"What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked." -Aldo Leopold
“How many mouths Nature has to fill, how many neighbors we have, how little we know about them and how seldom we get in each other’s way! Then to think of the infinite numbers of smaller fellow mortals, invisibly small, compared with which the smallest ants are as mastodons.”
-John Muir-
“Red-shouldered Hawk Nest, SNR 2012”
“…wildlife once fed us and shaped our culture. It still yields us pleasure for leisure hours, but we try to reap that pleasure by modern machinery and thus destroy part of its value. Reaping it by modern mentality would yield not only pleasure, but wisdom as well.”
-Aldo Leopold-
“Sedge Wren, Autumn 2012”
Did you know…?
The breeding range of the Common Yellowthroat is the most widespread of the American Wood Warblers.
“Common Yellowthroat, Autumn 2012”
Along the Glade Top Trail looking southward at what I believe are the northern hills of the Boston Mountains. I look forward to exploring more of Arkansas one day.
“Song Sparrow, Autumn 2012”
Marshland Elegy
by
Aldo Leopold
“A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.
Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding pack. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog.
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wings they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.”
“A Great Echelon of Birds”
“Eastern Bluebird, SNR, Autumn 2012”
“Changing Skies”
“I Never Dreamed Today Would Come, When Love Was Young”
It’s the day before Thanksgiving. I was fortunate again to be able to have most of the week off of work. This day I decided I would allow myself the uncommon treat of “sleeping in” and catching up on some rest, allow myself some down time. I rarely do this and I think it helps to “turn off” every now and then to help slow down, to say, it is OK to not be productive. So that was the plan, and I even stayed up pretty late. Then, just a scant few hours after I shut my eyes, I hear a voice, far off. Eventually I realize it was Sarah trying to convey some sort of message. I believe she had to repeat herself no fewer than four times before I comprehended – “The weather guy is saying this may likely be one of the foggiest days in St. Louis history.” She knows I am a sucker for a foggy day. Because we live so far from many of the great nature scenes, more often than not, I cannot get to a destination before the typical morning ephemeration has burned down. Figuring this would likely be the case on this particular morning, I almost said forget it, and went back to sleep. But, as Sarah knew, I would definitely have kicked myself repeatedly if I at least did not get out and try. If nothing else, the least I would get is a nice hike on a beautiful morning. I chose the relatively close Castlewood State Park. Sarah and I had recently tackled a particularly scenic trail with bluff views along the Meramec River, and I knew that a thick fog could be used well for a dramatic composition. Here are a few images I’ve had the opportunity to process so far. My “immortal thanks” to Sarah for waking me and to Mr. Whitman for his lines that follow.
To think of time – of all that retrospection,
To think of today, and the ages continued henceforward.
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is today nothing? is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.
To think that the sun rose in the east – that men and women were flexible, real, alive – that everything was alive,
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part,
To think that we are now here and bear our part.
Not a day passes, not a minute or second without an accouchement,
Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.
To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking great interest in them, and we taking no interest in them.
To think how eager we are in building our houses,
To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent.
Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth – they never cease – they are the burial lines,
He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall surely be buried.
“A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts, but I suspect that the grebe, who has neither, knows more history than we do. His dim primordial brain knows nothing of who won the Battle of Hastings, but it seems to sense who won the battle of time. If the race of men were as old as the race of grebes, we might better grasp the import of his call. Think what traditions, prides, disdains, and wisdoms even a few self-conscious generations bring to us! What pride of continuity, then, impels this bird, who was a grebe eons before there was a man.”
-Aldo Leopold-
“Peid-billed Grebe with Fish”
“The outstanding characteristic of perception is that it entails no consumption and no dilution of any resources. The swoop of a hawk, for example, is perceived by one as the drama of evolution. To another it is only a threat to the full frying-pan. The drama may thrill a hundred successive witnesses; the threat only one – for he responds with a shotgun.”
-Aldo Leopold-
“Red-tailed Hawk”
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 