Category: Spring

Learning of larks

Horned larks are messing with my eyes and challenging my photography efforts. And now, these masked birds with horns are giving me a devil of a time wondering where they spend their winters.

A birding friend of mine used to let me know when horned larks started showing up along the roads. He was a birdwatcher and a bartender—I don’t know if the two have a correlation—and he was excited about this first sign of spring in the bird seasons of northern Wisconsin. I assumed he meant the horned larks were migrating here. He has passed, so my opportunity to ask has also passed.

It always seems too early to see the horned larks. And they are tough to see, fading into the brown grasses and dirty snowbanks along roads as early as the last days of February, and certainly by the first week in March. A horned lark is creamy-hued with streaks of tan and a yellow face. It has a black patch on its throat and a line of black above its bill, extending under its eyes and down its cheeks, giving the appearance of a mask or handlebar mustache.

And it has those tiny horns atop its head. The horns are, of course, feathers, but with the “mask” give the bird a menacing look. That is, if you can get close enough for a look. When I’m walking next to fields this time of year I normally don’t see the bird until it takes flight from a snowbank or patch of grass, sometimes only 25 feet away.

I hold my camera ready, but inevitably the camouflaged lark is taking off before I see it. Normally there’s a loose, spread-out flock of several birds. Every day I vow to see the horned larks before they fly. I don’t. The photo above? Well, I got sort of lucky but at long range, from one field to another across a town road.

Now, with more study of horned larks, I learn that some of the birds may overwinter here if there’s scant snow and they can find natural seeds. However, they prefer bare ground, so I’m sure most of the larks are following bare ground northward. When bird books show horned larks are year-round residents in Wisconsin, the part of the state being referred to is probably well to the south.

So, “our” horned larks in March are either migrating here or through here from areas to the south, or if some spent the winter here they are now more visible as they peck at seeds along baring road shoulders. Either way, horned larks lifting off from ditches in late winter is one of our earliest signs of spring. They will be nesting by April in northern Wisconsin and well into Canada.

March produces the most sightings of horned larks in Wisconsin. I’ll keep my camera at ready and my eyes focused for a yellow face on the roadsides of March.

Stirrings of spring

So you think spring is stirring in your bones. Whatever fever you’re feeling, it’s probably not as strong as the migration tug in birds to the south of us these March days.

Spring is stirring in not only the bones of birds, but also in their brains—yes, bird brains—urging them to point their beaks northward and get on with what’s arousing their feathers, tingling their wings. It’s the stirring of migration and nesting, the need to nuture a family. It’s the awakening once again to get on with the survival of the species.

A migration study has found that birds’ urge to fly north in the spring has such an urgency that they make their spring return journey to our yards, fields and forests two to six times faster than their southward flight in fall. Scientists are now tracking entire migration routes, speeds and stopover locations of individual songbirds, using tiny geolocators, the first tracking devices small enough and light enough for songbirds to carry.

Weighing a fraction of an ounce, geolocators don’t slow the flight, say scientists. One female purple martin was tracked averaging 358 miles a day while winging northward more than 4,500 miles in only 13 days. That’s nearly four times faster than scientists previously thought. (Come to think about it, translating wings to tires, the 358 miles a day would also be pretty good for traveling cross-country by car or RV.)

Not only are we finding that birds migrate at a faster flight speed in spring than previously thought, we are also finding that the fall migration is more leisurely, with long layovers. Could it be that after all the hustle and bustle of nesting is over the birds simply slow down, take a breather and enjoy themselves?

But come spring, they feel the overwhelming urge to travel and stake a claim in the northland (as was the scarlet tanager in the above photo from a past spring). They’re feeling the urge to build a nest and raise young. They’re feeling it right now, a thousand or more miles away. Your bluebird, your robin, your oriole, your hummingbird—yes, all of them and more—are booking a flight to travel swift and light.

The flow of green

Greenness flows in waves and rows now, across the yards, forests, fields and meadows of late spring. In my field of vision is green in all shades imaginable, until the hues seemingly stretch the color to infinity.

Some color experts say the hues of green are, indeed, infinite. Others put a number on green hues, that number in the thousands. Whichever, considering green light’s wavelengths, the human eye may be able to distinguish 40 hues of green, say some doctors.

I like green and how it flows in early June. Flowing like verses in a poem, connected in visual rhyme, one purpose in time, leading spring into summer.

Wrote the poet James Russell Lowell:

“And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come 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:

“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 robin eggs and wild geraniums, blues and purples dotting the greenness. Of sulfurs and cardinals, yellows and reds dancing among the fullness of green.

The fullness is breathtaking. I stare in awe, as well I should. As William H Davies implored us to in “Leisure.”

“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.”

Little things in the shadows

It’s the little things that make up the big picture of nature. When we look across the woodlands, back yards and flower gardens, do we see the understory, figuratively and literally? In a reverse of the old saying: Sometimes we can’t see the trees for the forest. Yes, sometimes we should get lost in the details of tiny scenes of beauty.

I was taking photos of trilliums one morning when the shadow of a fern appeared on the flower’s white petals. I say “appeared,” for it was seemingly suddenly there, or so I thought. But it was there all along, begging me to see it, and I didn’t notice until I studied the photo composition in the camera lens.

The photo became more than that of a trillium in bloom. And though I often avoid direct sunshine in nature photography, here it worked, bursting the greens of the fern out of the darkness of the forest floor, with the red of another blooming flower in sharp contrast of the black backdrop.

We have to train ourselves to see, for nature truly does conceal its mysteries, especially its small mysteries. And so, as spring greens toward summer, what can we look for as we hike along a woodland trail or survey the back yard? There have been bumblebees in our herb garden, but until I look closely, I have no idea what sweetness they might be pursuing in early June. Lungwort? I will look.

I see white-throated sparrows in the front yard, and I know they must have a nest in the bushes next to the house. Maybe I can see their cup-like nest, only inches off the ground, with inch-long, pale blue eggs distinctively marked with blotches of reddish brown and lavender.

Is that a frog’s eyes just above the pond surface? A toad flattened out in the mulch? Ladybug beetles on hostas? Spittlebug in the green tansies? What are those dainty blossoms of soft hues on bushes every direction I turn? Oh, there’s a caterpillar on the underside of a milkweed’s emerging leaf.

What am I seeing? What am I missing?

Leeks for campers

So far I’ve left the adventure of seeking for leeks to my in-laws while Northwoods camping in late spring. I’ve also left the cleaning and cooking of leeks to my sister-in-law. But I readily partake in the tastiness of this wild vegetable.

I didn’t know much about leeks until a few years back when my brother-in-law and his wife showed me where the low, broad-leafed vegetable grew wild in the wooded area behind their rural home. I’ve always avoided mushrooms for fear of picking the wrong kind, so I didn’t think wild harvesting in spring was meant for me. I head for the natural stuff in late summer to pick blackberries and wild plums and gather butternuts.

But there they were, wild leeks with wide, green leaves rising half a foot above ground and thickening near the ground into a bundle of leaf sheaths, which disappear below the surface into a short, oblong bulb with roots. So the edible part is from the bundle of sheaths to just above the roots, I’m told. All I know is that the edible part of the wild leek smells like onion and tastes like mild onion with a hint of sweetness, however that is possible.

On our Memorial Day family camping trip, my inlaws found leeks, and they were sautéed with other vegetables in a tasty side dish to the main meal of salmon slices over a campfire. It all went well with the beverage of each one’s choice, with my German heritage coming out with my choice (always) of full-bodied beer.

I’m now reading everything I can about leeks, how they have 12 vitamins and six minerals, how they can replace all the greens and spices in a recipe, including spinach, garlic and onions, a culinary fact reinforced for me by naturalist Emily Stone of the Cable Natural History Museum.

My spring woodland hikes are now more than about wildflowers and finding what winter left behind. I’ve discovered leeks.

The Comfort of Spring

What is the comfort in the return to something familiar? Why does it feel that good to return to what we know, what we like, what is comfortable? Perhaps we are returning, in spirit or flesh, to where we were happiest.

Spring is a return, a happy return, to what we like, what we know will be pleasant, what we remember as being exciting—creeks and frogs, buds and grass, exploration along trails abandoned since last fall, save for four-legged travelers. And perhaps it explains the excitement and pleasure in another return, that of numerous songbirds who once again have chosen our yard, our tree, our box on a field post to start anew with nests and chicks and the whole propagation of the species.

The return of birds now dominates the conversation of at least the folks I hang around with. A friend calls daily to report new sightings—a loon, killdeer, bluebird and oriole. The sightings turn competitive. Who sees what first? Through it all there’s comfort in the normalcy of migration. For what if the birds didn’t return?

But somehow in all the comfort there’s a little irritation, a sticker in the stock, for birds not easily identified suddenly appear and just as suddenly flit away. It drives me crazy.

I came around the corner on a woodland trail the other day and half a dozen rust-colored birds danced away through the leafless branches. Rust-colored and 6 to 8 inches long is all I could gather. And now I wonder: Veery? Brown thrush? No matter what, they returned. They were here. I found comfort in that.

Patience in spring

The word patience came across my reading twice in the past couple of days, causing me to consider patience in regard to spring. In my birding journal that includes tidbits and quotes about birds, it’s noted that Ralph Waldo Emerson advised, “Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.”

Spring pretty much arrives grudgingly, haltingly every year. We wait, impatiently, through too many March and April days that are too cold, too windy, too wet, too gray. There are good days, only to have spring fever dashed suddenly with frost and flurries.

But nature is patient, on a course sometimes fast, sometimes slow but always headed for green grass, singing frogs, budding trees, nesting songbirds. Robins are a picture of patience, arriving on our lawns and then waiting for thawing soil to give up worms.

Grass perks up on a warm day, only to wait again under a light covering of snow. Walleyes wait for the right water temperature to spawn. Swans wait in field ponds before continuing their trek northward.

In “Grace for the Moment,” Max Lucado says patience is freely offered, citing a verse from the book of Galatians, “The Spirit produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience.”

With patience, we will see the joy and peace in nature and fall in love with nature, which is quite amazing every day, whether that day is chilly or warm, windy or calm, wet or dry, gray or bright with sunshine.