Category: Spring

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.)

Her paths are peace

“Walk with nature, her paths are peace.”

The narrow footpath snaked between the trees, bushes and emerging ferns. On the way to the main lake the trail followed the shoreline of a shallow bay, about 10 big steps from the stagnant water, strewn with trees that had gone down and now served as sunbathing platforms for turtles.

It was a quiet afternoon in May. Quiet save for the melodies of birds, most notably the notes of the rose-breasted grosbeaks. It was so tranquil, so peaceful, that the words, “Walk with nature, her paths are peace,” kept easing through my mind.

The words graced a framed poster I had many years ago, a gift from my parents who must have seen the budding naturalist in me as I progressed from my teens to young manhood. I assumed at the time the words came from a Bible passage.

The verse was overlaid on a scene of a welcoming trail winding between large trees, with the splintered sun shooting a ray onto the path. I wish I could see that poster again, but somewhere in half a dozen moves through college and early job days, it was lost.

I tried to find if the exact verse existed, but my Biblical search only came as close as Proverbs 3:17: “Her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” The “her,” however, in this instance refers to wisdom, not nature.

There is wisdom in nature, so perhaps the poster creator took liberty with the verse. It doesn’t matter, for my search took me down intriguing paths, one that led to naturalist John Muir’s words, “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

Muir also wrote, “Nature’s peace will flow into you as the sunshine flows into trees.”

My search also found Henry David Thoreau, who penned, “An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

On this afternoon, on this pathway to my fishing spot, nature was teeming but peaceful. Turtles lazed in the sun. I heard frogs. The newly-arrived songbirds’ melodies rippled through the air. The honking of two geese reverberated across the lake and then was swallowed by the calm water surface, which shared the blue hue of the sky. A great blue heron stalked fish nearby, and I could hear its wings when it lifted off.

I sat in awe on the shoreline, thinking nature doesn’t make a sound that is not peaceful, nor a path that is not peace. I thought about having never found that exact verse, but having found many times what it told me.

No overlooking spring

As I walk along a trail this morning I am surrounded by spring—the birds, buds, flowers, blossoms, and even the fresh smell of the season. I’m reminded that there’s something new emerging or migrating my way every day. When will the first trillium show? When will the chesnut-sided warbler land in front of me?

I am engrossed in spring, always on the verge of uncontrolled exhilaration and anticipation. But it wasn’t always that way. When I was a boy, spring was something that happened while I was riding bike or playing ball. When I wasn’t pedaling I was bouncing rubber balls off the house foundation or milkhouse while the countryside all around me was showing an amazing rebirth that I largely ignored.

Oh, sure, I took notes of frogs and tadpole eggs in the creek, and the cottonwood tree’s profuse shedding of white catkins. But I paid little attention to the arrival of songbirds, wildflowers popping through the leaf litter, the buds of lilacs and blossoms of wild plums, or the winter constellation Orion the Hunter slipping out of sight behind the glow of a spring evening’s twilight.

All these years later, I’m looking over what I overlooked in those early years. Spring. With the knowledge of the years and yet with the wonder of a child, I’m amazed every day now at what’s happening around me. And there’s plenty yet to learn. What bird is that? What bush is producing those stunning white, fragrant blossoms? (I’m quite sure the photo accompanying this blog is of pin cherry blossoms from along my path today.)

One morning this spring without fanfare the ospreys returned. One silently inspected its high nesting perch, while its mate was no doubt fishing in the nearby lake, which was freed of ice just over a month ago. The pair have come all the way from Central America to make our neighborhood their summer home again.

And now, as I walk along, there is the wood duck coming and going from its tree cavity on the edge of the marsh. A ruffed grouse is drumming, red-winged blackbirds are working the cattails, crimson buds are decorating red maples, and tiny green leaves are dotting sugar maples, just as an oriole with its breathtaking color alights on a branch.

I take it all in. I watch and listen as a child.

The way of May Day

The spring wildflowers of my childhood were all spring beauties or May flowers. It would be many years later that I learned there actually was a flower called spring beauty, but that May flowers weren’t the name of a particular flower, rather a general term for any wildflower blooming in May.

My childhood days included picking the spring flowers for May baskets. I’m sure I picked spring beauties along with others I would come to identify, such as hepatica and bloodroot. Now, memories fill me when I see the emerging whites and pinks of flower petals in the greening woodlands and along trails.

It’s May Day today. When I was a kid the May Day tradition was encouraged by teachers with an activity project. I rushed home from school in the late afternoon, disappeared in the woods for a time and returned with wildflowers in a small paper basket made in school. I proudly presented them to my mother, who gushed over their beauty and my thoughtfulness. (Many times my dad had already picked flowers, and mom would have two bouquets.)

Then, at the urging of my mother, I picked another handful and arranged them in a small basket my mother supplied. She thought it would be nice to take them to the elderly woman across the road. I happily obliged, for there was a prize for my surprise delivery.

I handed my offering to the neighbor woman. In return, there were cookies and, more importantly, a scooter that was once their children’s waiting for me to ride. She told me, as she had many times, where the scooter was behind the thick white door of an old shed.

With one foot on the scooter and the other kicking up dust and momentum, I passed their barn on my way to a creek that slipped beneath the driveway. There, I lingered a bit to look for frogs. Then I returned the scooter to the shed, where it would be tucked safely away in the darkness until maybe another ride that summer, or surely next May Day.

The years went by, and our elderly farm neighbors passed the farm along to their son’s family and moved to town. I moved, too, and many May Days I wasn’t home to bring wildflowers—always “nice ones”—to my mom. But at some point during the spring I would. The tradition continued in one form or another. Until last year.

My mother is gone now. But I remember. I hope anyone with a mother or grandmother, or a friend, thinks about showing the kindness of a May basket today. Or any day in May would be fine.

Rainy Day Frog

I really don’t need to know how much it rains. I am not a farmer, gardener or dam gate keeper. So this matter of placing a rain gauge in the perfect spot and then checking it after each rain is borne of my background; my dad was a farmer.

It just seems like something I should carry on, like searching for agates and butternuts. And, since I’m now known to have a rain gauge which I check and empty faithfully, I get asked often, “How much we get?”

Earlier this spring after a fairly steady overnight rain, I held the glass gauge at eye level to read 2 inches. Exactly 2 inches. And then it hit me. I really do need to know simply because I really do want to know. And I want to know because no one else is going to give me the exact measurement of how much it rained in my yard, or even on my end of town.

But rain gauges are work beyond the checking and emptying. One must be a gauge of temperatures, too, for on spring nights and again in autumn when the mercury is dipping toward the freezing mark, the gauge must come indoors, lest a quick shower is followed by clearing skies and freezing temps.

I’ve been caught several times, usually in the fall. The water in the gauge freezes, the glass breaks, and there’s a trip to the store for a $1.88 new glass cylinder. The new cylinder is shiny and clean, and the numbers easy to read. However, it comes with a cheap tin holder to tack to the deck railing or post, or an equally cheap plastic wedge to shove in the ground, at which point the wedge promptly breaks.

I toss the holders away, for we have a heavy, bluish-green metal frog who is all too happy to hold the cylinder and be called Rainy Day Frog. Rainy Day stands upright 6 inches on his front legs so his front feet and mouth touch the ground when the rod, which is attached under his wide gaping mouth, is poked into the lawn.

The frog always makes me smile with its eyes bulging and its legs rising and bent to form a diamond shape. And Rainy Day appears to be smiling back at me, probably because he always knows before I do how much it rained.

To the creek

May I go to the creek as a child again? I’ll put my shoes and socks on this rock.

I hope I can.

But where to put these worries and fears? Will the gurgling creek waters carry away the troubles?

And the tears?

Perhaps so, with help from the frogs and my memories. Of carefree evenings by the water.

Buds on the trees.

Of following a creek that only flowed in the spring. Cool water on my toes, frog eggs in a jar.

Birds with red wings.

A killdeer ran scolding through the pasture. A tractor groaned through its plowing chore in the field.

Was I ever happier?

I’d jump to the large flat rock in the small pond. Frogs leaped for cover. I stared at water spiders.

I’d stay too long.

Mom shouted for supper. I’d catch one more frog. Let it go and know I’d hear it in the night.

Through the fog.

May I go to the creek as a child again? I’ll put my worries and fears on this rock. Then I’ll close my eyes and listen.

I think I can.

Chatter on the pond

“Frogs.” My wife looked at the pond to our right, the pond hugging the narrow dirt road splitting the woods. “Do you hear them?”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to admit my lesser hearing. Not when it comes to nature.

“Do you hear the frogs? Don’t you hear them?” she asked again.

I rolled down the truck window. I could hear something. I shut the truck off, and immediately the drone of the engine was replaced with the chattering and clattering chorus of the pond. “Yeh,” I said, “I hear them.”

It was the first Sunday in April. Easter Sunday. With the temperature nudging 80˚, we went for a ride. Where the blacktop ended and the choice was three dirt roads that snaked away through the woods, we took the left option. I had taken it before, on spring fishing outings.

For the next mile, the road slightly dipped and climbed, and twisted a bit, with the lake only a narrow strip of woods away. Cabins were nestled among the trees. Well, not quite nestled in early April for there were no leaves to nestle them.

There were a handful of ponds on either side the dirt lane. After hearing the frogs, we sat for a long time, and the chorus grew louder. The frogs grew braver.

“Why can’t we see them?” my wife asked. And no more had she posed the question when the dimples of mouths and eyes started breaking the water surface.

There were bulging eyes everywhere. As I tried to photograph the frogs—what little of them there was to photograph—some frogs would shoot forward as if to chase a nearby frog. It seemed there was more going on here than just singing for joy in the choir on a summery April afternoon.

My wife shot a short video, the sweeping picture of the pond accompanied with the sound, its decibels climbing the longer we sat quiet on the road. It wasn’t a peeping sound. It was a constant clicking noise with no rhythm and yet a constant beat. So it was not the spring peepers’ shrill whistles, but rather the wood frogs’ sharp and raspy clack and perhaps the tree frogs’ fast-repeating calls of quank. Though not an expert in herpetology, I’d put my money on the wood frog.

It was one of those first days of real spring when you could have sat on a log next to the pond, closed your eyes, and let your ears soak up the rebirth of a season.

Pairing up for life

They’re paired up now, on the edge of lakes and rivers, where the cattails and grasses meet the open water, and in the marsh and ponds and wet fields. Canada geese are standing, walking, feeding, and floating, two at a time.

On a chilly day in early spring, I find warmth in this recurring scene of pairing and, we’re told, devotion. Canada geese mate for life or, taking the “death do us part” to heart, until they lose a mate to illness, accident or hunter’s gun. Only then will they choose another mate, and it may be a struggle to do so.

These birds are loyal to their mates over a dozen years or more of breeding and nesting. How long has that pair I’m looking at been together? Geese begin breeding as early as two years old, and can live more than 20 years.

But how does a goose that has lost its mate find another? Does it start looking in the flocks of fall and winter when the mating pairs are only loosely connected?

I saw three geese at the lakeshore the other day. Two floated close to each other while the other walked the shoreline. Suddenly the larger of the two birds in the water spread its wings and made a flapping, seemingly mad run at the bird on shore, chasing it off a ways.

Was the bird that was chased the odd goose out? Had it lost its mate and was looking to steal another’s mate? Where would it find companionship in its spring urge to nest, in its inherent obligation to sustain the species?

Later I walked next to a cornfield where ten geese intermittently watched me and picked at the waste grain atop the moist soil. As I drew closer I could tell the birds were loosely paired, even in feeding.

The female goose will soon be on her dozen eggs for nearly a month while the male stands and swims guard. For as long as it takes. For life.

Cloak of winter lifted

When the sun yawned on the eastern horizon on the first day of spring only one cloud stood in its wake-up way. That cloud, narrow and jagged, painted a temporary design on the reddish sphere. And then it went wherever clouds go.

The sun cleared the clutter and claimed the morning. And the day. It had already inhaled the snow over the previous weeks. Now it was intent on warming the nesting feelings in arriving birds. It was also awakening the flutter in our spring’s earliest butterfly.

By afternoon, mourning cloaks were flopping and flitting about in the yard. I had to check a butterfly guide to confirm what I was looking at. It all rushed back to me—the mourning cloak’s overall dark appearance making the cream-colored border on its wings stand out. The top of its wings are a deep brown, with a band of bluish dots on black tracing the golden rim.

Our best look at a mourning cloak is normally when it alights on something and folds its wings. The underside of those wings is dark charcoal, but again the creamy rim distinctly marks the butterfly’s 3-inch wingspan. Note that the wing edges may appear ragged from the wear of its long life in butterfly terms.

We admire monarch butterflies for their thousands of miles migration flight to winter in Mexico. But on the other end of the spectrum, we might want to give some love to the non-migrating mourning cloak. Yes, it overwinters in butterfly form, not as an egg or larvae. It stays out of the snow by tucking into a hole or crevice in a tree or unheated outbuilding.

This mild hibernation, called diapause, actually takes a fluttering pause on some unusually mild winter days. Say it’s a sunny afternoon well into the 40˚s in late winter. The mourning cloak may emerge for a short flight. For the most part, however, the butterfly stays sheltered, and it’s this winter adult form that makes the mourning cloak one of the longest living butterflies, even if that life is only 10 months.

We, too, like those rare thawing days in winter. But what finally brings us out are the spring days of sunshine, when sap leaks from the maple tree trunk and branches. That’s where I saw the mourning cloaks taking aim, and it all makes sense, for our first butterfly is a sap feeder, seeking out anything sugary.

I watched this marvel of the butterfly world. In the vernal equinox sun, the flight of the mourning cloak warmed me, knowing our winged creatures were reappearing in the reawakening countryside.

Ready for bluebirds

As March melts toward what we hope is the spring of April, anticipation must be building for gardeners. Though my parents had big and bountiful gardens on the farm, for some reason I don’t have the itch or niche for raising vegetables. I will let others enjoy the garden and will barter for their produce when it comes of age.

My March days are full of anticipation of what’s coming to the fields, not the gardens, and I’m not talking about alfalfa, clover and corn. I’m dreaming of bluebirds on sunny, warm spring days. I’m working on their lodging so it’s ready when their flight arrives.

A few weeks ago, as March dawned like a house cat rather than a lion, I got at the task immediately, while the field was still covered with several inches of crusted snow. But considering the speed with which that snow was leaving, and the promising longe-range forecast, I knew bluebirds could arrive early. I usually note their return the first week in April. But March has been noted in my journal before, and could be again this spring.

I keep adding nesting boxes—there are now five—but the one the bluebirds prefer was the first I ever built. It was rather crude, made of weathered shed boards from an uncle’s farm. One spring I replaced it with something bigger and better (I thought) and moved the original a couple of hundred yards farther north on the edge of the field, where it meets the town road ditch.

When the bluebirds returned, they promptly found and claimed the box that I moved—their old home—proving new and improved isn’t always better. The tree swallows took over my new project, as they have at other boxes intended for bluebirds. So be it; the two species get along fine in the same neighborhood, which also has bobolinks nesting near the ground in the hayfield.

Several years ago I improved ventilation in all boxes in hopes of helping the birds and their chicks survive prolonged days of hot sun; one July I found dead bluebird chicks in the nest after a brutal stretch of heat. Last year, I repaired a rotted corner of the tree swallows’ box with a piece of aluminum cut from a Leinenkugel’s beer can. The swallows didn’t mind the advertising. This spring, the boxes pretty much needed only cleaning, though one roof required refastening.

During the inspection, I was pulling old grass and cottony seed balls of goldenrod from one box when something jumped from the nest mess. A short-tailed shrew hit the snow and scampered for long grass. A shrew shack! I was wearing gloves, but nevertheless found a stick to finish the clean-out.

After a walk through the woods, sinking several inches into the granulated, melting snow, I started back through the field toward the road. I passed the readied bird boxes, wondering when bluebirds and swallows will return to this field, along with bobolinks and meadowlarks. The day was warm enough, with a blue sky, that it felt it could be any hour. But I knew it was several weeks away. Spring will come; it always does. The bluebirds will tell me when.