Local historian, Judy Beckman, remembers when what our locals call the Lake Road was a bit more interesting than before it became “Buckthorn Lane”; back in the days when mums and apples drew folks to the area perhaps as much as the perch and walleyes in Big Stone Lake. 

“Apple trees were ubiquitous,” she recalled “Part of the reason for that is that one of the main ways folks could get land was through the Tree Act, for which you had to plant so many trees and have them live for a certain amount of time. If one had to plant trees, you may as well plant something from which you could get fruit. At one time, based on electrical usage, Dragt’s Fruit Farm (now the campgrounds) was declared the largest apple orchard between Chicago and Seattle. Also at Eternal Springs there were about three acres of mums! Cars lined the highway on fall weekends for u-pick mums at $5 an armful.”

Although the mums are long gone, if my count is correct, only two apple orchards remain, both further up the highway.  “In those days the hills were grazed, and you would see sumac … which you could see through. Not anymore,” she said. Driving what is officially ST HWY 7, long since paved over the historic ruts of a wagon wheel trail, the weedy buckthorn has literally taken over. Densely packed along with non-native as well as native tree species for the length of the highway to the Bonanza portion of Big Stone Lake State Park.  

Perhaps now times and views are “achanging” … bit by bit. This began a few years ago with the “freeing the fen” effort along a mile and a quarter of the state highway fronting the lower prairie section of Big Stone Lake State Park. Now the city of Ortonville has joined in the cleanup effort by clearing off buckthorn brush and invasive tree species on the hillside of Nielson Park thanks to a Department of Natural Resources grant. Nielson was the home of a beautiful hillside-clinging stairway that weaved up the steep hillside along with other stone-work amenities found in the park, all gratis of the old Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. This beautiful, timeless resource was hidden completely from view. No more.

Let’s begin up the road apiece with the freeing of the prairie fen, an effort that began about six years ago with the removal of hundreds of weed trees and acres of buckthorn from this 500-acre portion of the state park prairie. A view is now open down to shores of Big Stone Lake. Park manager Terri Dennison said the fen was discovered a bit ahead of the clearing work and that workers were conscious of caring for the delicate, alkaline-rich, peat-forming wetland, fed by a groundwater spring. It takes thousands of years for a delicate fen to develop, much like its rainwater-fed cousin, the bog. Escalating climate change, man-made tampering and water quality issues seemingly threatens both. 

Initially it was surprising when the conservation workers (Conservation Corps Minnesota & Iowa) suddenly appeared and began the process of freeing that section of the state park from the fortress of trees and buckthorn that basically hid the lower section of the park prairie from view. Huge piles of tree trunks and debris were piled and allowed to thoroughly dry before being burned this fall. Tree removal work is still a work in process, Dennison said, although progress has reached a point where the prairie will be burned this spring. Fire protection swaths have already been cut along the edges. 

“We realized that CCMI was not able to keep up with the buckthorn removal along with the trees,” said Dennison. “So we started doing contractor contracts to remove both the trees and the buckthorn. I think we’ll probably have some more cutting work along Meadowbrook Creek, or at least have CCMI take out the rest of the buckthorn.”

On a recent hike through the area with assistant park manager, John Palmer, the fen was pointed out, for it remains largely hidden by dense prairie grasses and other forbs. No, the fen isn’t readily visible with standing water as a bog might be, yet he hopes the planned burn will more fully free the fen. “We might see the small white ladyslippers return along with other plants unique to a fen,” he said.

It was equally as shocking when on a drive into Ortonville about a month ago to find the Lake Road partially blocked as workers downed and removed the choking buckthorn, huge pines and other non-native trees hugging the steep hillside that revealed the old CCC stonework, including a beautiful rock bridge I had no idea even existed. Then they moved to clear the portion facing downtown. Left to be cleared is a space between the two cleared areas. The nakedness of the hillside is stark.

A friend whose house is adjacent to the hill closest to downtown section admitted being completely shocked of the seemingly thorough denuding of the hillside, for she loved the trees for both their beauty and privacy. “What’s going to happen now?” she asked. She’s not the only one asking.

According to the local Ortonville Independent, the entire area will be reseeded in late February and early March with some 80 different prairie grasses and forbs. 

“It will take a few years,” admitted Ortonville Mayor Gene Hausauer, adding that in the end the city-owned park will look like it did when he was growing up some 70 years ago. “It takes awhile for the roots to set in with the prairie grasses but it’s going to be beautiful.”

Hausauer admitted that some townspeople were shocked and complained about how the work initially looked. “I tell them to look across the lake from the hillside park to where the old ski area was in Big Stone City, for that’s how it will look in a few years. A green hillside in the summer, brown prairie grasses come fall and winter. Plus you’ll have the beauty with wild prairie flowers. I think people will really like it when they see the final results.

“That stonework is just beautiful,” he added, “and there are people around town who didn’t even know it existed until the buckthorn and crowded weed trees were removed. The stonework was done in the 1930s before I was born. We may hopefully get another grant to repair some of the damaged stonework that has been exposed thanks to the project.” 

Perhaps in time Hausauer and others will then climb the stone stairwell meandering up the hillside to enjoy prairie smoke, coneflowers and a host of other native prairie forbs in full bloom overlooking downtown and nearby lake. Just as others may venture through the state park prairie further up the Lake Road to see and enjoy small white ladyslippers and other forbs common to a natural fen. 

Both projects have attacked the fortress of invasive buckthorn and other non-native species that had gained a troublesome foothold for many a mile. Though both projects extend for less than a couple of miles, I’ll readily admit that it will be nice seeing something along the roadsides besides the impenetrable buckthorn; views that a few prairie flowers and big bluestem will certainly cure.

Back in my daily newspaper days we were asked at the end of the year to choose a favorite image we had made over the past year. Each of us would weigh the circumstances and possible challenges surrounding each of the images as we made our choices. This was especially true if you took the assignment to heart, and most of us did. Nowadays I’m under no such restrictions, and for the fifth year in a row I’ve been determined to choose my favorite 12 … a dozen among the several hundred images stored in my files from my year in the natural world.

It began by brainstorming, if you will. My initial collection featured some 84 different images which may be cause for laughter among my photojournalistic comrades. Whatever!

Although none made the final cut, there were images from five different Northern Light displays although I had slept through at least two displays and was clouded out on a couple of others. Accumulative, there were at least nine different Northern Lights displays through the year including two each in April, November and now December.  

Which is part of the fun of the exercise. Interestingly, my accumulation of deer images for the year was down significantly. No such issues with birds. Among the many images were birds I hadn’t photographed before, including a Western Meadowlark, White-faced Ibises, Indigo Buntings, Starlings, American Avocets, Catbirds and Bluebirds, to name a few. It seemed that every trip to a different state park would garner images of Catbirds, Yellow and Yellow Rumped Warblers. There were photographs from numerous trips to capture Sandhill Cranes throughout the year, most notably a special photographic expedition at Crane Trust in Central Nebraska for the annual spring migration with nature photographer, Cheryl Oppermann. We also made two trips to the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge for both Cranes and Swans. 

Wildflowers came through once again as I seem to follow their numerous flora seasons beginning with Pasque Flowers in March. We didn’t make a bog trip this past year, though, although autumn tree and sumac opportunities were both numerous and thoroughly appreciated.

And, you can’t live within the Horizontal Grandeur without capturing big sky images, especially those that capture the ambient light created by both sunrises and sunsets. Monet would be a happy prairie painter!

Several camping trips were made to different Minnesota State Parks along with a two week trip to Iceland and Norway, where every day seemed to offer an array of different waterfalls.

It was a blessed year, and a lot of “tough” decisions were made here on a snowy, gloomy wintry afternoon. My last 30 images were incredibly difficult to pare but I eventually made it down to 24. The last 16 took a long stretch of time. So many choices! A reflective image at Lac qui Parle State Park was very hard to eliminate, along with a nice broadside flight of a Bald Eagle. Some of the images fell into my “photographic poetry” realm, meaning that the feel and texture offered an “impressionistic” mood thanks to the beauty of nature. 

So, here you go (my 12 along with bonus images from Norway and Nebraska. All the rest were made in the prairies and woodlands within a day’s drive from Listening Stones Farm!): 

And now, for my bonus images:

We awoke to a visual treasure replete with magical wonder and science, of myth and beauty, that came for a brief visit. Too brief, if I must say so myself. Please excuse my personal thoughts of labeling this winer wonderland of near perfect whiteness as a “feather frost” while most label it as a hoarfrost. Some equate this crystalline and near immaculate beauty of an early morning visit with that of Northern Lights. Who am I to argue, for both are magical and fleeting moments of wonder and joy.

Certainly all this magic is backed by science, so perhaps we should get that out of the way. Technically these frosty conditions are created when water vapor condenses on solid surfaces that are below freezing, such as our bluestem prairie, stems of dormant faded flowers, stark tree branches of winter, and, well, nearly all solid surfaces. Science call this process a sublimation, created when warm moisture in the air starts condensing around frozen nuclei — a prairie or woodland, for instance. Once this process begins, the moisture in the air goes directly from a gas to a solid. In this case, when ice crystals form on various frozen features. All of which is dependent on calm air for these formations of complex, lacy deposits.

Our “vapor” here in the prairie is usually caused by fog coming in, as portrayed by poet Carl Sandburg, on “little cat feet.” Obviously we are nowhere close to Sandburg’s harbor and cityscape where his haunched fog silently and briefly settled before moving on, but the same phenomenon happens here in the prairie, too. His tribute to the beauty of fog might have happened before Sandburg settled to the woods of Vermont, although surely he experienced hoarfrosts outside of Burlington. This time the fog snuck in around here during the early morning hours, although it may happen at other times of the day. Such conditions are more typical on clear and cold winter nights.

Our wonderland of perfectly white frost feathers was so heavy the stems of big bluestem were weighted over to nearly kiss to the ground. Our trees glistened even with the sun being hidden by the dense blanket of fog. Popping through the glistening frosty whiteness were clumps of reddish crabapples to dapple hints of color to an otherwise frosted landscape. We were surrounded by an awe-inspired winter wonderland. 

One might wonder if such beauty has a mythical history. Certainly, for since we were children we’ve heard of Jack Frost. Beyond the science and artistic beauty, feathery hoarfrosts are thick with legend. The term itself is from old English that suggests the feathery ice crystals offer an appearance of “oldness”, of long strands of white hair and beards of elderly geezers. 

There is some thought that the legend of Jack Frost originated from Viking folklore, that his modern name is an Anglicized rendition of Jokul Frosti, or “Icicle Frost,” son of the Nordic wind god Kari. Jokul was a nymph-like creature who painted beautiful frosty patterns on windows during the night and was a personification of the chill that arrived with winter and nipped the noses of children with his icy bite.

Scandinavian mythology paints a picture of a frost giant that brought not only bitter cold but the black doom of winter that symbolized the end of the world. In northern Russia and Finland, an almighty deity known as “Frostman” commanded the weather, and was given sacrifices by reindeer herders to persuade him to lessen the severity of blizzards. The villagers would leave bowls of porridge for the Frostman to ensure their crops weren’t touched by the damaging frost. Elsewhere in Japanese folklore, Frostman was a malicious character, the brother of Mistman, who were both keepers of the frost and dew. 

Jack Frost is well known but barely understood in modern culture. Most people envisage the elfish creature that decorates the night with beautiful silver patterns that melt with the sunrise, and in old England “Jack” was a name or term given to jokers. Over time, he has shed the fearsome demeanor that came with the frost giants of Norse mythology. Something as beautiful as sweeping hoarfrost or delicate ice crystals surely couldn’t have been summoned by a menacing omen of everlasting winter. 

Much like Northern Lights, hoarfrosts are typically fleeting. A brief breeze will cause the frost to flake and scatter like falling snow. In the sunlight this takes on a wholly different beauty as those airborne “diamonds and pearls” Hannah Flagg Gould described in her poem, “The Frost” in the 1800s come to life. It’s all very magical, even those rare “wonderland” moments that somehow escape to last most of a day. However long one might last, they are still magical in their innocent beauty.

While I don’t recall having feathery frosts as a child growing up in Northeast Missouri, I’m sure we had them. We surely have them here in Minnesota, and they rarely shrink from wonderland status. One January day during one of the most snowy winters since moving to Minnesota some 40 years ago, I drove through the hill and valleys around here taking images of snow and frost, capturing pheasants and wild turkeys deep within the elements. A gray mist of fog hung around, and the few fences that remain and the abandoned groves of past dreams were all coated with the feathery finery. Shawls of splendidness. What a lovely and unexpected day.

Usually, though, hoarfrosts have become special memories by mid-morning. It was again this week. Yet I find it fun to wander about with a camera just like I do come nightfall and a chance to record the solar waves of an Aurora Borealis. Perhaps it’s just me for I just love the mysteries of our natural world, of the peacefulness nature offers in the face of so much worldly man-caused greed and turmoil. Sometimes you just need an unexpected flight of Canada Geese to fly overhead on a cold, rainy winter afternoon, a stunning display of Northern Lights, or to awake on a morning to a vista painted in feathery whiteness.

A lone leaf, a last leaf of a summer past, broke free from its tree in an oak savanna choked with a jungle of strong and darkened naked limbs. Halloween trees, as called by my partner, Roberta. Rather than drifting downward, gravity seemed to be drawn from the heavens. The leaf twirled ever higher, a flight not unlike a butterfly, somehow missing the nearby limbs, drifting both higher and laterally. Freely. As the drift crossed a plain created by the forest of oaken limbs, the leaf rose one last time before drifting slowly toward an anonymity of a leaf-strewn forest carpet.

A forestall moment on a late, November afternoon as light softened toward a sleepy haze — a haziness emerging to ever slowly capture the otherwise starkness of the savanna. This was a rare afternoon with barely a breeze in a month that had come in so cold and blustery, blowing, as Aldo Leopold observed in his rather poetic observations, as a wind that describes November. “The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on …  a tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.”

Leopold’s wind came early in our November, a somewhat schizophrenic month with afternoons of soul-warming, glorious sunlight mixed with dreary days of gray gloominess. Then the wind. Emily Dickinson wrote that “November always seems to me the Norway of the year.” Dickinson, a introverted loner who rarely left her room, let alone her house outside of Boston, penned the phrase in a letter to her friend, Elizabeth Holland, with this description of November: “The noons are more laconic and the sunsets sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign.”

Yes, November can be a laconic time following those glorious days of October’s warmth of vivid colors that are suddenly long gone, perhaps signified by a lone wayward leaf joining a dulled leafy carpet. There were days, too, when the trees fought to argue. Days when there was no detaining the wind. Yet, there was color even on the darkest of those days, and enough light to warm the soul just when it seemed the dour gloom of grayness would smother over you like a blanket. Who am I to complain? 

We made a few forays into nature, as is our custom, including a delightful sunny afternoon drive through Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, where we found two large pockets of sandhill cranes and enough swans to make magical moments seem like a living poem. Such moments feed the soul. November moments, a splinter of time between the colors of autumn and the blessing of light we celebrate come the Solstice.

Yes, November serves as a transition, a prelude to winter that seems equivalent of a spring March as seasons seem to wrestle one another before autumn recedes on one hand, and winter relinquishes on the other. And we are simply on the sideline, observers of a grand plan of which we have little say. 

On those rare years when the joy of October is crushed by a sudden unseasonable snow, the lack of transition seems to hit like a heavyweight’s punch to the gut. Gut punches aside, the transitions ease forever onward. Our grasp for the warmth and color in November is not unlike our wish for warmth and color come March following  a long cold and snowy winter. In my mind these are the reasons for these annual transitions, a slow sliding into winter on one hand, and a quick exit from winter come spring on the other. 

I’m somewhat surprised by the strength of color and light here in the western reaches of Minnesota, although after all these years I perhaps shouldn’t be. Both seem to argue against those otherwise drab and somewhat dreary days by offering a poetic charm to the prairie. An unexpected warmth has mostly kept the waters from freezing, reflecting color and light like prized jewelry or a queenly shawl. Finding such joys helps make this somewhat “foreign” ecosystem seem like home.

Home? On these days of November? This prairie wasn’t part of my grand scheme. I barely realized it existed in my youth, or even as I aged into the “autumn” of my life. Using this as a metaphor, one might suggest I’m entering into the November of my life. In my “September” years we moved to what we learned was the “black desert” of prairie to run a small country weekly. Our initial plan was to give it a few years, yet some 20 years later we were  settled in. We had discovered a vibrant artist community that seemed to dwarf the flatness and lack of trees we were so used to while living along the Little Vermillion and Mississippi Rivers at our former home. Through our new found friendships we discovered the prairie rivers, the riverine environments along with an appreciation of what the late essayist Bill Holm referred to as the “horizontal grandeur.” 

We would plant a native flora garden in our backyard, and I began photographing the blossoms. Yes, it was planted on a cold November day, a planting session that was averted by a bone chilling rain mixed with snow. Years later, after my wife died, I remarried and settled here in this last semblance of the prairie pothole biome in the “Minnesota Bump.” We bought this little patch of land and named it Listening Stones Farm both in honor of its glacial history and our love of Sigrid Olson’s writing. We converted the tillable land to prairie grasses and flora and made paths through both the prairie and woodland for both observation and photography. 

Then the deeper discoveries began; of small pockets of both native and restored prairies along with the few remaining wetlands. With that came the observations of color and light, especially the nuances of ambient light that often paints this horizontal grandeur with pastels that would have made Monet jealous. Before long a place I had no idea even existed either in my youth and early adulthood had become home. 

It is said to appreciate the prairie you must look beyond and within the grasses to discover the inner beauty along with the appreciation of color and light; in the noticing of the magical moments such as a last leaf drifting aimlessly through an oak savanna. November sometimes forces you to see beyond those waving grasses, to be encouraged by both color and light and to develop an appreciation of the natural world around you, in bringing joy to the soul. I’d call that being blessed.

Long before he became a toddler, we took our son, Aaron, on a short hike through a small riverine woodland just south of Prescott, WI, on an October afternoon. He was in my arms, small yet eager, looking over my shoulder before uttering what my late wife, Sharon, and I claimed was his first ever word: “Preee” he said. It was, indeed, for the afternoon was chummy and sunny, the leaves colorful and the currents of the Mississippi River easing by slowly.

Now, entering his fourth decade, Aaron balances his writing and theatre training into stand-up comedy routines in both English and Norwegian in his adopted home of Bergen, Norway, while studying to become a nurse. In the process he holds fast to his love of nature on long hikes with his wife, Michelle, and their dog, Storm. When I offered him my newest word of his adopted language, he knew precisely what “friluftsliv” meant, a discipline he practices whenever possible.

Pronounced “free-loofts-liv”, this translates into one’s thorough enjoyment of nature. Friluftslive was popularized in the 1850s by the Norwegian playwright and poet, Henrik Ibsen, who used the term to describe the value of spending time in remote locations for spiritual and physical well being. If you’ve spent time in Norway, and especially in the breadth of Telemark County, which includes Ibsen’s home in Skien, the county extends from seaside villas into the heights of the mountains to provide ample opportunities to soak in as much friluftsliv as humanly possible.

I can now add “friluftslive” to the Japanese term, “shinrin-yoku,” which translates to forest bathing, into my limited vocabulary. Color me guilty of loving and practicing both disciplines. Forest bathing encompasses meditative disciplines while friluftsliv seems to simply embrace the enjoyment of being in and enjoying nature. Friluftsliv was a word that came from an American-Norwegian friend, Judy Beckman, during a recent house concert here at Listening Stones Farm featuring author-song writer-musician Douglas Wood and his accompanist, Steve Borgstrom. One of their songs, she said, brought the term to life, which I can thoroughly understand since Douglas’ music is ripe with references to nature and, well, friluftsliv. 

Enjoying the beauty and peacefulness of nature comes naturally for us here in Big Stone County on the Western “coast” of Minnesota. While we lack stave churches, mountains and fjords of Norway, we do have the last gasp of the mostly extinct prairie pothole biome, meaning we retain some patches of prairie along with having several potholes or wetlands dotting a somewhat rolling landscape. Nature settings in a natural environment.

How natural? It was here that the massive glacial Lake Agassiz, a large pro-glacial lake that spread across the upper regions of the northern tier states into much of the Canadian prairielands during late Pleistocene Era, and was fed by melt water from the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet at the end of the last glacial period. When the ice dam broke at modern day Browns Valley, it cut a huge river channel deep into the width of what became a natural prairie extending across SW Minnesota and NW Iowa. At its peak, Agassiz was larger than all of the modern Great Lakes combined, and one could suggest that Lake Winnipeg, which is longer than our current Minnesota River, is a remnant of Agassiz. If one uses his or her imagination, the remnants of that glacial activity surrounds us here both in real time and as “ghosts” of the Pleistocene.

That break at the top of what is now Big Stone Lake created the Glacial River Warren, which came rushing through at speeds scientists estimate at more than a million cubic feet per second (CFS). Warren carved out a wide and deep gorge down to the bedrock that extended from the headwaters to Mankato where an ancient mountain range forced the water northward to what is now the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. The Minnesota resides in the bed of the ancient glacial river. Some of that exposed bedrock looms today on the landscape within the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge just south of Ortonville, as well as hidden pockets along the Minnesota River. Friluftsliv, anyone? 

Those “ghosts?” It doesn’t take much of an imagination to recognize where and how many of the huge potholes or lakes existed before ditching and tile draining. Some of that land, like our farm, has been converted back into some restored prairie, perfect for easing into a bit of friluftsliv-friendly sanctuaries.

Also resting in carved bed of the River Warren are two separate areas of Big Stone Lake State Park. The lower Meadowbrook portion is mainly a wide swath of prairieland hosting a healthy stand of prairie grasses and other native flora. Further north is the Bonanza area with both a hillside prairie and a beautiful oak savanna — places you can take a deep breath and find calmness. I frequently practice my forest bathing in the savanna.

We will also make several nature friendly trips over the year to various state parks and NWRs, especially Sherburne and Tamarac. Earlier this week we drove to Sherburne for a last-of-the-year viewing of sandhill cranes. Visually beautiful, and adding to our pleasure was the “music” provided by both countless swans and cranes, accompanied by shrill “sallow flute” piped in by numerous bluejays along the way. Friluftsliv, anyone? 

Friluftsliv may be practiced here at Listening Stones as well, for we make several walks a week with Joe Pye through our own restored prairie. Now, in November, golden stems of six foot tall barren Big Bluestem offer us saber-like arches to meander through. In summer numerous species of native flora add color and a haven for pollinators and various bird species. Stopping ever so often, we may watch the frensied flight of a flushed pheasant, or spy goldfinches munching on thistle seeds. Even now, as November lingers, ring-billed gulls glide over the prairie, their feathers gleaming like sparkling silver. 

In these trying times, with wars raging in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria (have I forgot any?), along with an extended attempt of a Nazi rising within our own nation, I find a heightened need to seek whatever peace nature seems to offer. A sweet sanctuary for soothing a weary soul. Maybe my baby boy described nature best so many year ago: “Preee …” Indeed. “Friluftsliv” couldn’t have come into my consciousness any sooner. 

Ah, November. Come on, surprise us. Give us some glimmer of hope heading into the depths of winter.

Your staunch wind had settled in causing the blueish smoke from my smoker to tangle within the breeze rather than dancing wistfully above the port holes, yet inside the small salmon slabs seemed to be taking it well. This followed an evening attempt to catch a Northern Lights display which we ditched within moments at the top of our prairie, for the clouds even curtained off the moonlight. After tending the smoker this came from a friend from Ely who wrote, “What’s up with this month? Sun never shines. November is dull. But like the ‘moose turd pie joke’, I love November.”

I don’t know the joke, and I grasp to find much love for this dullness, lack of sunlight and the ever present wind, for as Edwin Way Teale pinned, “How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring.” 

Yes, November is our prelude of winter. Medical folks claim January is the toughest month for us mentally here in the North Country, although I could offer a strong argument for November after such a colorful October. At best November could be considered a subtle month, a time when you seek even the tiniest glimmer of color and hope. Our colorful leaves have long blown away into the prairie grasses by those sturdy and seemingly relentless winds, and those gray skies seem empty now that most of the bird migrations have sped through our neck of the prairie. Yes, we still have some ring-billed gulls adding a glitter-like whiteness and beautiful glides through this otherwise muted grayness. 

Then, this happened. Like an unexpected peak of the sun and an umbrella of blue overhead, we were overjoyed when notified by friend, Lisa Thorson, that a 100 or so swans had descended one gray and chilly evening onto nearby Lake Eli. Swans? On Lake Eli? Was this our surprise?

Lake Eli, located on eastern defining edge of nearby Clinton, seems rather unencumbered by canoes or kayaks, so yes, the swans came as an exciting and welcomed surprise, for not much seems to happen around here outside of the annual county fair and hosting what townsfolk call the “world’s longest lasting ice golf tournament” on the shallow lake, one that has been held annually ongoing for 30 some years and draws a few times more than the town’s population each January. For their Arctic Open, holes are drilled via ice auger, then marked by recycled Christmas trees instead of poled golf green flags. 

Yet, there they were. A hundred or so swans offering us both grace and beauty by dropping from the migratory sky to cheer us on a chilly November weekend. We jumped from bed early Sunday morning to hopefully catch the swans in a prairie “sunrise” — for if our sun had broken through between two dense banks of clouds that would have been considered quite a blessing in itself.

As it was, the sun was held captive for at least another hour while the swans held forth in the misty morning. Their collective squawking filled an otherwise quiet morning sky, swan music accented by a few sudden departures that came across as brushed cymbals on a soft jazz piece as long white wings slapped the cold surface of the 160 acre lake when a few select family units lifted from the frigid waters. 

While such a migratory moment wouldn’t garner much attention on the other side of Minnesota, here in the prairie this was wonderfully unexpected, for Lake Eli is not Weaver Bottoms in the Mississippi River. There thousands of swans migrate to the open water each autumn thanks to the bountiful feeding areas in the backwater shallows. Lake Eli, with an average depth of five feet, can offer similar meals for the migratory waterfowl before freeze up. Around here many of the smaller wetlands are already coated with a layer of ice, and both Eli and Big Stone Lake will soon follow suit. By then the last of the swans and other waterfowl will be headed elsewhere leaving behind a stilled silence as we head deeper into winter.

We arrived as dawn settled in to find a large flank of the flock floating across and along the distant bank, much too far for my lens even in decent photographic-friendly light. Not in this low light, dawn-ish haze. Further up the highway we found a good number clustered against the edged water next to the highway. As we neared, though, they began easing away, meandering into the heart of Eli in clusters, some in small select family units or as a larger grouping, their long necks gracefully rising and turning to watch as they sought safety from a rogue photographer. A few took to the air to fly down the length of the lake or overhead. 

As the early morning light grew ever brighter the birds with their beauty and sounds were fine fuel for the soul. Ambient colors began to tint the mostly stilled surface waters. All those thoughts of a gloomy, cold gray November morning seemed to ease away as deep breaths came naturally. How can such a moment seem both calming and exhilarating? Especially as a cold November morning?

I couldn’t help but wonder, though, where the swans will go from here once the lake freezes over? If they even stay around that long? Perhaps to my home state of Missouri, where a couple of Novembers ago en route to our family Thanksgiving we detoured off the Interstate into the Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge in northwestern corner of the state where we were pleasantly surprised to see swans by the thousands supposedly overwintering in the backwaters of the Missouri River. Swans and snow geese, both, and it was a breathtaking sight. 

For now, though, they’re floating on small Lake Eli, where on a cold January morning volunteers will trudge onto the iced-over surface to drill holes for the Arctic Open before motoring down Zero Street and the other streets and avenues in town to retrieve discarded Christmas trees. Although the swans will be long gone we’ll remember how they so unexpectedly came to give us, as poet Mary Oliver wrote, “an armful of white blossoms” —  reminders of the beauty of life on an otherwise cold and blustery November morning. 

His email was to invite me to visit his “forest”, adding a tantalizing suggestion of how it would be good for the soul. It was mid-September, back when the days were warmer and the sun seemed to paint most everything with a hint of a golden autumn hue. “It’s in the middle of a section just off the road,” wrote my friend and fellow writer, Brent Olson. While not knowing quite what to expect, it wasn’t going to be Thoreau’s Walden Pond!  Different writers, eras and environments, yet a similar need and desire. 

Some may know Brent beyond our neck of the prairie. He writes a weekly column called “Independently Speaking” he posts online and to an incredibly large number of subscribers near and far, and he has a growing shelf of books he has written. Seven at last count. Mostly essays with a novel or two wedged within. 

When we first met a few decades ago he was giving a reading from his first book at an evening chow feed in the old school in Milan as part of the annual Upper Minnesota River Arts Meander. At the time he was still proudly growing pigs which made him the second hog farmer I knew of at the time to have published a book. I thought briefly that perhaps that was a missing link in my own writing career, that I should be raising pigs. I might add that this was a fleeting thought.

Since I’ve moved into his neighborhood and we’ve become friends, I didn’t take his invitation to his 35-acre cottonwood forest lightly, for I was more than slightly intrigued by both his offer of a walk in the cottonwoods and of soothing the soul. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised Brent had a “forest,” for a few years ago he took issue with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for busily removing trees from their restored prairies in an effort to reduce perching possibilities to hawks and other predatory birds of waterfowl and to restore the land to their long removed heritage.

“I happen to like trees,” came the comment from the avowed prairieman. 

While that may sound like a contradiction, it makes Brent sort of a rascal within the premises of the prairie where for many, trees are viewed with about the same reverence as pimples on a teenager’s cheek. His reputation is that of a principled man with a streak of stubbornness, for he seemingly has no fear of paddling against the flow. Making a mark as he’s done for years with both his writing and his community service in committees, organizations and as a Big Stone County commissioner, as a politician he understands the need for a graceful compromise.  

His independent nature often forsakes previously agreed upon tracks of “suitable” timing for moving things along. He’s more likely to write a grant to jump differing timetables than convention might suggest, or to take a Bobcat afield to inadvertently build a picnic table from a huge slab of polished quartz he had lifted from a slag pile of a local tombstone manufacturer with grunts and hernia fodder into the bed of his pickup. Once home he headed off into his prairie with the slab and eight angle iron pillars he pilfered from an old grain bin to create a rather sturdy picnic table. That table now anchors what is basically a grassy triangular pheasant haven on the peninsula within a beautiful undrained and shallow 150-acre wetland he calls Olson Lake. “For the pheasant hunters,” he claimed. 

Ah, the lake and now a forest? As a third generation owner of the home farm, Brent has followed his family tradition of keeping the shallow wetland intact. On the shores of that “lake” he recently completed the construction of his “writer’s shack” from piecemeal and family relics. It’s a cozy little enclave and wood heated in the winter. Like Thoreau’s cabin, the shack is decidedly basic. By now, perhaps, you’re getting the gist, for his forest, like Olson Lake, stands as a rather defiant metaphor to common acceptance of his prairie peers.

His little forest is located a few miles to the west of the Olson home place. “My forest is the middle of the section,” he explained as we drove toward the dense cottonwood plantation. “Back then when the trees were pretty small I asked Fish and Wildlife if I could keep the trees. They didn’t seem to care back then. Now I’m being told to cut them all down. I won’t. My spirits are always lifted when spending time in here.”

The worn tracks through the cropland surrounding the trees give evidence that his spirits are often lifted.

Many of the cottonwoods are immature, small enough you can encircle the trunks with your two bare hands. Yet, you can almost imagine how his forest will look in 20 to 30 years as competition for light and soil nutrients begin to take charge, crowding out the weaker, smaller trees. Natural succession and selection. Century old cottonwoods around here stretch high into the sky with gnarly limbs towering over competitive species in the dozens of farm groves. Which of the hundreds of cottonwoods that surrounded us within his forest will reach such character and status? All part of time, natural history and mystery. Brent seems content to allow nature to take charge.

Many of the trees on this beautiful sunny afternoon bore golden leaves, while others held onto a summer greenness making for interesting color contrasts. Intermingled among the cottonwoods were a few picturesque mature willow trees near a small and “dormant” wetland. A bed of cattails gave it away. Despite an ongoing drought, the cattails, willows and cottonwoods left stranded seemed healthy. 

His forest, seemingly obstinate in its prairie setting, has a lively and lovely denseness despite the drought, and when in the midst of the timber you are surrounded by such a density of trees the adjacent prairie and cropland cannot be seen. Though we were less than a quarter mile from a county highway, and over a ridge from a major U.S. highway, the trees seem to buffer the outside noise. Thoreau’s wooded enclave? While it’s beautiful with a hillside of oaks and maples alongside a tranquil lake, those triangular woods are surrounded on two sides by multiple lane highways with the third hosting a major bed of commuter and freighter railroad tracks. Outside of his “sleepy” Concord, an incredible imagination is necessary to sense Walden Pond being peaceful and quiet, a haven for the soul.

Here in Brent’s woods you feel a need of taking in a deep, natural breath to allow the surrounding nature to settle into higher sensory levels. Sound, for one, soothed the soul as bird songs joined the soft background music of the shimmering cottonwood leaves. Adding another layer of sensory appreciation was a soft woody scent from the nearby cottonwoods. Not quite apple buttery. A hint, perhaps. As we weaved our way back through the trees toward the pickup, Brent’s “forest” was holding its own here in the midst of an otherwise rather flat and nondescript prairie. He was correct. One’s spirits could be lifted here.

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.”