Motley Chanteuses and Nanokames

Spring is stuttering and stumbling in slowly, like a drunk after last call having some trouble getting the key in the front door.  I've been there myself, but I always managed to get through the door, and so will spring.

The return of migratory bird species is among the first signs of the impending warm-up.  I was greeted by my first rather frozen looking robin of the season a few days before St. Patrick's Day this year.  The earliest ones always look a little indignant to me when the weather turns back to snow and cold -- as do the rest of us, I guess.

I look forward most to the brightly adorned, wee warblers that will soon make their way through.  These are some of the most musically gifted songbirds we get around here, crooners every one.  They flit and sing from understory to canopy and most everywhere in between, bright little harbingers of spring.  For years I've intended to finally learn how to identify them each by their individual song, but here we sit on the cusp of yet another migratory warbler concert, and I remain wholly unable to distinguish between Yellow-throated, Chestnut-sided, and Blackburnian solely by their teeny chirps and whistles.  Not to mention the near-countless others.  Somehow I'm fully capable of digesting four straight hours of Game of Thrones in preparation for the upcoming season, but I can't get around to learning warbler songs.  That pretty much exemplifies how priorities can sometimes run askew.

The Sandhill Cranes have returned as well, though they've remained hidden from view, betrayed only by their prehistoric clattering calls as they traverse the sky.  Grackles and geese too, the vernal parade begins anew.

Even the birds who never parted for warmer climes are more active now.  There are a couple of male cardinals, for instance, who now pose and posture in front of the single, demure female resident seemingly all day long.  I believe the trio consists of a mated pair and an interloper.  When the uninvited suitor arrives on the scene, the mated male will crouch forward on his branch and spread his wings low and wide to ward off the hopeful bachelor, looking for all the world like he's bowing in some imperial court.  He chases the intruder off time and again, but the unwed male is relentless in his attempts to woo the female away.  Like bar time again.

Nuthatches creep and hop improbably upside down on hardwood trunks.  For such a small bird they certainly do carry on with those surprisingly strident yank yanks!  Last year a pair nested right outside the dining room window in a natural cavity, where I witnessed for the first time their so-called "sweeping" behavior.  According to my extensive research (I clicked on two Google results), Nuthatches will find a particularly stinky bug or other wisp of debris, hold it in their bill, and "sweep" their doorstep with it in order to mask their own scent from predators like squirrels and raccoons.  I knew nothing of any of that until I watched it happen one evening last year, stuffing a Reuben into my gob.

Trickle inspection can be even more gratifying with a partner

I'm a longtime proponent of trickle gazing, and there have been plenty of opportunities for that in recent days.  After the third coldest winter in local history, the snow pack is finally giving in to sun, and everything is a glorious, gooey mess on the ground.  The standard gravel driveway glaciation has retreated in the form of perfectly delightful rills and tiny streams at all sides.

And while I playfully choose to employ the term "glaciation" to denote that the driveway was covered with receding sheets of ice, it's not without a purpose here.  As I was enjoying the last of the ice retreat and cogitating on all things kettle and moraine one warm evening, I noticed a natural phenomenon, writ infinitesimal, coming to fruition directly from the pages of my Earth Science textbooks of yore.  I'd venture it's exceedingly rare to happen upon a demonstration of fluvial glacial geoformation happening right before your eyes, but that is precisely what took place, albeit it on a minuscule scale.

Dundee Mountain, a moulin kame, from afar

Dundee Mountain, though perhaps a bit enthusiastically monikered, rests comfortably nestled in the Northern Kettle Moraine State Forest not far from here.  More of a conical hill than a mountain, it's nothing more than a pile of glacial till.  A kame, by name and definition.

A kame is a type of hill left behind by a glacier, put plainly.  Sometimes they are irregularly shaped, but to my mind, the most iconic among them are the blatantly conical examples.  Sand and gravel are deposited by a meltwater river in a depression on the top of a retreating glacier.  With further regression of the glacier those materials are deposited in a pile on the ground surface.  Boom.  Kame.

In the case of our vastly smaller example, the depressions atop the driveway "glacier" in question were formed by dark spots under the ice (last year's plantain and lambsquaters, specifically) causing it to melt faster in those areas.

Snow melt runs across and down the driveway in this area, and often forms a surface better suited to hockey than driving, but that's the way it's gonna be until somebody regrades that entire section of driveway and yard.  When the melt happens with enough vigor, the runoff carries with it some of the sand and gravel hurled up into the adjacent snowbanks by the plow.

And when the ice is finally all gone we're left with little piles of sand and gravel, formerly retained in their weedy depressions, deposited onto the surface of the driveway.  When the vegetation that caused the depressions and holes in the first place rots away, we will be left with what, in fact, will be teensy-weensy little kames.  Nano-kames perched atop the very Kettle Range that was formed in antiquity by a glacier which shares a name with our state.  That's some heady Hakuna matata, circle of life shit if you think about it too much.  Especially while standing in the driveway drinking a beer on a gorgeous late winter evening.

I've dubbed this miniature glacial formation The Bucket-head NanoKame Field after the bucket-head dog who kept stepping on them while I was trying to take the picture.  They probably won't last through the April storms, but as long as they do remain I'll be reminded of the immensity and tiny detail of the natural world every time I walk by.

The Pull

There once was a boy who grew up in the woods.  Not speaking literally.  There was, of course, a bedroom he shared with his brother and a table he was made to set and clear before and after dinner.  There was a roof to keep the rain off and a garden full of peas and tomatoes and corn.

But his heart was in the woods, walking with his dad and brother, and sometimes his dad's best friend.  During those walks, the men often regaled the wide-eyed boys with the tales of their own fort building and campfired youth.  How they'd vowed, as young teens one summer long gone, to spend the entire time away from school living off the land.  And how hungry that proposition soon became.  Stories of cooking squirrels on sticks and digging cattail roots for sustenance.  Of Alaskan homesteading dreams and long soggy nights spent huddled over sad, sputtling little fires together.  And the time a chipmunk shit in the butter.  They only used language like that in the woods back then, a small step in the secret rite toward manhood.

The boy was enchanted.  He vowed he would be a woodsman too.  He would grow a beard, wear flannel shirts and chunky boots, and eat what he killed with his own bloodied hands.

They still rest there, the volumes updated.

A lover of books from the beginning, he was soon devouring everything he could lay hands on at the library concerning bushcraft, wilderness survival, and famous explorers.  In elementary and middle school classrooms he stared out the window at a forested hillside, and dreamed of being out there practicing his novice-level skills.  The doodles in his Trapper Keeper were of deadfalls and snares, and a solar still he once read about constructing with a parachute in an Air Force survival handbook.  He slept with field guides to wildflowers, trees, and birds mixed in with the London, Tolkien, and Asimov on his little bedside table.

Even in high school this pull toward the woods did not wane.  While there were girls and cars; music, sports, and hormones; he still spent plenty of time splashing around in creeks, hunting small game, building snares and knapping flint, and lying on the ground staring up at the cathedral of trees.



Then the boy moved to the big humming city to sit in other classrooms, and he forgot a lot of the things he'd learned in the woods.  There were so many new things to learn there in the bustling, metropolitan hive that he couldn't hang onto all of his old life, try as he might.

In the beginning he learned how to navigate busy streets, keep pace with all those people, and make new friends.  He learned about the wonders of keg parties and chasing women.  Of live music and dead tired hangovers.  Of a certain green-eyed beauty who laughed at his fumbling jokes and made him feel everything and nothing at once.  She followed him into the wilds sometimes, listened and learned as he parroted what he'd been taught, but her heart was in it only for him, not for the woods.

Over the course of a couple decades in the city he learned a great many things.  How to interview for jobs.  How to work with people he detested and lose people he loved.  How to get the good table.  Where to get the best late night pizza and early morning doughnuts.  That a suit and a shave sometimes get you further than cargo shorts and sandals.  The best tailgating spots and how to snag a much-vaunted taxi after the game.  That people absolutely lose their minds and manners while encapsulated safely in their cars.  These things and many more.

There was still the pull to the woods and occasional weekend excursions there, but he was of the city, with a designated parking space at work and neighbors who looked down on him for being a gun owner, among other things.  His wilding needs were met more often with the words and deeds of early American frontiersmen such as Meshach Browning and Simon Kenton, read to the ever-present din of traffic noise.



Now the boy is no longer a boy, but a man with gray in his beard and aching knees at bedtime if he doesn't do his stretches.  And he is no longer a man of the city, having returned to the countryside of his youth.  The trade-offs have been many concerning his move out of the metropolis.  He still can't find truly great bread locally, and he stays in most nights as his skills in the kitchen far outpace all the fare offered by TGI Applebee's Sysco Garden in the nearest town. 

Hello, old friends.

The difficulties associated with the move pale in comparison to its rewards.  Many of those important things he forgot while jostling and pushing in town are slowly coming back to him.  The swing of the splitting maul becomes more powerful and precise.  The smell of bar and chain oil, mixed with freshly cut white pine battered over the long winter, stops him in his tracks, quite literally.  The names of spring wildflowers and migrating warblers flitting about rush into his mind from the past unbidden, and with them the great joy of encountering old friends.


He stands around staring genially at stuff more than he probably should now.  He misses that feta pizza in the city, with the spinach and caramelized onions, but he's getting closer to replicating it.  He misses warm pre-dawn blueberry doughnuts from that slightly odd walk-up drive-through window in the garish neon light, but the pull of the woods is stronger.