered the sacred territory of a pair of house wrens, and they fearlessly and adamantly let us know of their displeasure.

You couldn’t help by hear their loud “tseett” protests, yet as much as I scanned the broken down and browned leaves of tree death, I simply couldn’t find them until Jakob pointed them out. “You need to sharpen your safari eyes,” he said.

Now, for a minor disclosure of my abilities to see; it isn’t rare to be sauntering along with a friend with my stopping every several feet to focus on something no one else has observed be it a leaf draped over a twig or the poetic bend of a cone flower reaching for the sky. Over the years I’ve taught several classes on recognizing composition within the offerings of nature, beginning at the Denver Free University back in the 1970s to Minnesota Master Naturalists’ annual Gathering Partners in recent years. I’m no slouch of observation.

Be it his age, of my being considered by Jakob an “old man” which he started harping about when we hosted him as an exchange student about a dozen years ago, or my lack of “safari eyesight,” those wrens were quite good at visual deception. Seems the recent college graduate back in his home country of Austria, and just a few days from his first post-graduate professional position, was taken on a couple of photographic safaris in Africa which Jakob claimed taught him the nuances of how to see in nature. 

Please allow me to set the scene: This walking trail was until a few years ago the gem of hiking trails in our section of Minnesota. Meandering along the eastern shore of Big Stone Lake, the trail eased along the hillsides through a beautiful oak savanna and meadows of invasive staghorn sumac. Those oak limbs, of what my partner Roberta calls  “Halloween trees”, were staunch, bold and strong. Some will argue that oaks are among the toughest and sturdiest of trees, and these along the trail were all native burr oak. Trunks were solid and bold, a circumference of enough breadth to take two humans with arms outstretched to hug the trunk. In fact, the Hardwood Manufacturers Association claims that oaks rank as the third most hardiest trees in the land behind hickory and hard maple.

Then came the July, 2022, a derecho with straight line winds knifing across the shallow but long, 26 mile lake, at speeds estimated to be more than 100 mph; winds that swept down from the heavens without the rotation common to tornadoes, shearing off trunks as well as those sturdy, Halloweenish limbs. Many of those staunch oaks were battered to the ground through the savanna and were no match for the winds. Park employees, for Bonanza Education Center is part of Big Stone Lake State Park, simply took chainsaws to whatever blocked the trail, leaving behind the broken trunks and limbs to weather and wither away. And what had been so stately and strong, now splintered and broken, has since become a home for birds like the wrens.

This pair was making sure that we recognized and respected what they now deemed as their own. After all, even Shakespeare was enamored by the diminutive and fearless birds as he penned: “ … wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.” Here on the battered oak along the Bonanza trail they leapt from one broken limb to another, to the broken and gnarled stump to what remained of the prone trunk. Although the Latin translation of their family name, Troglodytidae, is of “cave dwellers,” wrens are seemingly anything but. They’re expert foragers in tight spaces including thickets, tangles, tree-falls and rocky crevices … all sites that supports an abundance of insects, millipedes, spiders and their eggs. 

These wrens offered no ground without a fight, and you know you’re in one when their shrill “tseett” warnings come in such a rapid cadence, and when you have both the male and female defending their broken tree, it’s nearly deafening. Years ago an old friend sat on his deck on the edge of the Driftless with a cocktail as we watched a male wren chat at us as it bounced from the small birdhouse to a trellis to an overhanging limb. “I really respect that bird,” said Harland. “A few weeks ago the female was still feeding the last of the first batch, by then fully grown, with captured insects. The old guy, there, wasn’t having none of that. Eventually when she left for more food he got into the face of the youngster and wouldn’t let up until it finally had enough and flew away. Order was restored.”

“Do you mean that it was suddenly peaceful?”

“It’s hard to put ‘wrens’ and ‘peace’ into the same sentence,” he quipped before taking a sip.

I suspect there is a lot of truth to that, and it certainly seemed that way on the trail with Jakob and Roberta. As we sauntered on down the trail you could still hear the chatter as we moved away. 

This trail is a beauty for birdwatchers, with the piles of chips beneath long dead trees thanks to the work of Pileated woodpeckers, or the bouncing treetop branches as warblers and cedar waxwings scamper through the canopy. Those birds are reasons why I so thoroughly enjoy “forest bathing” here, for once you have meditated to that point of magical bliss the sounds of birds becomes the overall dominate sense even before the more recent move in by the wrens. Meditative calmness, however, isn’t something I’d equate with roused wrens! 

Actually, until the damage caused by the derecho I can’t recall ever seeing a wren along the lakeside trail. That damage is in keeping with the philosophy of maintaining the workings of the wild within its own natural time. Those damaged trees will most likely remain for eternity, and now that the wrens have dropped in to grab this particular piece of real estate on the trail, we saunterers had best be prepared for these bombastic blasts when we near their claimed space.

I’m reminded of what Wendell Berry so eloquently wrote of the tiny battler: “The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he’s alive forever, this instant, and may be.”

Indeed. As we learned on our short saunter along the lakeside trail of Bonanza, some of those songs of wrens are not of pleasure but of warnings; and wrens are not shy nor in fear of eagle, hawk, man nor perhaps, as Berry expresses, even death!  Bless the little pugilists! 

When artist and bird photographer extraordinary, Terri Robichon, suggested Sherburne I doubt if either of us anticipated a spiritual experience. It began innocently enough when she recently posted some nice images of sandhill cranes near her New London home, and being a crane chaser myself, I reached out to Terri who was kind enough to offer an idea of where to find them near a lake close to her home. “You might have better luck at Sherburne, though,” she said.

Ah, Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. Yes, Sherburne has long been a summertime home for the sandhill cranes and the idea of driving over seemed like a real possibility, even if it was six hours and counting for a round trip. A few years ago I made the trip for the same reason only to find the gates to the seven mile Prairie’s Edge Wildlife Drive shut and locked. That drive was late in the season, early November in the midst of the Covid pandemic, and near fall migration. Although birders had posted pictures on a social media birder’s page, there were thoughts that it would all work out. It didn’t.

Back in real time: when Terri posted an image of a pair of sandhills with their colts, the name given to their newly hatched offspring, my quest revved up significantly. As if fate has a hand in the land of the fortunate, Roberta and I were headed to the St. Paul suburb of White Bear Lake over the weekend for the 50th birthday of her son. “What if on the way back we head through Sherburne to see if we can find sandhill cranes?” I asked.

Since she seems to enjoy our photographic forays it was a go, so mid-afternoon on the way home we veered off onto a connecting highway, a winding adventure through numerous road closures and small towns to reach Sherburne. Once we pulled onto the wildlife drive around four in the afternoon, we stopped to organize the car seats and camera equipment and immediately found some interesting clumps of purple vetch and butterfly weed to photograph. 

Then, not 100 meters further down the road we spotted our first pair of sandhill cranes slowly ambling through the prairie. What a great start, and not even a quarter mile into the 7.3 mile nature drive. This was a nice prelude since it would become even better with dozens of other birds and wildflowers awaiting us. This was the Sherburne I envisioned.

The huge 30,000 acre refuge is between the Twin Cities and St. Cloud within the St. Francis River Valley. Established in 1965, it includes numerous wetlands, oak savannas and open prairie. The vast majority of the refuge is off limits to the public and is designated as a wildlife sanctuary to allow an amazing array of wildlife the freedom to breed and raise their young without human disturbance. Only the wildlife drive, the numerous hiking trails and a designated canoe route are open to the public. 

Our forays are often stop and go affairs, and our Sherburne drive was no different. Having one goal in mind … continuing my seemingly endless chasing of the cranes … was taken care of even before we reached the first observation deck less than a mile from the entrance. That pair was only the beginning for there would be much more, and amazingly so. We would also happen upon a green heron stalking reeds and cattails of a marsh. A cowbird, brown crown and all, posed for us. Flycatchers, sparrows, warblers and even an operatic dickcissel added to the mix. Not to mention the wildflowers, including Roberta’s first viewing of wild purple iris.

Yet the stars of the show were the numerous swans and sandhills. Seemingly around every nook and corner. Swans sat stationary as if on nests, paddled poetically across stilled surfaces, and some were with cygnets. These were ample artistic moments filled with grace and beauty. Meanwhile we were cautiously on the lookout for those telltale lumps of brown, and fate was certainly on our side as those “lumps” were most often bent and feeding sandhills. This was certainly a “rush and miss” adventure as evidenced by the number of cars passing by us.

At one wetland we came upon a pair with their colts, slowly feeding along the reedy edge. At one point one of the colts broke free and acted its age, although the parent bird continued to pace along, head down, grabbing food. Its mate seemed to be teaching two other colts the available menu. 

Eventually we moved along only to stop less than a mile away when I heard that telltale bugling sound that the late naturalist and essayist Aldo Leopold called the “trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.” When you hear the unique call, you must stop and search for the birds. And, we did.

It took a bit before we found a pair nearby, then another, although looking around the panoramic view of this vast wetland we spied other solitary singles and pairs. And swans. The view was a living diorama an artist could never emulate at the Bell Museum. More of “church” than you may find in any building despite the artistry of Gaudi. As I looked around I found myself being drawn to a huge brownish patch where the long lens revealed dozens of sandhills grouped together. While it wasn’t March in Nebraska, we were facing into a very large gathering of sandhills. Fortunately for us we had been patient and curious, and I give Roberta credit for her appreciation of those traits.

This was a truly spiritual moment for me, and caused me to think of Leopold’s quote from his Marshland Elegy: “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins as in art with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.” 

How true, and perhaps the grasp of my quest.

Lest I forget, here is the full contest of Leopold’s earlier quote: “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”

Moments like these bring to life my devotion to Leopold and his Sand County Almanac, a book of his poetic essays I first read back in college in the 1960s … a copy I still own. Which might explain the roots of my passion of chasing the cranes, a passion I rarely find tiresome. Especially on this little seven mile “wildlife drive” through Sherburne. While we didn’t head to Sherburne with spirituality in mind, you could hardly not feel it at that moment in that particular vast panorama of wetland and prairie. 

If the cranes offered the trumpets, the swans granted us an uncommon grace. Adding to this was the colorful blossoming popping from the prairie-land grasses and varied songs aired by the dickcissel and assorted warblers. As much as I struggle to adequately describe the feeling, I realize fully that there is a higher gamut beyond the reach of words. 

Where are you, Irving Berlin, now we so desperately need those blue skies you penned and pined over so many years ago, those “blue skies from now on” lyrics sung by a variety of singers from Jackie Wilson to Willie Nelson. Here we are in the second week of June and our skies are mostly smoke stained and I feel hard-pressed to recall a day when we had actual blue skies. So smoky gray, and we cannot see past a mile across the prairie. 

Last week many events were shut down from New York City and along the East Coast because of dense smoke. Smoke so thick you couldn’t see halfway up a skyscraper. Down in DC, the top half of the Washington Monument was invisible. Here in Western Minnesota our skies are gray to hazy blue from dawn to dusk. Acidity scented smoke gives you a raw throat.

Just for the record, we are now in an air quality alert that will exist through three more days. This is nothing new. If there is anything positive we do have some interesting sunrises and sunsets. Yet, you cough and your throat is raw, and you cannot escape the smell of smoke. There are the pictures, though. Yes, there are the photographs. Some even stunningly beautiful.

Meanwhile fires in Canada and the Western United States continue to scorch the timbers and prairies, heightened by a drought that seems to have spread continent wide. A new wildfire broke out on the Gunflint Trail in the BWCA this week, so it’s even closer to home. 

Western reservoirs are drying up as Arizona, California and Nevada fight over water allotments. Those fantastic fountains in Las Vegas must recycle used waters, and the rich are restricted from filling their pools from Phoenix to Fresno. Worldwide desertification is running rampant, and the UN suggests that more than 24 billion tons of fertile soil disappears every year. All caused by man made causes … global climate change. Today two-thirds of the earth is undergoing a process of desertification described as an area equivalent to the entire arable land of India. All will be lost by 2050 if changes are imminent.

Our plastic choked oceans are warming so quickly scientists have warned that commercial fishing will be a thing of the past by mid-century. Thanks to farm country runoff, the hypoxia zone in the Gulf of Mexico continues to grow, meaning there is basically no sustainable life in affected waters. The lifeless zone is now larger than the land mass of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

While we’re in a severe drought, we aren’t in a desertification strait here in Minnesota, although our grasses appear as if it was August and the cracks in the soil average about an inch in width. Brown has replaced green nearly throughout. Browned and crunchy. Perhaps having our largest city and the nation’s capitol shrouded in smoke will convince the naysayers and the depth of the Republican Party to believe that global climate change is both real and worsening. Many are the experts who concede that we’ve passed the tipping point. A planet on alert.  

Our leaders on either political party at our nation’s capitol are no better at legislating change and corrective actions than those in China and India. For every young Greta there are seemingly hundreds of greedy capitalists pushing for expansions of the uses of fossil fuels, deep-gorge mining, managing highway traffic, spewing chemicals and letting their best soils blow or wash away, and so on. The UN warned earlier this week that half of the expected carbon budget has been eliminated in less than three years. Adding to the misery is that we have an incoming El Nino that will give us an extra kick of heat this summer and into the coming year.

While we’re had six major mass extinctions, the first was identified some 66 million years ago when a six mile wide asteroid crashed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula to create a mile-high tsunami wave that wiped out three-fourths of the earth’s plant and animal life, including all but the flying dinosaurs. Our birds. Scientists now  conclude we’re well into our seventh and this one is far less dramatic. This one is being caused by you and me, and billions of common folks just like us. We are all contributing to global warming, and to be honest, not many of us are doing much to abate the issue. And we’re not getting much help from government and industry.

Oh, I’m certainly more conscious about making a 20 miles impromptu trip to town for a jar of mayo or whatever. If possible my meetings are streamed online to my computer here in the office. Years ago at a Master Naturalist’s Gathering Partners presentation on global warming we were told that making these sorts of decisions, while seeming mundane and perhaps even silly considering the overall impact of global climate change, yet each such decision still has an impact. Taking a bus or light rail to work. Streaming meetings or work on the computer. Taking a cloth bag to the supermarket.

Then there are the pictures. My first smoke hazed image I can recall was one I call “August” for it was made here in my home prairie in August 2015. Since I’ve become conditioned that come August we’ll have those forlorn ghostly sunsets and a smoky fog come morning. I’ve photographed ashened forests out west, and barely missed a couple of wildfires in the state of Washington. Yes, there are the pictures.

Will there come a time in the future, if and when someone happens upon one of these images, to remark, “Wow! Look at how light the sky looks. What a beautiful gray.”

“Oh, and you can actually see the sun,” adds a friend. “I think that’s a sun. So red and just barely breaking through the grayness.”

No “blue skies from now on” except in perhaps an old MP3 recording by Willie. Were the images from New York City and Washington, D.C. skies of the future? A future for a planet on fire?

So goes some of my thinking nowadays. It’s difficult to stay positive, not with two sons now in their 40s. I think a lot about their future, and I become incredibly concerned when I see a baby in its young mother’s arms. What kind of life will that child face in ten years? Twenty? Will he or she reach my age before the turn of the century on a planet than now seems on fire, now as global warming refugees are more and more commonplace? What about its mother? So young and hopeful … 

A week or so ago we were at Itasca State Park making images in a muted light thanks to smoke stained skies. Back then the smoke was less dense than it is now, and the scent of acidic smoke was certainly less than it is now. This week my images were made around here, all with that red-ball sun peeking through dense grayness. Some of the images were striking and beautiful. A pretty poison, someone once said. So I keep making pictures … those of reddish suns and smoke stained skies.