March of Change

I haven't been into the woods much this winter, but for an occasional 30°+ chainsaw operation. Now, the growing day length, the day's work done, it was time to spread a bag of collected, mixed seed somewhere the sun may shine in the green season. 

The melt and evaporation is near constant, even on days well below freezing, but with this colder winter, refreshing snows were common. Now, with March's warm sun, the snow loses ground and the ground gains moisture. The thaw begins above, sinking into the earth, and its moisture mixed with mineral soil is a cold way to speak of mud. Mud is an element; we protect ourselves from it. In March, mud season begins in earnest, so a crisp mat of snow is a welcome traveling companion.

En route to the seeding region, snow delivered a graphic of animal traffic. The crossroads, the indecision, the quick and the casual are all written in the snow. I cannot fathom it, but isn't there a similar, but scented, pattern here only recognizable to those more dependent on the nose?

 

The wavy trail of, probably, a deer mouse on a journey of late winter courage as the red tail hawks and bald eagles glide high and the barred owls lurk mid canopy. 

By early March, ankle deep in snow, deer browse the dry, fibrous stems of the garlic mustard that they refuse to consider in the green season. Food of last resort, in winter, but never, not at all, when the buffet is so grand in May.

I did not understand how comfortable our mammal friends are with human paths before this place. I will take their cue as trails are altered by fallen timber, such as here. The trail used to pass to the right of this basswood, until it began to fall apart, completely blocking the old trail. The deer have made their decision; they now travel under the arch of a sibling basswood, the Arc de Ruminant.

In the late winter we take stock of the dead, the ill, the weak. The tops torn from hollowed basswood by time or wind, the snags of elder oak, rotted, but standing, the insect kill green ash and drowned every species in times of high water, are most evident in winter. Snags are important ecological components of the forest, whether killed by native or exotic means. For us, snags are question of safety, of food and shelter for wildlife, of timber taking out healthy neighbors. Few nearby young come out unscathed when elder trees fall and fall they do.

Of the remaining oak giants, red and bur of about a dozen on the drier, south facing slopes, we feel concern. These trees are one hundred forty, one hundred sixty, or more years old based on the rings of smaller felled oaks. They may outlast me, or not, but the point is not to count on a static nature, that is not what nature is.

As spring approaches I ready myself for the multitude of upcoming tasks and adventures. Many house and landscape projects remain, including seeding thousands of native woodland plants and harvesting two plots of Hudson Clove garlic, but also new opportunities. I have several upcoming photography courses at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum that are filling up with those eager for something new from somebody new. I am also going to be working with scientists over the coming year, as artist in residence, at the highly regarded research landscape known as Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. I plan to blog from Cedar Creek, nine square miles of otherwise inaccessible nature at the junction of the prairie, eastern deciduous and boreal forest. Stay tuned.

Spring Chorus

You cannot see them, but they are there, near any body of water. They know when you are there, even though they are concealed under leaf litter, and will hush on your approach. If you wait, silently, they will begin playing their combs once again. They are the Chorus Frogs of March. See here for the group experience.

The Animal Way

I am always taken by the animals willingness to use the human made pathways. 

It reminds me that we are as much animals and we all prefer the easiest route.

Turkeys

The Birds

I have to keep it short, today. We have been blessed with much and are thankful beyond the sentiment. As I worked diligently in the studio, the turkeys enjoyed the old garden (that finally received the garlic, yesterday).

Our dinner's bird came from here, the Gale Woods county park. Despite losses of millions of poultry birds to a severe outbreak of avian flu at Minnesota's mega farms, small farms like Gale Woods didn't lose any birds. It's hard to imagine how we could decentralize the production of food animals at the scale that we produce and consume them in this country, but I am thankful for this park and its mission, and that it provides for our meals of pork, beef, lamb, chicken and turkey, and finally for the Gale family who well understood years ago that this kind of farming was losing ground and needed to be preserved by imagining it as a park.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Autumn Creature Feature

This is the best view we could get of a Wood Duck that inhabited the back pond (I don't know what else to call it now, it's beginning to suggest permanent). About two months ago the ducks began congregating, yet I was so busy I didn't realize what was happening. A few weeks later, while felling trees, we noticed on the ridge a steady stream of walking ducks. It went on for minutes, there must have been one hundred! They are extremely skittish and do not let you get close, but I had been listening to their squeaky swing set sound for weeks. It wasn't until the parade that I understood we had a large congregation. One day, a week or so ago, they began flying over the house, rounding back to land on the lawn. Then they were gone.

Last year I did my best to save the frogs from what I thought was a frog trap. But now I'm beginning to think they want to be in this pit -the soil cut and retained around our basement, code required, egress window. I count at least thirteen in this portion of the pit, but there are more. You may also see the blue-spotted salamander to the left of the blue, roofer's trash. Next summer this pit will be excavated, probably retained with a galvanized steel, and a new, rot-proof, egress window installed. What will happen to this amphibian paradise?

Apparently, in autumn, the best house painting days are also the best days for lady bugs to seek out their death chamber. By the thousands on a warm, breezy day, a couple of weeks back, they swarmed the house. On their backs, stuck to the paint I eagerly applied, they became such a nuisance I had to quit. Several left defensive trails, "reflex bleeding" as it is known, on the paint that had dried. Once in the house they strive for light, which tends to be the light fixtures on at night. Look up at the plastic lens to see all the dark splotches of recently passed Coccinellidae. Don't bother cleaning it until winter sets in. They are stubborn too. When you try to coax them into your hand or onto a piece of paper they hunker down or, just as frequently, as they climb walls and windows, they simply drop to the floor, sometimes spreading wings to fly to another location. While gardeners love ladybugs, I have entered a new relationship to them that is, well, a little bit more complicated, and I well-learned not to paint the house after labor day.

Squirrels. This one had no idea I was standing there, silently waiting for Wood Ducks to come by. They didn't. Look at how auburn it is -for a gray squirrel. The posture resembles a man in a Godzilla suit, and by most people's reactions to them, squirrels may as well be Godzilla. Me? I still like them, they do not bother us or the house, we don't feed birds so I have no self-interested reason to despise them, and I'm pretty sure they're having more fun in the woods than any other animal. There is one thing I have learned. I always thought it was squirrels dropping all those acorns in the back yard. It's not. Bluejays. Autumn is the season of bluejays. They knock the acorns down and then do their level best to stuff them in their mouths, then fly away to stash them. Even though I grew up in an oak forested area where gray squirrels and bluejays were the most common animals, I never recognized this behavior until this autumn.

The Balm of Night

The other night it was warm and breezy. The most perfect balm of temperature and dew point.

We walked out through the dappled moonlit woods to watch the clouds blow by from the quiet road. Then a raccoon went crazy where the road turns, tearing up the silence of night, and we headed back to the house.

Munk

Taking it all in atop a brush pile.

No Respect

No one respects squirrels, except for the oaks, maybe, if that's possible. Certainly the hawk does not. The sound of a thousand paper shufflers dominate the woods through the golden hours. So much work before quitting time for the poor, lowly squirrel, but no one respects paper shufflers. Like a boss, the hawk swoops in below the treetops, gliding above the wetland, and issues its battle screech. Every busy body freezes into a terrific silence. No intention of coming in for the kill, it then climbs out of the basin, heading for preferred hunting grounds, snickering likely.

Minnesota At Mississipi

At the conjunction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers is designated park land. Rising above the Minnesota river is the Mendota Bridge (it is nearly silent and one wonders why New York City Bridges are so darn loud). 

Here, there are some very large trees.

A few are big enough to climb into.

And beavers...

...that may bring them down.

_____________________

This park is the site of an American policy of extermination, named for Fort Snelling, which looms on the bluff above the river floor. The land at the confluence of the two rivers was spiritually significant to the Dakota people, so it became a tragic irony that many of them should have been impounded here, died here, and ultimately expelled from their land under the gun of European Americans. Be vigilant against the concept of savagery as it is too often used to to conceal one's own.

Taking Spring

At the morning table with coffee, I was a bit taken by the sudden appearance of a green tree among the gray. When did this happen? 

A basswood, apparently young, but one never knows as trees will linger under the shadow of larger trees for years.

It looks to be algae growing over lichens only on the north-northeast side of the tree. That it is only this tree is surprising. There are plenty of trees with this exposure, many also slim and lack vigor.

Of course, there are other greens on trees. Like these mosses at the base of a nearby white oak, Quercus alba.

_____________________

Although only forty something, the breezes were a moist balm. Rain was on the way, the first rain of spring, and likely the first since October. I lingered outside wearing only a sweater. Toms pace the slough casting their garbled opinions. A red squirrel spits its rattling chastisement. Trilling robins blaze high limbs. The dimly lit woods is colored by sound. The animals take spring sooner than we do.

The Herd

I often see them running.

Particularly in the woods behind the house, running northeast to southwest or the reverse.

This time, it was out in the fields, down the road. 

The Backwoods

At the western edge of the land, just before it rises up toward the old gravel pit slash horse farm, there is a topographical depression, what I will call the swale. Although its origin may be artificial, it is one of the more interesting features of the land.

I walked out to the swale to investigate bark-stripping that, as far as I can tell, is only happening here.

Stripped clean from the base well up the tree, with no broken branches, so it isn't deer rubbing or eating the bark.

Several feet away I spotted this mess and a hodgepodge of prints.

Above it, more stripped bark. An animal that climbs, or flies. Hmm, I'm going with climbs as birds at the base of a tree seems to put them at risk of predators. Probably a rodent, maybe a squirrel.

I see hanging material, which at a distance I took for lichen, on many of the upright twigs. On closer inspection I recognize it as the dried remains of duckweed. Ah, an excellent indicator of the depth of the past summer's vernal pool, which looks to have been nearly two feet in places.

Trees fall easily here, succumbing to the wind and saturated soil, a soil made visible by the exposed root mound of a fallen tree. I wonder how it is that it holds much water at all, as it feels crumbly and porous. This, and the spring which emerges from the base of a tree about two hundred feet from here, reveal a complex hydrology that I've yet to fully understand.

Toward the back and upslope lay an assortment of aggregations; what looks to be concrete, dumped by the gravel mining operation that long ago operated just over the property line.

The aggregations have weathered, moss clings to it now, and one day I may make aesthetic use of this waste. 

An old, plastic six-pack in the swale.

Beyond the swale, up and quickly down again to the edge of the large wetland, a sign painted and hung by Rex. It read "American Trash Museum."

This neck of the woods, at the bottom land of a ravine just beyond our property, is full of cast-off appliances. Some go back fifty or more years. The dump exists at an intersection of what farmers would consider three "wastes" -a ravine, a wetland, and a woods. Well, the woods held some value as a woodlot, and the cows could roam them for munching on all kinds of under-growth (which probably helped the buckthorn get a foothold), but the other two were rarely looked upon kindly by farmers and country men. 

Looking southeast you see the wetland. Where there is little to no grasses there's visible snow, revealing where water is most likely to stand in wetter periods. Here the ravine drains its steep-sided slopes.

Up the ravine, littered mostly with old washing machines, but also empty fifty-five gallon drums and five gallon pails of mostly unknown chemicals. If you live in a second-growth forest that once was part of a farm, on or near a farm, you can probably find this kind of dump, or what remains of it. 

At the top of the ravine, a two hundred feet or so off our land, looking toward the adjacent horse farm and the steep incline of the old gravel pit. 

Trash comes in many forms.

And offers its warnings.

Heading back, one of Rex's many brush piles, consisting mostly of fallen branches. There are ten or twelve of these around the woods, and more could be made, should one choose to.