"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
Magnolia Warblers can be a blast to watch as they migrate through the St. Louis region. Searching almost nonstop for tasty prey hidden on the undersides of leaves on shrubs and short trees, they will sometimes hover as well as take short looping flights following insects that have been flushed.
“Magnolia Warbler, Autumn 2012”
The Oven Bird
THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
-Robert Frost-
“Ovenbird, Autumn 2012”
“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”
“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”
“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”
“That thing called ‘nature study’, despite the shiver it brings to the spine of the elect, constitutes the first embryonic groping of the mass-mind toward perception.”
-Aldo Leopold-
“Tennessee Warbler – Autumn Migration 2012”
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 