A calm encounter

There was calmness in the deer’s eyes, a calmness that spread across its oval face. The deer stood there, staring at me. There was a hint of curiosity, but no fear, no alarm. The deer’s face had a softness about it, as soft as the September foliage, turning to faded greens and pale yellows.

I was on a morning run on the Wild Rivers Trail, at a point where a path drops gently away from the trail for 40 feet before opening into a meadow. As I ran past this narrow corridor, in my peripheral vision I saw a deer, facing the trail from the far portal. A strand of old, smooth fence wire drooped near its knees.

It was a doe, no doubt intending to walk from the meadow to the trail, but stopping when it heard me, then saw me. I knew what to do next if I wanted a photo. I ran past the opening as if I hadn’t seen the doe, then stopped behind cover.

I didn’t have my long-lens camera, so readied my phone camera and tip-toed back to the opening. In these cases, the objective is to get a quick first photo before the animal bolts. It won’t be the perfect photo but good enough for a memory.

I eased into the opening. The doe was still there, attentive to my presence but showing no alarm. I began positioning for better photos, putting myself into clear view. The doe studied my slow approach.

For what seemed like several minutes, I alternated between baby steps and pauses, coming closer and closer to the doe. It simply stared at me with large, pensive eyes. I was within 10 feet of the deer when it slowly turned sideways, walked a few feet into the meadow and began eating leaves off an aspen sapling. It chewed while nonchalantly looking at me.

I walked toward it again, within five paces. The doe appeared healthy, the hair on its plump body beginning to take on a darker autumn hue. I was quite sure it was a yearling; it was too big, its body too mature, to be this year’s fawn.

How does one explain calm encounters with wild animals? Was the deer simply curious? It had surely encountered humans before, but perhaps had never felt threatened by them. For whatever reason, I posed no danger to the doe.

In his book “Within These Woods,” author Timothy Goodwin writes about a healthy young deer that adopted the family cabin as a place to eat corn out of family members’ hands. It had first appeared out of nowhere, nudging at Timothy’s father from behind.

Folks who believe in “spirit animals” say that deer have a strong spiritual connection, allowing them to be aware of the subtle energies happening around them. In this belief, deer are attracted to people whose spiritual centers are giving off vibrations of gentleness and compassion.

That’s nice to think. As I stood in front of the doe that morning, I wondered: Could I actually touch this deer? I only wondered. I backed away, not wanting to unsettle the gentleness of the moment. The doe ambled among the short saplings. I walked back to the trail and continued my run.

Note: Want to read more nature essays like this? My book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through online book sellers, and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tail), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwinds), Bayfield (Honest Dog), Three Lakes (Mind Chimes), Stevens Point (Bound to Happen), and in Duluth, Minn., at The Bookstore at Fitger’s.

Jewel of the flowage

Unless I go back to the campsite for a chair, I’m pretty sure who is going to win this waiting game. Great blue herons make a living stalking prey; my patience too often flutters.

I was walking the shoreline of this sluggish flowage, scaring frogs and taking photos of wetland plants, when the heron lifted in a rush from an old elm tree. Branches hanging over the water framed the bird’s getaway.

I had startled the heron, which in turn startled me. It flapped away on a 6-foot wingspan in a serious of screamy squawks piercing the silence on this dew-laden morning. The heron saw me before I saw it. Was I not paying attention?

Now, the heron is in the middle of the flowage, where lily pads and clumps of algae cover much of the water surface. The heron looked large when it took off, and still does, perched on a small dead branch poking out of the water. A great blue stands over 4 feet tall. This one is that and more.

My camera lens finds a portal between low branches and shoreline grasses. It’s not much of a photo, considering I missed the dramatic, close-up takeoff. My attention had been on frogs and flowers, and so I was guilty of not being ready for “now you don’t see it, now you do.”

The heron knows I’m here, so there’s no chance it will come back to its morning perch in the tree. In what I interpret as showing off after its escape, the big bird begins preening, using its dagger beak to rub its chest and get beneath its feathers, one outstretched wing at a time.

Meanwhile, the lazy morning meanders on along this 29-acre shallow flowage created by a dam on a slow and low river between the campground and village. I can’t say there’s stunning natural beauty here, or that the algal blooms riding murky green mats don’t smell. But I grew up along this river, so it’s all good with me.

The natural beauty is in the life on this nearly stagnant water. A kingfisher perches on a wire, silhouetted against the sky. An osprey flies over, a bald eagle circles. Though not known as a fishing lake, the heron, kingfisher, osprey and eagle know there are several species of fish “present,” as my Wisconsin lakes book puts it. Translated to avian language, there’s variety on the menu.

I begin looking at an array of wetland plants in late August: sweet flag, broadleaf cattail, and broadleaf arrowhead. Water plantain is in bloom with a spot of yellow at its base of three white petals. Pale smartweed blooms in drooping spikes of pink.

Jewelweed catches my eye. How can I not focus on the jewelweed? There hang the showy two-lipped flowers in reddish-orange with beads of dew on petals hiding a cornucopia-shaped pouch of nectar. Bees and hummingbirds know about the nectar. They use the lower lip of two fused petals as a landing pad.

Speaking of landing, a frog suddenly jumps and disappears below the muck, breaking my jewelweed fascination and concentration. I check for the heron. It’s still there. Perhaps I’ll get that chair.

Note: Want to read more nature essays like this? My book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through online book sellers and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tail), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwinds), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and in Duluth, Minn., at The Bookstore at Fitger’s. For a personally-signed copy, email me at davegreschner@icloud.com.

Month of the moth, and more

Our neighbors have a knack for seeing the little thing in nature. It helps that they tend to two gardens and two young boys; A child’s unburdened explorations reveal discoveries adults often overlook.

These folks just plain enjoy nature spinning its story in their yard. They wave us over for these discoveries—a baby hummingbird they nursed to independence, a flying squirrel living in a bird house, the clownish-striped caterpillars of monarch butterflies.

The other day it was a hawk moth, a fascinating creature less that two inches long, seemingly assembled with parts from a bee, hummingbird, wasp and dragonfly. Research revealed that these sweet feeders with long string-like tongues (proboscis) for probing flower tubes go by many names.

What we observed darting among blooming bee balm was a clear-winged hummingbird moth, also known as a hawk moth, from the sphinx moth family. They are daytime feeders, and if noticed at all are often assumed to be baby hummingbirds. However, baby hummingbirds don’t fledge until they are the size of their parents, and they don’t have antennae as do the sphinx moths.

So it’s August, and all that makes the month a mellow transition to the next season. Hawk moths, hummingbirds, and bees are pursuing the nectar of bee balm (bergamot in the wild). I walked away from the hawk moth in awe, wondering what else late summer will bring on days that dawn hazy but far from lazy as nature preps for autumn.

Spider webs glisten on the morning dew, the night work of the orb weaver spider, a dream weaver with visions of captured flies. The day drifts on as monarch butterflies squirm from chrysalids on milkweed with green pods. Tansies paint the roadsides yellow, and goldenrod takes the cue. Nearby Jerusalem artichokes nod approval as they bloom in the same hue.

Blackbirds whirl in synchrony and frenzy above fields of browning oats and barley. Bullfrogs poke their fat heads above the green scum of a warm lakeshore. Wild plums blush in purple, and clumps of mountain ash berries in deepening orange bow under their own weight. Squirrels scurry for green acorns, butternuts and walnuts.

I walk past field corn. Rope-like tassels, the male flower of corn, beg for a breeze to carry their pollen to the silk of young slender cobs in this business of manufacturing kernels. Somewhere, bears anticipate milk-stage corn.

I hear talk of tomatoes on a walk at sunset, a sunset 20 minutes earlier than two months ago. Where does summer go? It goes on the wings of Canada geese, their molt over, now flying against the dusky sky, adults and goslings alike, all with new flight feathers.

This evening, the Milky Way stretches across the sky, through the humid air, horizon to horizon. I wonder at its vastness. How many stars in it, how many creatures great and small under it? I wonder where the hawk moth is tonight.

Note: Want to read more nature essays like this? My book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through online book sellers and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Menomonie (Dragon Tail Books), Hudson (Chapter2Books), Spooner (Northwind), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and in Duluth, Minn., at Bookstore at Fitger’s. For a personally-signed copy, contact me at davegreschner@icloud.com.

Glistening in green

It’s June. The lupine moth is mint green. The vibrant hostas outside the patio doors are pea green. The bracken ferns along the trail are bright yellowish green. Green, green, and more green.

Greenness flows in waves and rows, across yards and to the forests and fields, to the trails and meadows. The forces and rhythms of nature’s rebirth stretch green to infinity. In my field of vision, green comes in all shades distinguishable; the human eye is said to pick up only 40 hues of green even though there are thousands or even infinite shades of the color.

I like how green streams through June, how it runs from the lawn to the meadow, to the rows of corn leading one’s eyes to the leafed-out woods. The color flows like verses in a poem, connected in visual rhyme, one purpose in time, leading spring into summer. I’m filled with the bloom of June.

The month glistens, wrote the poet James Russell Lowell. “And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, comes perfect days. Whether we look, or whether we listen, we hear the murmur, or see it glisten.”

In his “Succession of Four Sweet Months, Robert Herrick penned of June, “Next enters June, and brings us more gems than those two that went before.”

Gems indeed, on days so full that darkness defers for a time to the beauty. There are gems of campion and geraniums, their whites and purples dotting the greenness. Of daisy fleabane and wild roses, their yellows and reds dancing on a stage of green.

The fullness of June is breathtaking. I stare in awe, as well I should, as William H. Davies implored us to in “Leisure.” Davies penned, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare? No time to turn to Beauty’s glance, and watch her feet, how they can dance. A poor life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.”

Note: Want to read more nature essays such as this? My new book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through online book sellers and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Spooner (Northwinds), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and at Bookstore at Fitger’s in Duluth, Minn.

Tracing the transition

The landscape is changing, trying to make up its mind on its makeup, while on the lake a sliver of open water bounces between sheets of thin, dicey ice stretching to the shorelines. The ice is clear in places, shows shades of gray in other spots, with scant snow swept here and there.

It was only a week ago that trumpeter swans bobbed next to Canada geese across open water, both species plunging head-first below the surface to feed, leaving only their tail feathers and back end exposed. But cold nights this week have put a lid on the lake. Geese stand on the ice or crowd the shrinking water, probably discussing a move to the open river. The swans are gone.

There’s an allure in both the briskness and starkness of both landscape and lakescape as the first day of December arrives. It’s the beginning of meteorological winter, they say. The other day I worked in the woods, the ground bare except for decaying leaves and fallen branches. I gathered firewood, then built a campfire. I knew it was the end of autumn, both somber and stimulating in the hushed resignation of the woodlot.

Give me one more day, I always say, before the snow gets too tall on the boots and the fingers too cold on the saw. I must admit, there have been a lot of “one more days” this fall. It won’t last, because winter always comes, seemingly always in an unwelcome flurry. But that’s not really the case. Winter sends out early notices that it will be along soon, dropping white notes on the lawn and not paying much attention as the afternoon sun picks them up the next day.

Winter whispers through the doors and windows that it’s out there, packing its bags full of cold, snow and harsh winds. It always arrives, changing our attitudes, our routines, for better or for worse.

Changes, always changes. Accept them or resist them? There’s really no choice, I know, as today I trace the vastness and starkness of November handing off to December. The transition has been slow and agreeable so far. Nature has been given extra autumnal days to prepare, change and recharge. So have we.

Note: The black and white photo of the barred owl above may not have much to do with this blog other than that owls are easier to see in the bare branches of late autumn and winter. The owl however, like the one that befriended Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh, helps me announce that my book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” will be released by Cornerstone Press on Dec. 15. The posterized owl photo is one of 50 graphics in the book, accompanying 60 chapters, essays and journals on nature, wildlife and rural life, often in an introspective tone as I explore how we connect with the natural world.

Those interested in the book can preorder now, through Dec. 15, from Cornerstone Press at 20% discount off the $22.95 retail price. Cornerstone Press prefers that customers email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu to request a book, and Cornerstone will then email back an order form.

The book is also available now through online sites Amazon and Barnes & Noble (both $22.95), and Bookshop and Indiebound (both $21.34). Several bookstores will carry the book, including Dotters Books (Eau Claire) Old Bookshop (Rice Lake), and Honest Dog Books (Bayfield). I will also have copies available. Any questions can be sent to me through the comment section of this blog, or at my email davegreschner@icloud.com.

Choices on long days

It’s the first full day of summer, yesterday’s midday solstice behind us. I have 15 hours and 38 minutes to work with, or play with. What should I do as the sun takes its leisurly most northerly path, from sunrise in the northeast to sunset in the northwest?

Should I share the day with the skippers in the hay, trying to match their nonchalant ways as they bounce from daisy to daisy, drawn to oxeyes? Maybe I’ll look for agates in the dry creek, though maybe I’ll wait for the next hard rain to tumble them into view.

Should I ease into the morning with a cup of coffee on the quiet porch, or with a fishing rod on a quiet lake, the silence broken only by the call of a loon? That could also be saved for sunset, though I’m leaning towards a trout stream, watching brookies break the surface for mayflies, and for my imagination if not my imitation.

Also near sunset I could choose to walk with the cooling of the evening, perhaps seeing a deer doing the same as it tiptoes through corn rows or pauses in the fold of ferns to query my presence.

And the long hours between sunrise and sunset? What about them? I’ll watch a catbird at the bird bath, then walk a trail and make notes of tiny blossoms on brambles where green blackberries will begin their journey to sweetness.

Should I mow lawn or drive through the countryside and smell fresh-mown hay? I could follow a bumblebee or look for a walking stick—one the insect, the other a walking aid. I’ll check the bluebird box.

So many ways to go on long days in the greenness of June as nature takes up a myriad of matters in the extended light. The seasons turn on the solstice and the sun trails the corresponding path, keeping all in balance

Is there a solstice, a turning point, a path and balance in my own life? Am I on course, connecting the natural world with my inner self? There’s plenty of time to find out today.

The soul of the soil

There was a time when m0re of us were more in step with the soil in spring. Though I strive to be a steward of the land, I am not a planter of the land. Oh, what I miss because of that lost connection with the soil.

As a farm boy I watched my parents, our neighbors and my aunts and uncles work the land, plant seeds and wait for the magic of tiny sprouts of corn and oats. There was magic in the soil. Spring after spring.

These good people on small farms turned over the earth with small plows, only two- or three-share bottoms. Then they pulled disks and harrows over the furrows, back and forth, leveling the soil like smoothing a table cloth. The finished surface was a brown carpet ready for the oats drill or corn planter.

It was hard work, on a deadline, compounded by the lack of help since farm kids were still in school. I’d run from the bus to see a field transformed since morning. My dad, too, had changed, now focused on fields, not the milking chores.

A small wagon of seeds for corn, alfalfa and oats waited at the edge of the field while dad rushed to unhook the harrow and hook up the planter, all the time shouting out my duties over the puttering John Deere tractor.

I shuttled between the field and barn, helping dad plant, helping mom with milking the cows. Dad rolled through the fields until dusk. Dust in the dusk, and beyond.

Those farmers knew the land, loved the land, did what was best for the land. They knew when to plant each spring and recorded the dates on a wall in the granary or machine shed.

The fields were small, and sometimes so were the yields in summer and fall. But in the spring the hopes of crops wafted across the bare fields, those hopes and the earthy smell of soil settling into the souls of the stewards of the land.

The holler of spring

As I wait for spring, delayed again by yesterday’s 9-inch snowfall added to the already too-tall snowbanks, I close my eyes and see wild daffodils, bluebirds, a rushing creek, and little goats. Kids, you know.

Those images keep coming back, of my first spring this year, in the hills and hollers of northern Tennessee. On this second day of April, I drift back to a week in late February, 900 miles to the south, just across the Kentucky border. There’s no snow. It isn’t a dream.

Maple and hickory buds are swelling in soft hues of crimson and olive, feather brushing the tree-lined ridges as the transformation from stark to soft begins. From my nephew’s deck overlooking the valley of his goat ranch, I watch a bluebird pick at last fall’s crabapples. A meadowlark sings in the pasture. Remy, the old bird dog, stretches out in the morning sun, letting springtime warmth massage his tired bones.

In the valley is a narrow blacktop lane—move over and stop when meeting someone—that twists and climbs for two miles back to the main highway. Deep gullies drop away from both sides, to forests where beech trees hold their creamy leaves from last fall. Faded tobacco barns recall their past in clearings backed up against steep hills.

The sun has climbed over the tree line. From this log house, halfway up a hill of pasture and woodland, a vista stretches out in front of me of pastured goats, sheds and barns old and new, two creeks, and a few farmsteads further down the holler and up the next hill. Green branches of red cedar and wild bamboo bow over the creeks, while flocks of turkey vultures circle above.

There’s a small cemetery just up the hill from where the creek passes under a thick cement slab along the dirt driveway. The cemetery, its footprint no larger than a garage, is fenced off from seven docile, hairy Highland steers and cows. The Charlie Cothron Cemetery, with half a dozen crumbling head stones, is one of many family graveyards in Macon County.

My cemetery reverie is pierced by a juvenile bleat. The goats are kidding, I kid you not. I’ve picked out the tan 8-pounder I want to bring back to Wisconsin. Its long ears complement its long nose, with rectangular pupils cutting through marbled blue eyes. Just too cute. But then I watch the buck kid and his sister doe nursed by their protective mother, and I know the little guy needs to stay in Tennessee.

So I take photos of the kids, of the great blue heron in the creek, of the bluebirds, and of the yellow daffodils, which will run their course here before any dare show their petals in Wisconsin.

Oh, back to Wisconsin. I open my eyes, and it’s still white outside the window on the first Sunday in April. On the positive side, I’ll have two springs, the first in February in Tennessee, and then in northern Wisconsin, someday before May Day. I hope.

(Dave Greschner’s “Up North” column appears in the Friday print editions of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and the Ashland Daily Press, and on the Ashland newspaper’s website, normally a day or two ahead of the Friday newspaper.)

Did you bring beer?

Whew! I got that out of the way. Yup, ice fishing is out of my system for another winter. Or maybe not.

I’ve been going ice fishing once a year for some years now, just to know it hasn’t changed. I normally don’t catch fish, I get bored and cold, and when I’m convinced I won’t catch fish is when I wonder why anyone thinks cold beer on a cold lake in a cold wind tastes good.

Ice fishing is not in my blood, even if lutefisk is. My parents fished in the summer only, because in our family “no such thing as safe ice” was taken way too seriously. Even when ice skating on the flooded rink in our front yard I had to tie a rope from my belly to the cottonwood tree.

But on a mild morning last week I texted my brother-in-law about something we’d been threatening since Christmas. “How about today for ice fishing?” I asked. A cold front was moving in by mid-afternoon, so we made fast plans to meet at the lake by 11 a.m. Maybe we’d catch fish before catching cold.

I stopped for waxies and teardrops—oh, you thought I’m not well-versed in ice fishing—drove to the landing and rode in bro-in-law’s Jeep to a spot hugging the west shoreline, out of the breeze. Bro’s gas-powered auger started whining and churning, thank heavens, because I really didn’t have a good plan for puncturing 18 inches of ice other than a garage sale special manual auger with a dull blade.

(When I go ice fishing alone I walk rapidly across the lake as if I know where I’m going. In reality, I have no idea, knowing only that I’m scanning for a hole already drilled but recently abandoned, a hole with only a skim of ice on it. The drawback being that I don’t catch fish in the same place someone else didn’t catch fish.)

I was fishing within 10 minutes. But by 30 minutes I was slouching on my obligatory 5-gallon pail, gazing across the ice, sometimes at the sky, fighting boredom by counting ice shacks and thinking profound thoughts. My profoundness was interrupted by my partner’s “Did you bring beer?” No.

Then suddenly, a nibble, though in my state of negative chill I figured a cruising northern pike had bumped my waxie. But then the bobber moved enough to get my hand’s attention to yank into a tiny bluegill. I threw it back down the hole. A minute later I either caught it again or its twin.

Then came more serious bites, and more serious fish starting beaming up the shaft to daylight. I tossed them on the ice next to me like I always do (or don’t). I was getting quite a collection of fryer bluegills when it all ended during a tangled line interruption and a cold-front eruption riding an emboldened wind.

Snow devils raced and chased across the flat whiteness. Clouds ran away, and so did the fish. But there were enough bluegills for supper, with a matching contribution from my bro-in-law. So you know, I might just go ice fishing again. Seems I got it into my system, not out of my system.

(Blogger’s note: Yes, I know this Outdoor Journal blog has taken a lengthy hiatus—18 months to be exact, after a 15-month run from the blog beginning in May 2020 to its pause in September 2021. As Jackson Browne wrote in his “These Days” song, “Don’t confront me with my failures, I’m aware of them.” But here’s the deal: About the time I paused I was taking on another newspaper column weekly commitment, which includes a photo with each piece. Then I got serious about a book, which has been accepted by Cornerstone Press at UW-Stevens Point, with publication scheduled later this year. The book is a collection of nature essays and outdoor stories. I hope to keep this blog up, more like once a month than the ambitious once-a-week routine it began with. This would also be a good time to note that my Up North column appears in the Friday print editions of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and Ashland Daily Press, and on the Ashland newspaper’s website, normally a day or two ahead of the Friday newspaper. A condensed version of the outdoor column also appears in every Wednesday edition of the Rice Lake Chronotype.)

Tailing the butterflies

I curbed my fascination with monarch butterflies when the swallowtails showed up. I was standing in a hayfield, the August morning’s harvest of firewood stacked in the trailer. I took my camera and walked into the blooming red clover.

There were half a dozen or more monarchs within my camera range. This was good news, or good views, for several years ago I stood in this same spot and was lucky to see a monarch or two. Are they recovering with our awareness of how much a milkweed plant means to a monarch butterfly? Or was I witnessing the early signs of migration, when monarchs gather in groups and roost by the hundreds in trees.

I’ve seen the roosting once, as a child, in the giant cottonwood tree of our farmyard. There were hundred of monarchs on the trunk and the lower branches on an afternoon in September. I’ve never forgotten the sight, and have not seen it since. But I keep looking.

As impressive is the monarch with wings in varying shades of orange, and white and yellow spots on the black borders, my eye was suddenly captured by an even larger butterfly. The giant and tiger swallowtails (giant swallowtail in photo above) were also probing the red clover, extending their proboscis tubes into the purple sweetness.

At 6 inches, the wingspan of a swallowtail is at least 2 inches wider than a monarch. It also has those tails protruding from the rear wings, which the monarch doesn’t have. And, with yellow and deep brown wings with dots of orange and blue here and there, an argument could be made that the swallowtail is as colorful as the monarch.

But there is one big difference in the two species. The monarchs we see now are the last of two or three generations to hatch in these parts this summer. Monarchs summering on their breeding range will only live a month, give or take a week. That is, except for the last generation we now see in August. These monarchs will live up to 9 months, and they are the ones that will make the incredible flight of nearly 2,000 miles to the forests of central Mexico, where they hibernate.

Unlike birds, overwintering monarchs in Mexico will not return to our northland. They will start out in February, lay eggs in the southern states and then die. Young monarchs will pick up the chase northward.

But the swallowtail will not fly south. Like monarchs, the swallowtails’ life expectancy in our summer midst is short—about a month. This will continue until the last eggs are laid and the swallowtails’ larvae caterpillars emerge. Before frost, those caterpillars will turn into pupas on several types of plants and also tree twigs.

Tiny butterflies overwinter inside the pupa, or chrysalis, with butterflies emerging when the weather warms in spring. It can be a long wait for a monthlong life as a fluttering butterfly.

So I stand in the field of clover, the monarchs and butterflies all about me. In a few weeks, some will fly thousands of miles, others will lay eggs and give up their lives. Now, I am fascinated with swallowtails, too.