“It’s like an Irish spring,” Tom Davis said to Dianne and me, referring to the season’s slow unfolding as we started up the path at the Proving Grounds County Park. Winter had broken early, but then spring retreated. By mid-late April, trees were still mostly bare. Tom had been on the lookout for spring wildflowers the past week, with none in sight.
      He’d finally spotted some a few days back and we’d set up a time to walk. But overnight freezes and near-freezes had caused the resilient flowers to curl their buds and leaves in protection. In the cool afternoon air, they were cautiously re-opening.
     Dr. Tom Davis has been a Professor of Biology at Loras College for over 30 years. A native of Oconomowoc, WI, he is an expert on Midwest and Driftless Area plants and birds. But his knowledge and professional experience is much broader, as he has led students in studying nature in such faraway places as Ireland and Costa Rica, and led summer Sierra Club hikes in the American West.
     Tom had suggested the Proving Grounds for today’s hike. Resilience could describe this 137-acre Dubuque County Park. It had long been owned and used by John Deere Tractor Works as an outdoors testing grounds for the machinery produced at the factory just across the road. The rugged hills offered the perfect site to prove the mettle of earth-moving equipment. How much soil could be dozed or lifted, how much slope could a dozer withstand?
       John Deere had long ago moved its testing site to a new location, and in 2018 donated the land to Dubuque County to be developed as a park. The grounds have new life now with hiking paths and a highly reputed and challenging mountain bike trail. A disc golf course is under construction near the top of the bluff.
     No mountain bikes were around on this early spring afternoon, so we started up the rocky switchbacks of the bike trail. I worried for a moment whether the still-fresh trail cuts would harm the plant life, but Tom assured us that these, too, would heal.
      And so began the parade! Dutchman’s Britches hung out their upside-down white pantaloons. May apples had been spreading their “baby umbrellas” for less than a week. Tom explained how their leaves spiral as they unfurl from the plant stem emerging from the earth. Their fruit begins as a poisonous white “apple,” but becomes edible when it matures and turns yellow.
     Dainty star-shaped lavender hepatica flowers had burst from their hairy stems amid three-lobed leaves that turn liver-colored as they age. Bloodwort had already completed its bloom. Tom identified it by its blood-red leaf stems, which Native Americans used as a dye. Each wild ginger plant cradled at the base of its spade-shaped leaves a single maroon flower the size and shape of a radish with a tri-pointed cap.
       This was exercise for the eyes, not the legs, at least initially. In a forty-foot stretch of ascending trail, Tom looked right and left, up and down, discovering something new every few moments. I took notes while Dianne took photos. Our particular talent, we told Tom, is learning these flowers each spring and forgetting them each winter, so that each year’s growth is a “new discovery”!
     Giant trillium showed off its three-petaled white flowers. Yellow bellwort draped its flowers upside down, like chandeliers.
       Not all of our discoveries were flowers. On an outcrop shelf of splintered rock, Tom showed us the shell of a snail, about half the size of a fingernail, that thrives in the cool microclimate of a Driftless woods.
       We did finally take to the trails and talked for a while without looking for plants. Our lives have intersected in many ways. Before we knew each other well, years ago, our paths would literally cross as Dianne and I kept encountering Tom and his wife Barb on local woodland and prairie trails. We’ve taught in each other’s classrooms. Our mutual interest in Ireland has led us to hike together in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin and to climb Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain of St. Patrick on Ireland’s west coast. Tom, with his long legs, made it to the peak well ahead of Barb and me.
       But there was more to discover here today at the Proving Grounds in Driftless northeast Iowa. Descending from the bluff top, Tom showed us goldenrod galls. Goldenrod gall flies bore into the plant stem in the late fall to lay their eggs, forming a gall or swelling in the stem. The larvae overwinter in the gall and emerge in the spring, that is if they survive the woodpeckers, who will peck into a certain number of the pods for a larvae lunch.
       It shows resilience that the woodpecker, the gall flies, and the goldenrod all seem to make do with this arrangement.
        Our hike ended, appropriately enough, with Tom showing us the walking fern near the base of a rock cut. The untrained eye might never guess it is a fern at all, as it has none of the showy, spiraling fronds often associated with woodland ferns. Its plain green leaves, shaped like a spear tip, are fern fronds nonetheless, harboring rows of spores on the underside until they disperse. But the plant has found a new way to spread as well, “walking” across the landscape as each front tip elongates and sends out a shoot that anchors to the ground a half a foot away and grows anew.
     We live in this world with both resilience and beauty. Landscapes are scarred and recover. Spring promises and the overnight freeze returns. But the spring flowers come again, as they have always come.
       And friends find yet another landscape in which to walk.
 
-- April 2021

A sea swell of prairie flowers and grasses have been restored to the Gateway Park property.

Gateway Park offers a far-off glimpse of historic Galena.

An old windmill is a reminder of past uses of the property. 

An oak savanna, such as the one under restoration at Sinsinawa Mound, blends prairie and forest ecosystems.  ​

​Many of the oaks at Sinsinawa Mound date back to the decades just before and after the Civil War.  Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.

​Oak seedlings need sunlight to sprout. Restoration puts sunlight back on the savanna floor.  Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.

Some of the oaks at Sinsinawa have reached the end of their lifespan. Thinning of the underbrush and small trees allows oaks to regenerate. Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.

​The Dunleith Mounds of East Dubuque are visible on the bluff when traveling East across the Julien Dubuque bridge.

The rope hammock suspends visitors 25 feet above the Whiting Forest floor in Midland, MI.  Visitors can get an upclose view of birds.

       Suspended twenty-five feet in the air, my wife Dianne and I took turns lying back in an oversized rope hammock in the canopy walk amid the pine branches of Whiting Forest of Dow Gardens in Midland, MI. Beneath us strolled forest visitors, and among us flitted a range of Midwestern birds chattering about their fall migration plans. On this September weekend, Whiting Forest was hosting a major regional birding festival, but in between events we hung out for a while in the trees.
      Whiting Forest is part of the adjacent Dow Gardens, a botanical garden located on the former estate of Grace and Herbert Dow.  Herbert Dow was  founder of the Dow Chemical Company still headquartered in Midland, not far from Lake Huron. The Dows built their family home amid a sprawling property purchased in 1899.  In 1936, a few years after Herbert’s death, Grace created the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, and eventually turned the family property over to the Foundation to be operated as a botanical garden (with no direct ties to the chemical company).
       Today the 110-acre Dow Gardens boasts 35,000 annuals and 22,000 flowering bulbs laid out in geometrical patterns amid a wandering stream, ponds, and gently rolling hills. On this early autumn afternoon red Canna and Sunpatiens and yellow-petaled Brown-Eyed Susans popped brilliant against a light-blue sky. 
       The weekend we visited also featured a temporary outdoor metal origami sculpture exhibition by Santa Fe artists Jennifer and Kevin Box.  Amid the garden’s blooming treasures were origami-like sculptures of swans, butterflies, ponies, and bison.
          The 54-acre Whiting Forest became part of Dow Gardens in 1991—also by way of Dow family descendants—and was opened to the public in 2004.  The forest includes a mix of planted and natural regrowth red pines, tamaracks, and assorted hardwoods on lands that were logged in the 1870s and later reforested.  
      Kyle Bagnall, Advanced Learning Program Manager, calls the forest “a green oasis in an urban area,” although the city of 44,000 and surrounding area boasts several additional significant green spaces and wildlife refuges as well. Whiting Forest’s bird diversity is particularly pronounced, with native woodland species mingling with migratory birds in a flyway that emanates from nearby Saginaw Bay.
       In 2015, prior to Bagnall’s arrival, the Foundation commissioned the design of a handicapped-accessible canopy walk to bring visitors into the tree level and to overlook the surrounding landscape, pond, and apple orchards.  Ranging from twenty-five to forty feet in the air, the ¼-mile elevated canopy walk brings visitors eye-to-beak with birds at tree-top and mid-branch levels.  “Encouraging play at any age,” says Bagnall, the canopy walk also features two wooden tree pods and the rope-netted hammock for those wanting to nest for a while amid the pines.  
      When Bagnall came on board in 2017, he brought with him a combination of environmental education experience, birding enthusiasm, and historical awareness that perfectly suited Whiting Forest. With a college degree in Public History, he is aware of the need to preserve the legacy of the founding Dow family.  His environmental education experience was honed over twenty-two years at his previous position at the nearby Chippewa Nature Center. And birding has been in his blood since he was a small child, when his father would wake him for 4 a.m. local birding expeditions.  Kyle started making his own life-long birding list at age 10.
      At Whiting Forest, Bagnall soon set about planning the first Birding Festival for Dow Gardens. Like everything Kyle does, the event bustled with activity. Local and regional experts led over 150 participants to enjoy activities such as bird banding at Chippewa Nature Center, viewing herons, gulls and other waterfowl at the Nayanquing Point Wildlife Area, searching for woodland migrant species at the Pine Haven Recreation Area and Albert Szok Preserve, and scouting coastal birds along Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Kyle himself blended history and nature, helping birders spot migratory species in Midland County’s historic cemeteries.
         Dianne and I hopped on board the two-mast Tall Ship Appledore, setting sail for Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, as part of yet another outdoor excursion.
        Indoor sessions included presentations on raptors, wetland preservation, “birding by ear,” and creating a bird-friendly yard.  Additional Festival workshops included nature writing, art, and photography. 
Culminating the festival was the keynote address by David Allen Sibley, author and illustrator of the New York Times best-seller The Sibley Guide to Birds, a work that participants look upon as the premier guide to birding.
 
        On Friday evening, nearing sunset, Dianne and I sat quietly at a table outside the Whiting Forest Café, while other festival-goers mingled nearby. Bagnall chatted with everyone.  Soon his phone buzzed, a text from birders in the nearby forest who’d spotted some specimens Kyle would want to see. 
       We all flocked, then, to the canopy walk, where the setting sun was bringing out new voices. Forty feet above the ground, we listened to the nighthawks.         
 
-- November 2019

The 1/4-mile  Canopy Walk at Whiting Forest of Down Gardens puts visitors at bird's-eye view.

​A pair of origami swans grace the Dow Gardens during a metal sculpture exhibit.

​The Dow Gardens of Midland, Michigan, is awash in color in the early fall. 

​Horseshoe Bluff at the Mines of Spain offers a vertical view 450 million years into the past.

           A geologist draws conclusions from the evidence and a writer draws a story from the details, Dale mused as we stood in line at Dubuque’s north-end Dairy Queen, about halfway through our recent geological road trip. 
            Dale Easley is a geologist who is also a gifted writer. I am a writer with a deep interest in geology. Over the years we’ve struck up a friendship that crosses disciplines and academic institutions (Dr. Easley is a professor of Natural & Applied Sciences at the University of Dubuque; I am an English professor at Loras College.) It was about time, I thought, to put his geologic vision to work on my home landscape. So we set out on an afternoon’s drive across Dubuque County, stopping at several locations to talk about rocks and homespun bedrock philosophies.
 
Horseshoe Bluff Quarry
            We are looking up from the base of Horseshoe Bluff, an abandoned quarry at the Mines of Spain, fronting a 200-foot sheer downcut through 450 million-year-old limestone formed in a shallow Ordovician seabed.
            Dale points out the neat horizontal layers. “One of the first things that I noticed as a geologist when I came here 15 years ago was that the rock layers were not folded like I’d experienced elsewhere,” he says, recalling the mountains where he’d schooled in North Carolina and Wyoming.
           In more stressed landscapes, rock layers have been twisted by the buckling and shifting of continental plates, he explains.  Midwest bedrock, on the other hand, formed in gentle ocean bottoms and then ever-so-slowly uplifted—today only 600 feet above ocean level 1000 miles from the sea—keeping the rock layers mostly intact.  Elsewhere in the Midwest those horizontal bedrock layers lay hidden from view, buried under the rubble and drift bulldozed along by the glaciers.  Here in the Driftless Area—bypassed by all but the oldest of the glaciers—the bedrock pokes out from the surface in bluffs and towers.
             Dale is a lot like this, calm and even-keeled, but, with a cup of coffee in hand, as deep as bedrock.
            .
The Mississippi River from Eagle Point Park
            “So what does a geologist see here?” 
            Dale frowns. “What I see is a lot of modifications made by humans,” he says, pointing to the lock and dam below us, one of 27 such structures on the Upper Mississippi built in the 1930s to maintain a 9-foot channel for barges through a series of stair-step pools. Commodity transportation may be more energy efficient by barge than by train or semi, but one thing for sure is that this is not the natural river.
            But then the geologist kicks into gear. “We’re looking at half a million years here,” he says, figuring the age of the Mississippi. The river valley we see today, though, was formed by meltwater surges from the northern glaciers only 15,000 years ago. Summer melt and ice-dam breaks sent water coursing down the Mississippi, deepening its channel through the limestone bluffs.
            “The river ran faster then, too,” says Dale. During the Ice Age, the sea level was 500 feet lower than today. As a result, the river ran more quickly along a steeper slope to the Gulf of Mexico. 
            When the glaciers had finished melting and the sea level reached its current level, the Mississippi slowed its pace, dropped its load of glacial outwash on the river bottom, and took to meandering through the deep flood plain it had carved.
            Our conversation meanders as well. We are in New Orleans, along this great river, where Dale taught for 15 years. And then we are back again,  alongside the Eagle Point Park fishpond, which, I explain to Dale, my father helped build during the Depression.

Balltown Overlook
            From the Balltown Mound, at one of Iowa’s most iconic overlooks, the land drops quickly away across farm and field on its way to the Mississippi River.
            We in the Driftless see our landscape as a realm of rocky bluffs and steep valleys amid the glacially flattened Midwest. But Dale sees a flatland plateau downcut by erosional forces.  Looking past the river valley and scanning the horizon, focusing on the river bluffs and beyond, I can imagine a vast, continuous plain. Geologists call it the Paleozoic Plateau. In the midst of the plateau, however, the Mississippi River, its tributaries, and drainage ravines have gouged deep scars.
            Rising above the plateau are the mounds that dot the landscape. Not far from Balltown Mound is the Sherrill Mound, and across the river the Platteville Mound, Blue Mound, and Sinsinawa Mound. The mounds, Dale explains, are called “resistant remnants,” the only remaining segments of a limestone layer that has since eroded away from the rest of the landscape. 
            I like the concept of “resistant remnants.” It describes pretty well the pair of us who bicycle or scooter to class against the prevailing culture.
 
Fossil Outcrop at Graf
            I explain to Dale that when our kids were young and the Heritage Trail newly opened, my wife and I would take them to Graf, Iowa, for railroad stories and pie at Smitty’s Tap, but also to hunt for fossils at a nearby rock outcrop. Our bike bags would be heavier on the return trip.
            The sun is sinking low as Dale and I scuttle up to the base of this same outcrop from the side of the road. The rock is thinly layered, fragile, crumbly to the touch. The fossils are squid-like nautoloid cephalapods that lived 440 million years ago.
The limestone here is intermingled with thin layers of dark shale that formed, perhaps, during brief interludes when an ancient river delta shifted, spewing mud into the sea.
             I imagine it layering stories into the seabed.
                                                                           *                      *                      *
           The land is a text written in a wordless language.  The geologist translates it. The writer gives it shape.  And that is how the world speaks across the ages.
 
October 2019

The locks and dams on the Mississippi have altered the natural flow of the river. 

​The overlook from the Balltown Mound offers an iconic view of eastern Iowa.

​Rock outcrops at Graf, IA, are rich in fossils. 

​Dr. Dale Easley, professor of Natural & Applied Sciences at the University of Dubuque, offered geological insights across Dubuque County.  

​The ridges of western Iowa’s Loess Hills formed from wind-blown soil particles during glacial times. 

​Loess (pronounced ‘luss’) soils are like a fine, brown flour, and are easily erodible when the landscape is disturbed.

​Prairie flowers and grasses have returned naturally where the encroaching forest has been trimmed back. 

​A 45-foot observation tower at the Hitchcock Nature Center near Council Bluffs offers wide vistas and excellent raptor viewing.

​Backcountry hike-in campsites for single tents or small groups are available throughout the grounds, including some near the Hohneke Ponds.

​ The earth is ancient memoria. It holds within its layers every happening that ever was.
 – John O’Donohue
 
        The slopes of the lightly frosted path dropped steeply away into a stark winter woods. The narrow, curving trail was an esker in the Kettle Moraine State Forest South Unit in southeast Wisconsin. An esker, formed courtesy of our most recent glaciers ten thousand years ago, is a natural elevated path created by sediment dropped at the base of a melt-stream at the bottom of the ice. I remember its name by means of a visual alphabet: its twists and turns remind me of an “S-Curve.”
        Landscape is a text we can read. Stories accumulate here. I tick off glacial formations like squares on a bingo card as we hike through Kettle Moraine. A kame, shaped like the bottom half of an hour glass sand pile and formed much the same way from sediment dropped when meltwater plummeted down a vertical chute in the ice. A tear-drop shaped drumlin, fashioned from rubble dragged and scraped across the bedrock and whose arrowed edge points in the direction of the glacial crawl.
        Plus the two features for which the state forest is named: a moraine, the steep line of rubble pushed along at the front or side of an advancing glacier; and a kettle, a pot-shaped indentation in the forest floor formed by a huge chunk of calved-off melting ice. When the last of the ice chunk melted away, its indentation in the outwash floor became a kettle pond.
       Such is a reading of Kettle Moraine South Unit, a 22,000 acre state forest that stretches in a northeastly band for 30 miles beyond Whitewater, Wisconsin.
         My wife Dianne and I recently hiked on the Ice Age Trail in Kettle Moraine on a sunny but chilly winter day. More than thirty miles of Wisconsin’s 1,100-mile long Ice Age Trail wind through the state forest, roughly following the furthest advance of the last great glaciers. 
        The winter thus far had been mild, but a stinging wind swiping down from the north offered the imagination a hint of a glacial chill. But only a hint. In truth, the slight dusting of snow served mostly to offer some color contrast to the browned-out woods and brought the sometimes hidden glacial features into relief.
       In addition to glacial features, the forest chapters of oak, pine, and aspen punctuated with prairies, springs, and marshes offer habitat to coyotes, foxes, Cooper’s hawks, and sandhill cranes. Kettle Moraine is an Audubon Society Important Bird Area (IBA), home or breeding ground to 137 woodland, grassland, and marshland species.
       More of the Ice Age Trail climbs through the Lapham Peak Unit of the state forest, rising from a lowland boardwalk crossing over the marsh and scaling up through the woods to the peak. The trail passes alongside the 45-foot wooden watch tower capping the highest point in Waukesha County.
       But the land holds in its pages human stories as well and reminds us that our every footprint is inscribed in the landscape and is eventually swallowed by it.
       A hike through the Scuppernong Springs Trail near the north of the forest’s scattered holdings tells how humans have lived both with and against the landscape over time. Archaeological findings of arrowheads and flint flakes point to Native American encampments on high ground overlooking the marsh, the choice of location based on access to plentiful game and fresh water.
       White settlement altered the landscape. The 1½-mile trail brushes past the fading traces of an 1846 sawmill and the still-standing walls of a 1909 marl plant. Marl is a lime-based, grayish white soil formed at the bottom of glacial lakes and used as fertilizer and as building mortar. For six years up to 60 employees dug the clay out of the marsh, processed it, and put it on train cars on rail run specifically to the plant. By 1915 the plant was closed, the railroad abandoned, and the entirety left for the woods and marsh to reclaim.
       A 19th century cranberry bog and a trout hatchery flourished behind man-made dikes. These were removed in the 1990s to restore natural habitat along the Scuppernong River for native wild brook trout, beaver, otter, muskrat, and mink. The springs themselves can still be seen bubbling up from the marly clay bottom.
       At nearby Paradise Springs additional natural springs erupt where the water table is sliced diagonally by the rocky slopes. Thirty thousand gallons of fresh water per hour pour from the rocks at a constant 47 degrees, year round, into a scenic valley. The resources and scenery attracted both entrepreneurs and those seeking an idyllic escape from Milwaukee, about 40 miles away.  A ½-mile leisurely trail—much of it handicap-accessible, winds past the remains of a 1920s horse track and a water bottling plant that once produced the label “Lullaby Baby Drinking Water.” The plant’s foundations and cement stairway are all that remain.
       Beyond these lies the Fieldstone Spring House built in the 1930s to protect the spring waters. The Spring House originally sported a copper-domed roof. Roofless today, all that remains are the fieldstone walls and the spring as it emerges from the rocky hillside. The dammed-up pond still harbors trout. The grounds around the Paradise Springs Hotel, a popular honeymoon resort whose foundation ruins are located near the pond, once boasted a menagerie of peacocks, monkeys, and pheasants. All are gone now, except for the spring, the pond, and assortment of ruins and foundations.
        Historians speak of palimpsests, ancient and medieval texts whose base—whether parchment or animal hide—was so valuable that it was oft-reused. Old lettering was scraped from the pages to make way for new text, but the old still showed through faintly.
       Landscape is a palimpsest. Stories as ancient as the glaciers and first-peoples, as comparatively modern as abandoned factories and fisheries, and even as recent as today’s worn footpath sink back into—but still faintly grace—the land.
 
-- January 2019

 
            The Wisconsin River roiled and churned and licked at its banks as we drove across the Highway 23 bridge at Spring Green. Recent recurring mid-September rains had emboldened the river with a relentless purpose.
            My son Brian and I were en route to the Spring Green Nature Preserve to meet up with our local hiking guide for the day, conservationist and author Curt Meine. Having gotten ourselves lost and fifteen minutes late, we flew into the Preserve parking lot with as much haste as the rushing river.
            Curt deflected my apologies: “What, so I had to spend a few extra minutes basking in this glorious morning?”
            The Spring Green Preserve embodies both sides of this morning: the gentle swaying of prairie grasses in the early autumn sun belies its thunderous beginnings.
            The Spring Green Preserve is a rare Midwestern sand prairie born perhaps 17,000 years ago in the waning glacial period when an ice dam holding back meltwater in Glacial Lake Wisconsin suddenly burst. The escaping waters carved out today’s Wisconsin Dells and surged down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi. “It must have been an epic flood,” Curt mused.
            Geologists speculate the rush may have been as quick as seven days, during which it flooded the valley and filled it with 100 feet of glacially pulverized sand from the glacial lake upstream. The Spring Green Preserve showcases an 1,100-acre sandy remnant of the outwash and of the blowing winds and dunes that followed.
            As Curt, Brian, and I entered the prairie, a host of grasshoppers flicked across the path ahead of us. As we walked, Curt often stopped us to point out Indian grass, whorled milkweed, blazing star, big bluestem, and little bluestem grasses.
The prairie sports both tallgrass and shortgrass species. Tallgrass like big bluestem is more prevalent in the Midwest where it thrives in the typical rich, black, soil. Here in the sand prairie it grows in the wetter lowlands.  Shortgrass like little bluestem is more common in the drier west. But shortgrass species like little bluestem are quite happy in Midwestern sand prairies, where the soil drains quickly, mimicking drier, Western conditions. Here it begins growing where the prairie rises to meet the bluffs that loom 200 feet above the floodplain .
            More unusual to the Midwestern eye, though, is the prickly pear cactus growing quite nicely, if low, in the Wisconsin sand. No doubt the cactus inspired the sand prairie to have been known colloquially as the Wisconsin Desert.
            Curt points to plant variations just beyond the hiking path. Sand blowouts—temporary exposures of sand caused by winds funneling up the river valley—create their own micro communities where conspicuous patches of prairie cottonweed wave in the wind.  Conversely, small groves of black oak dot the occasional sinks of wetter soil.
            The sand prairie provides niche homes to animal species as well. The Ornate Box Turtle is so rare that conservationists track their movements with radio-transmitters, making sure, for example, that the turtles are burrowed into the sand before the prairie is burned.
The prairie provides habitat for all sorts of crawling and winged critters with menacing names: tiger beetles, wolf spiders, black widow spiders, predatory wasps. The three of us amused ourselves for a while watching two beetles waddling along with a chunk of insect. We couldn’t decide if they were ineptly trying to cooperate or if beetle #1 was trying to steal the prize. 
For those who prefer avian wildlife, the sand prairie is home to dickcissels, grasshopper sparrows, indigo buntings, orchard orioles, and many other species that nest in the grasses or stop over during migration.  The Preserve is a favorite location for birding enthusiasts.
“This is the place to find the lark sparrow,” a grassland bird listed as a Species of Special Concern, Curt explains. “They like the open ground and patches of sand.” Not so the sandhill crane, another rare bird found in Autumn along the river. “We’re wetland birds,” Curt says on their behalf as we watch a pair circle the rim of the prairie and disappear beyond the terrace bluff. “This place is not for us.”
            Sand prairies made for challenging agricultural conditions because they drain so quickly and are not nutrient-rich. Even so, much of this habitat has been lost. Curt points out that today’s Spring Green Preserve was identified early on in the 1940s for preservation by conservationist Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries. Leopold “wanted to protect the best gems,” Curt says, and included this site due to its niche plant and animal communities.
Preservation didn’t happen overnight, however. The land was eventually purchased by the Nature Conservancy beginning in 1971, and restoration began shortly thereafter.
Prairie restoration and maintenance is labor-intensive. In the absence of prairie fire in the post-settlement era, sand prairies tended to be overtaken by red cedars. Many of the nearby bluff terraces are cedar-draped, but due to tree removal and controlled burns, the Spring Green Preserve looks more like it did in the early 1800s. Often times a burn will bring about its own reseeding, Curt adds, “releasing prairie seed already in the ground.”
            As we finish our sand prairie hike, Curt resituates us in the sand-rich Wisconsin River valley that resulted from the break in the ice dam holding back the waters of Glacial Lake Wisconsin. The Wisconsin River, he says, is known as the river of a thousand islands, always shifting “islands, shifting because the river floats on a bed of sand.” “The river is a paddler’s delight because it contains no dams for 92 miles, a direct result of the deep sand, Curt says, pointing out that “it’s hard to put a dam on a sand foundation.”
After the hike and a lunch, we depart in our separate directions: Curt to his nearby home; Brian back to Chicago where he lives; and me back home to Dubuque.
          I cross the rain-swelled Wisconsin River one more time and imagine its waters chasing me downstream to the Mississippi where it will crest past my hometown in a few days’ time.
As it has done through the ages. 

​-- October 2018

 ​    On either side of Devil’s Lake—bookending one of Wisconsin’s most-visited and largest parks—lie two tiny gems, Natural Bridge State Park and Parfrey’s Glen Natural Area.  At roughly 500 acres each, they can be easily combined with a visit to the more popular park, or can be enjoyed in leap-frog fashion, bypassing the crowds and parking hassle.
      On a late-autumn Sunday afternoon, we chose to leap-frog. 
      It seems we leap-frogged across the seasons and centuries as well.
 
NATURAL BRIDGE STATE PARK
     On a blustery, late-November afternoon, early winter was practicing at misery.  My wife Dianne and I had brought bikes along for a day-adventure in case we found some new Wisconsin back roads, but the north winds convinced us otherwise.  We left the bikes on the hitch-rack and instead hiked into the woods at Wisconsin’s Natural Bridge State Park.  The hardwood forest would provide some shelter.  Inside the woods it was late autumn again.
      The park, established in 1973, lies 15 miles southwest of Devil’s Lake.  Its namesake sandstone arch popped into view when we turned a corner on the Indian Moccasin Trail.  The natural bridge spans 80 feet across a valley, capping a 15-by-25-foot oval-shaped hole in the sandstone, eroded over the eons by wind and water.  The brown and yellow layered arch sits atop its bedrock base like a giant old-time telephone receiver on its mount.
      At the base of the arch, time had carved another indentation, a rock shelter that was home to some of the Midwest’s earliest inhabitants. At 60 feet wide x 30 feet deep, the rock shelter revealed its story to archaeologists through remnant meal-bones, mollusk shells, and fire-pit charwood dating back to 10,000 B.C.  Paleo-Indians sheltered at this site as the nearby glaciers retreated.  Ancient soot is still visible on the sandstone walls.
      A spur off the Moccasin Trail leads to a cliff face overlooking the edge of the glacier-free Driftless Region.  The bluff top prairie is graced with Indian grass and little blue-stem as well as  numerous ferns, and even cacti.
Back on the main trail and beyond the natural bridge lies a hardwood forest and a guided trail indicating how Native Americans used the forest plants and trees: quaking aspen bark for pain relief and poultices; witch hazel for skin irritants; wild black cherry for coughs and colds. 
       As we left the autumnal shelter of the woods, we re-emerged into the blustery winds.  Twelve thousand years ago we might have stocked the rock shelter with supplies for the upcoming winter.  Instead, we took refuge in the Honda and drove away.
           
PARFREY’S GLEN STATE NATURAL AREA
            It was a good day to keep driving, so we sailed seven miles east of Devil’s Lake to our second stop at Parfrey’s Glen.
The glen, or valley, was settled in the mid-1800s, the fast-moving Parfrey’s Glen Creek offering power for an assortment of saw and grist mills.  It takes its name from its last inhabitant, Robert Parfrey, who ran a grist mill there from 1865 to 1876.  The site remained a favorite of visitors thereafter, and in 1952 it became Wisconsin’s first State Natural Area.
      Hiking upstream through Parfrey’s Glen is like pacing out a song that starts softly with violins, builds steadily, and crescendos with crashing cymbals, timpani, and bass drums.  The first quarter-mile edges gently enough through the prairie alongside a kittenish stream that tumbles out of the forest and hurries across scatterings of well-worn stones. 
      But the serene bottom-glen is deceptive. The change begins gradually, with the forested creek edge giving way to small outcrops that the stream burbles past.  From there, by twist and turn the path leads upwards into an increasingly steep splashing Jurassic-Park-like gorge of purplish quartzite. 
     In its uppermost reaches, the rock walls of the glen are 100 foot sheer drop-offs carved into the angular bedrock 12,000 years ago by glacial meltwater.   Potholes dot the ledges, round-shaped hollows in the rock scooped out by swirling boulders that had been caught up in the eddies of the rushing meltwater.
      This wasn’t the first time the glen had seen dramatic waters.  The walls of the glen are sandstone embedded with quartzite conglomerate—rounded pebbles and boulders seemingly cemented in the sandstone.  These were formed on tropical seashores 500 million years ago when equatorial storms tossed and smoothed the stones before they settled to the ocean floor and mixed into the hardening bedrock. 
      Cool summer seepage from the rocks creates a microclimate, harboring more-northerly, and often rare and threatened species of plants and animals like northern monkshood, false foxglove, cerulean warblers, and diving beetles.  
      On this November day the glen, protected and warm, felt like spring.  Green leaves still clung to the wind-sheltered trees.  Trunks and boulders were green with abundant moss.  Stream water rushed everywhere, cascading off boulders, pooling into rock-lined ponds, and sliding through the gaps. 
      The uppermost reach of the gorge is fed by a waterfall.  Here the stream exits a serene forest and plunges into the time hole before emerging calmly again at the lower end of the glen.
      Our hike wasn’t wall-to-wall people, but it wasn’t solitary either.  At the lower reaches of the glen we watched two young siblings testing their ability to hop-scotch across the stream atop a few exposed boulders while their parents encouraged them.  Further up the gorge, young couples crawled across the ledges and leaped across stream crossings. While an early winter wind blustered outside the park, inside the glen it felt like a new vernal season had just begun.
                                                                         *                      *                      *
            Summer days are meant for big parks with lakes for swimming and kayaking and long, challenging trails that work up a sweat.  In the off-season we chose to visit two tiny parks instead. 
            Almost forgotten, Natural Bridge State Park and Parfrey’s Glen took us to forgotten time as well,  leap-frogging us across the seasons and across the ages.
 
-- Kevin Koch
March 2018

      Bird specialist Jon Stravers and I are driving through leaf-strewn dirt roads along the river bluffs of Alamakee County.   We bounce over a few ruts, occasionally pausing to peer through the woods at the old oaks and hickories where Jon tracks cerulean warblers each spring and summer.  But in general our movement is upward, ascending through the forest to a cliff face where Jon has constructed, rock by rock, a 1000-stone raptor effigy.
        Stravers, who lives most of the year in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, conducts bird-nesting inventories for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, Yellow River State Forest, and other environmental groups and agencies.  His work has resulted in much of the region encompassing Yellow River State Forest, Effigy Mounds National Monument, the Upper Mississippi National Fish & Wildlife Refuge, and Pikes Peak being designated a 35,000-acre Globally Important Bird Area (IBA) in 2014.
        Parking where the road ends fifty yards from the overlook, we swish through fallen leaves till we emerge at the cliff-face with its view clear to the east, save for one tenacious old cedar clinging to the limestone edge.  “That gnarly old dog, how long do you think he’s been here?” Jon rasps.  Stravers, with a headful of unruly gray hair, rumpled outdoor clothing, and cargo pockets filled to the brim, looks at home in these woods.
        Before us lies the 35-foot wing-spanned stone raptor, its left wing a few dozen feet from the overlook.  It looks much lighter than its rocky weight, as if it might take flight at a moment’s notice.
The spacious forest is both home and migratory haven to a wide range of birds, including coopers hawks, scarlet tanagers, and Jon Stravers’ favorites, the red shouldered hawk and cerulean warbler.
         Stravers’ bird inventories, for example, have identified 190 territories of the cerulean warbler, which is in 75% decline nationwide but thriving in the Driftless. The Effigy Mounds-Yellow River IBA provides habitat for over 100 bird species, including tropical migrants that seasonally inhabit the area. The IBA also includes nesting sites of rare and reintroduced raptors like the peregrine falcon.
       Across the river, Wyalusing State Park is included in a separate Wisconsin IBA program, adding to the overall bird sanctuary.   But, says Jon, “The birds don’t pay any attention to political boundaries, and I try to ignore some of that as well.”
                                                                             *                      *                      *
         On our way to the stone raptor, Jon stopped to point out the 30-inch diameter cottonwoods, ancient oaks and black walnuts that his cerulean warblers live among.  Their choice of tree “perhaps has something to do with tree structure and topography–open spacing in the upper branches,” Jon said, exercising his Audubon thinking.         Then Jon engaged his mystical side: “Or perhaps it could be the cerulean recognizing the wisdom of an ancient tree.”
        Cerulean warblers migrate to the Driftless Area from Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and the northern Amazon.  Jon marvels at the mystery: “How do they find their way over 3000 miles, a forest bird crossing the Gulf of Mexico trusting the compass in their heart and the elders of their clan?”
       The cerulean warblers usually arrive around May 5.  In May and June, as early as 4:30 a.m. Jon is at the Yellow River Forest or nearby to be in the best location when first light arrives.  He has been tracking about 200 ceruleans in the region, learning where they nest and how they defend their territories.  “They talk differently when they court, when the eggs are laid, and when their chicks are hatched,” Jon explains.  After the young reach adolescence, the parents stop singing and the family unit blends into the surrounding clan of warblers.  They leave Yellow River by the end of August to return south.  
       Jon is as much caught up in the mystery as the science of migrating birds.  “I’m trying to figure out what draws them in, what brings them back.”  The mystery, for Jon at least, largely resides in the Driftless landscape, particular the region encompassing the Yellow River State Forest and nearby Effigy Mounds National Monument.
        “Something happened to me where I first visited the bird effigies at Effigy Mounds,” he says, describing the nearby national monument along the Mississippi bluffs that protects almost 200 Native American mounds, including 30 in the shapes of bears and birds.  “I loved that view, that feeling, that remoteness when nobody else is up there.  There began a longing within me to be close to that place.  Though I knew little about the people who built them, I felt connected to them.”
       In 2015 Stravers first began building a stone raptor on a cliff overlook.  His current raptor sits atop Andy Mountain near Harper’s Ferry.   On his regular travels along the forest roads, he picks up fist- to lap-sized rocks and hauls them to the overlook, where he places them, stone by stone, in the outline or interior of the growing bird.  Like the mound-builders who placed heart-stones collected from far away at the center of their effigies, Jon has also collected rocks from Idaho, where his daughter and grandchildren live, and added them to the raptor.
      He has built similar stone raptors in northeast Iowa, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida in places where he senses a sacred landscape.
        Today Jon pulls a new stone from the back of the car to place on the wing.  Some stones, he says, are placed for symbolic value (such as the red stone at the raptor’s heart), while the rest are placed for the shape and fitting of the rock. 
       “I come here to become centered,” Jon reflects after placing the stone.  “We all need ‘spiritual exercise’ like we need physical exercise.  It only works if you consistently practice it.” 
So we place a new stone on the effigy, turn back to the car, and descend through the gray and golden light, giving space for the spirit of the raptor to take flight.

A PRAIRIE RESTORATION
By Kevin Koch
 
            Daryl guided the prairie burn like a sheepdog nudging the flock around the bend and tucking it into the valley.  He dribbled out the first flames from his drop torch along an edge of winter-browned tallgrass, forcing a line of fire to crawl against the wind for 20 feet until it petered out.  Then he circled back across the prairie and drop-torched bits of flame along another line.  This flame roared to life and rode the wind with soaring abandon till it reached the previous burn line and sank away.
          Dave Cushman, the owner of this private patch of prairie, had hired Daryl Parker of Tri-State Habitat Specialists, to conduct a safe burn on the 453-acre property. Dave had invited a few friends to help out, which mostly consisted of walking along the burn line and tamping down any flames that threatened to go rogue.
          This was Dave’s second annual prairie burn on his Jackson county property.  Along with restoring natural tallgrasses and wildflowers, he has constructed ponds for wildlife, built berms to minimize erosion, and revitalized the health of acreage’s forests.  Managing a prairie woodland ecosystem in the absence of the full range of natural inputs is a bit like a sheepdog’s task: nudging here, tucking there. 
           Dave and his wife purchased the property in 2001.  The previous owner had put much of the hilly, erodible land that that had been farmed continuously since the 1840s into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).  But, having retired the land, the former owner was ready to retire himself. 
          Dave’s intentions for the property developed gradually.  The CRP lands at the time of purchase were planted in bromegrass, a non-native shallow-rooted grass that holds the soil but can be easily reconverted to agriculture. Bromegrass does little to attract wildlife.  But Dave was increasingly drawn to the land’s original survey from the 1840s that recorded elk, deer, and wild turkey in an oak savanna landscape.
          Dave and I toured the property in late fall, bouncing along mowed paths in a pickup truck, winding among the prairie, ponds, and edgewoods.  A rooster pheasant waddled out into the path in front of us, strutting down the lane, reluctant to fly off, though he finally did.  “He must have someone interesting back in the grass,” chuckled Dave. 
            The 196 acres that have been restored to prairie are divided into three sections, one of which is scheduled for burning each spring.  As we circled the prairie, the three sections were easily distinguishable.  This year’s burned acres were vibrant with big bluestem, side oats grama, switchgrass, goldenrod, coneflowers, blackeyed susans, prairie dropseed, and other prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Last year’s burn was healthy as well, just a bit more unkempt.  The third parcel, never yet burned but scheduled for next spring, was in definite need of a haircut.
           Dave hired local forester and grassland expert Kevin Oetken to help with the conversion to native prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Dave doesn’t like using chemicals on the land, so the first step pained him, but was necessary.  First, the bromegrass had to be mowed low and killed off with herbicide in the fall and following spring.  Once the bromegrass had been removed, the next step was to plant a 39-seed variety mixture of native grasses and wildflowers in the late fall.
          Around the same time, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) approached Dave about building berms and ponds to reduce runoff from the steep-sloped property as part of a plan to reduce erosion throughout the region and limiting runoff.  Over the last few years Dave has constructed four ponds and 10-12 berms and basins for erosion control. 
          The ponds, Dave says, “are wildlife magnets.”  As we drove past we noted a ring of beaten-down grasses around each pond resulting from the wildlife drawn to the water.
          Next, Dave turned his attention to improving the timber stands of oak, hickory, and walnut by removing scrub trees so that the hardwoods can flourish and replenish. He has recently planted some American chestnut trees.
          Dave’s father was a forester, and he and his brothers grew up with a love of the outdoors.  “I probably spent 30 weekends a year from the time I was 5 or 6  hunting, fishing, and hiking while growing up.”
          Dave and his family—across three generations—enjoy hunting on the property, but also enjoy watching the re-established wildlife. “Before the restoration,” Dave says, “we really only saw red-winged blackbirds out here.  Now we see orioles, wrens, red-tailed hawks, tanagers.  There are deer, pheasants, lots of butterflies.”
          One hundred fifty years of farming on the steep-sloped acres depleted much of the topsoil, but over time, the prairie will restore the soil.  Deep native roots aerate the soil, providing places for organisms to grow, which feed insects, which in turn feed birds and butterflies and draws back a wider array of wildlife.
         “I don’t think that this property should ever be put back into production,” Dave says, contemplating future plans to assure this.
          Dave is proud of what has been accomplished on the farm, but insists the story of his prairie farm is not about himself, but about the land.  In addition, he points out that his prairie is an isolated plot.  “Corridors of native plants are needed,” he explains, in order to attract migrating and nesting birds, butterflies, and more.  
          A month before Dave and I bounced along the grassy lanes in his pickup, I had come out to the acreage on my own.  It was the first I had seen the property since Daryl had managed the fire and the straggling band of helpers.
          That April I had seen a scorched, black earth unfolding behind a sweeping orange and golden prairie fire.  Now, in early fall, the golds and oranges were back—in brown-eyed susans and compass plants and golden rod, and in the monarch butterflies that flitted about like so many prairie plants with wings.
 
-- Kevin Koch
December 2017
 
 

 THE  PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS
By Kevin Koch
 
     Growling thunder and a darkening sky to the west put a quick retreat to our second day’s hike on the Escarpment Trail in the Porcupine Mountains.  The rush lay in contrast to the leisurely lunch my wife and I had enjoyed on an outcrop 500 feet above the Lake of the Clouds a few minutes earlier. 
     The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park offers a dose of both urgency and calm as it stretches 60,000 acres along the south shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan.  The primacy of the present moment quickly dissipates into the eons here.
       Known colloquially as the Porkies, the range rises 1000 to 1600 feet above Lake Superior, forming parallel ridges a mile or so inland.  The parallel ridges are separated by glacial lakes, marshes, and old-growth, virgin forest.  From a fire tower at the crest of the Summit Trail, the highest point in the Porkies, the ridges undulate from peak to peak, forming a silhouette against the horizon that supposedly reminded early inhabitants of the hunched-up back of a porcupine.
     Dianne and I spent most of our hiking time on the Escarpment Trail, whose sheer basalt cliffs drop precipitously into the Lake of the Clouds.  It was a clear day on our first hike, so the lake reflected the deep blue of the seemingly-near sky instead.
     The escarpment—the term meaning a long, steep-sloped ridge—was formed a billion years ago when the earth’s crust began to pull apart in this region, forming the Midcontinent Rift. Volcanic magma rushed in to fill the void.  Uplifted 40,000 million years ago, the escarpment layers were later scoured by glaciers.  As we hiked along the ridge, we could still see scratch marks left on the exposed bedrock by the grinding glaciers.
     The Porkies are home to over 30,000 acres of old growth virgin forest, including the largest stand of hardwood west of the Adirondacks.  Towering eastern hemlocks—100-foot-tall, short-needled pines—shade large sections of the forest floor, preventing other trees from getting established and resulting in a “clean” understory from which the hemlock trunks arise like cathedral columns.
     Human habitation came early to the Porkies, with archaeological evidence dating back 8000 years.  The Ojibwe were the last indigenous peoples of the region.  The initial Euro-American appearance was quick, furious, and destructive.  Large swaths along Lake Superior were logged until the remaining old-growth forest was preserved when the Porkies were declared a wilderness park in 1945.
     Copper mining blew through the region like a wildfire as well.  Although intermittent mining dates back thousands of years, the mid-1840s saw a short-lived copper mining rush.  We hiked the Union Mine Trail through the bottomlands where interpretive signs point out the eroding evidence of an 1846 company mining community.  In October 1846 a miner named William Spaulding wrote home that “everything seems to prosper at this location; we are not only turning out copper, but children.  Mrs. Shin gave birth to a whopping baby boy today.” 
            The boom ended quickly.  The tone of Spaulding’s February 1847 message home foreshadowed the gloom that would soon overtake the mining community: “A man by the name of Baily was found frozen to death 4 miles from the mouth of the Iron River.”  The Union Mine was abandoned later in 1847 due to slumping copper prices.  It was reopened briefly in the 1860s and early 1900s, but each time closed quickly due to the vagaries of the market and limited ore deposits.
            The Union Mine trail led us past several mostly disappeared shafts as well some small waterfalls. Indeed, one of the biggest draws to the Porcupine Mountains—and to the Upper Peninsula in general—are the innumerable cascades.  The topography of the region creates a small “continental divide,” with waters south of the park embarking on a leisurely 2300-mile path to the Gulf of Mexico while waters from the Porkies plummet the few short miles to Lake Superior with great urgency.
            Our campsite was near the Presque Isle River.  Here the wooded Presque River Trail edges alongside numerous jagged waterfalls and bouldered rapids.  Further downstream, the river tumbles through a basalt valley, pounding through narrow draws and doubling back on itself to carve out “potholes” in the black rock. 
            Finally the Presque Isle River eases out into Lake Superior.  Our introduction to the mouth of the river came at sunset.  We caught the lake in summer calm as it drew the sun down into its belly.
            Lake Superior is, of course, the largest of the Great Lakes, but with depths reaching to 1330 feet, it could hold the waters of the four other lakes combined.  The most northerly of the lakes as well, its waters are bone-aching cold.  I swam briefly along the shoreline, hugging the top six inches as much as possible to float along a thin, sun-warmed layer. 
            The deep, clear Superior waters can turn urgent quickly, though, with November gales notoriously welling up to pull down yet another forlorn shipwreck.
          Both urgency and calm vie for the upper hand in the Porcupine Mountains.  Adrenaline pumps in proximity to a rushing waterfall while a quiet lunch on a basalt cliff outcrop above the Lake of the Clouds soberly reminds you of the power of the ages.
            But in a small corner of the Porkies—in a section added later and not subject to the park’s environmental protections—new exploratory drillings for copper mining erupted in the winter of 2017, accompanied by the usual voices pitting jobs against preservation. 
            Is there an urgency here?  Is there a long view?
 

           
 
 

            Christie is trying to disentangle the call of the Bobolink from the web of bird song at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary. “Hear that beep-boop-beep?  It sounds like R2-D2!” she laughs, likening it to the whirrings of the lovable Star Wars robot.
            My wife Dianne and I are guests of Christie Trifone-Simon, Director of Development for the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF), hiking a one-mile loop of the organization’s newly acquired 410-acre property located southwest of Stockton, IL. The rich range of habitat at Valley of Eden—tall and short grass restored prairie, brome grass, hardwood and orchard forest, wetlands and intermittent streams, and Rush Creek—are home to over 70 as-yet-identified bird species, including 15 species listed in “need of conservation” and/or “state-endangered.” 
            The result on this mid-June morning walk is a symphony of bird song.
            JDCF is a private non-profit organization in northwest Illinois’ Jo Daviess County that protects and restores environmentally significant lands based on the support of members, donors, and volunteers.  JDCF currently owns over 1,100 acres of woods, prairie, marsh, and archaeologically significant lands throughout the county available to public access, and they help other owners establish conservation easements on private lands as well.  
            Christie, who has led us on hikes before, is her usual enthusiastic self.  She points out a pair of bobolinks perched on a prairie bush swaying in the breeze.  The Bobolink is a migrant bird that spends part of its year in Panama, Christie explains.  A grassland bird, it has been in decline in recent years as more land is cultivated and developed.
            We also spook up a Meadowlark and several Red-Winged Blackbirds as we walk.  The blackbirds’ nests in the grass “look like a woven piece of art,” Christie says.
            As we turn a bend along the trail, we encounter the forest edge and a whole new set of birds.  An oriole is swooping among the orchard trees and a woodpecker is drumming a deadwood tree stump somewhere out of sight.  
            The list of rare or threatened species also includes Henslow’s Sparrow and Dickcissel on the prairie grasslands, the Great Egret in the marshes, the American Woodcock and Yellow-Billed and Black-Billed Cuckoo from the forest, and the Brown Thrasher and Savanna Sparrow in the edgewood.
Future plans for the property include bird watching and photography blinds. The bird sanctuary has drawn the interest of organizations like the Audubon Society.  It could well become a destination site for birders, says Christie.
            “It’s like a symphony of bird calls out here,” Dianne says, and suddenly the conversation turns to the aesthetics and psychological benefits of nature. 
            “The experience of nature is about sight, sound, texture, and colors,” Christie responds.  She tries to get kids, especially, to see nature up close.  Her sentences sometimes stop mid-stream as she points out swallowtail, monarch, wood nymph, and skipper butterflies that have fluttered across her train of thought, calling out to be noticed.
            The Monarch, Christie says, has a special relationship to the milkweed, and she takes us off the trail midsentence to show us the plant.  Monarchs feed off its milky sap, ingesting cardenolids, which in turn make the monarchs toxic to potential predators.  The loss of grassland milkweeds has contributed to the steep decline of monarchs.
            Everything in nature is woven together, and Christie leads our attention next to the underside of the milkweed leaves where ants, she explains, are “farming” aphids. The ants herd the nearly microscopic insects, protecting them from predators and feeding off the aphid excretion called honeydew.  “Look at the size of those ants’ mandibles,” Christie says with delight and amazement as she unfurls the milkweed leaf and examines the ants up close.
            We trade the microscopic view for a broad sweeping vista from the upland forest edge down through the valley grassland and across to the woods and farm fields that rim the horizon.  From here the wide range of habitat and land use is apparent.
From beyond the trail but still within the sanctuary grounds rises the lowing of cattle.  Another unusual feature of the Valley of Eden sanctuary is that cattle will continue to graze certain areas to keep the forest from encroaching on the short grass habitat that some birds require for nesting.  A farmhouse and cattle shed will also continue to grace the sanctuary entrance to help visitors “appreciate the history of our farming heritage,” Christie adds.
            Indeed, the Valley of Eden takes its name not from the Biblical garden but from the family name of its past owners who farmed the land.  But the bird sanctuary will be donated anonymously to the JDCF by its current owner who has been actively restoring the land the past 25 years, including planting prairie and new stands of hardwood forest.  Having seen habitat disappear elsewhere in the country, the owner has worked to preserve and improve the grasslands and woods that sweep across this sun-drenched valley and uplands.
            “The intention of the donor,” says Christie, “was to create a sanctuary for birds of many habitats.  We intend to carry on that dream forever.”
The Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary will be open to the public sometime in 2018.
            There is plenty of work to do in the meantime.  A new road and gravel parking lot had just been laid down the week before our visit.  Volunteers can get a sneak preview by offering to pull weeds, manage a bluebird trail, take part in birding inventories, help with wildlife interpretation, and more.
            A symphony of bird calls trill across the grassland at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary.  Bird interweaves with butterfly, ant with aphid, cow with grassland, and grassland with forest. 
And as with any good orchestra, each instrument is part of the song.