take a close look…

there’s a lot going on here. there are the bouquets of maple blossoms, and beneath them the stringy unfurling leaves, and beneath them the burst petals of the original buds, and below them the segmented branches with additional buds that will not be leaves but new branches someday. and if you were looking up into this maple tree tonight around dusk you would have seen the first dartings of insects among these blossoms and the darting after those insects of the season’s first warblers. a little closed seasonal world in the top of a single tree.

sugar maple tree blossoms

feeling puny

these tiny siberian scilla, or squill, are coming up along our driveway in pastel blue waves right now. despite knowing that they are invasive, i love seeing them because they are one of our first doses of color after the snow melts. unfortunately i am missing this little pageant because i have managed to catch some kind of flu, just in time for spring, after surviving all winter intact. tomorrow will be day four of prostrating fatigue, headaches, chills and fever, and a sore abdomen from coughing so hard. these little flowers are puny. but not as puny as i feel right now. happy spri…cough hack wheeze…spring.

blue scilla (siberian squill)

ovenbird

ovenbirds are one of those birds you hear all summer long if you spend any time in the north woods, to the extent that their call becomes a little bit monotonous. like the red-eyed vireo, or the phoebe, or the eastern wood peewee, or even, on the occasional sleepless summer morning around 4:00 am, when all you want is to turn over for another couple of hours of sleep, the infuriatingly persistent american robin. it’s awfully hard to see an ovenbird in person, though. because their green backs blend so perfectly with the deep woods where they sing anonymously all day long. it was a melancholy pleasure, therefore, to see an ovenbird this morning on my rear deck. his head and body bent into a most gracefully sinuous line that displayed his spotted beauty, and told the tale of his violent collision with our window. we’re very sorry, well-dressed stranger. we would much rather have been bored by your cheerful call all summer than made your acquaintance under these circumstances.

body positive

today we are celebrating all the leaf shapes. The rotund, the pear-shaped, the oddly protruberant, the whisper thin, the many-limbed, the damaged, the dark hued, the light-skinned, the spotted, the native, the nonnative, the tiny, the classic, the irregular, the asymmetrical, the topheavy, the left-leaning, the right-leaning, the flocked, the hairy, the bald. the big tent flap is right over there. please let yourself in.

pressed leaves

long views on the last day in april

all the buds are swollen, and some leaves have begun to burst, but the trees around here have yet to start seriously leafing out, which means that i currently have long sight lines through the woods that will quickly be strangled by the fingers of fully leaved tree branches. this also means that i will collect fewer things on my walks over the next few months, because there will simply be less to see through the vegetation. and that means that the productiveness of today’s relatively short walk should be celebrated. which is why i am celebrating.

northern woodland nature finds from one walk