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Small Creatures and Ordinary Places

The University of Wisconsin Press

Contents

Illustrations.......................................ixPreface.............................................xiIntroduction........................................3Spring..............................................9Mourning Cloaks.....................................19Spring Peepers......................................31Summer..............................................39Monarch Butterflies.................................49Annual Cicadas......................................61Paper Wasps.........................................69Firefly Magic.......................................86Bat Plays...........................................95Green Darners.......................................102Autumn..............................................117True Katydids.......................................132Hard Frost..........................................144A Withered Patch of Wildflowers.....................150Winter..............................................159Between Cornfield and Forest........................165Cocooning...........................................173A Royal Oak.........................................188Winter Moon.........................................194Commencement........................................209Bibliography........................................217

Chapter One

Last summer, leaves and twigs snapped and cracked beneath my feet along this path. Just three months ago I slogged through a foot of snow here. This place was brittle and bare then, its deafening silence offering few clues of things alive. But today this wooded glen is dripping and soft, its mulch a water-soaked sponge underfoot-winter's thawing legacy.

I try to forget the surrounding city's stoic embrace of gray, metallic clatter. Slipping into this sodden place, a small pocket of relic forest closed in by urbanized landscape, reveals some persistent signs of what long ago was the year's awakening in sprawling, majestic woodlands. This five-acre slice of forest is skirted by old warehouses, modest homes, a railroad line, and an expressway. Yet it still has a few ancient oaks, many maples, beech, other assorted trees, and a springtime pond.

On this day, with its rain sparkle blending with the slow, steady chirp of a lone wood frog, it's easy to sense the awakening of earth's wild citizens. What's really special about going into these woods just now is that it is the very cusp of the season, when the trees are barely beginning to bud and nature's presence seems scant. Scant that is, unless you look closely at the land for stirrings of life.

I can never guarantee exactly what I might see in the woods at this time of the year. For sure, there will be some bird watchers-the same feisty group that comes here every year to witness the spring northward migration. I prefer to relinquish upward gazing to them and focus on more earth-bound signs of nature's rebirth. Nature's bold strokes, symbolized across the continent, even canonized perhaps, by huge old trees, owls, raptors, and big cats, are precipitously held together by intricate linkages among many small wild beasts. Surprisingly enough, more than 80 percent of this planet's animal life comes packaged as small arthropods alone, and the interconnections among myriad other small creatures adds an even more complex dimension to the design of these woods.

Many people feel more at ease with the larger, more obvious signs of nature, even in spring. But the true nature loyalist seeks out the tiny, far less prominent beings and their intertwined lives. Taking the time to expose nature's unfolding subtleties in spring's thaw kindles an appreciation for this land's capacity to reseed itself and sprout new life. What is truly marvelous about spring-oft noted only in passing, as a clich, and rarely comprehended much further-is that nature's awesome tapestry is woven together once again, as if the whole woods is some superorganism coming out of a deep sleep.

Spring, however, can be very different one year to the next. Like a petulant child, the season thrives on inherent unpredictability and guile. In some years, it arrives "early" and in others, "late." Sometimes its display is gradual and muffled, a stretched unfolding of freshened new life sliding at a snail's pace into summer. At other times it is a thin and rushed but glorious and vibrant ribbon whisked from winter's grasp and flung into summer. Such capriciousness aside, spring's personality is always an elegant symphony, orchestrated stanzas of things being born, shaped, and blended by weather and each other.

Only inside the woods, when meandering toward the flooded center of this place, can we truly begin to sense the ancient seasonal cycle of birth, growth, harvest, and death that has needled philosophers and others for centuries. Those who ponder life's essence, its soul, find ample fodder for the task in spring. Streaks of sunlight cascading down through a pale green veil of interlacing buds and new leaves give a soft glow to the bottom of the woods. Patches of an incredibly blue sky fill spaces behind dead and threadbare branches. Even though this place is still cold and damp, the growing green roof above hints of many sultry, steamy days to come only a few months ahead. By summer's debut the depth of these woods will darken under a full-blown canopy of expanded, seasoned leaves. A flawless mosaic of many sizes and shapes, this living shawl will give shade and coolness to this glen and its rich ground cover of accumulated sticks and leaves. Across the mulch an occasional smudge of lush, crisp skunk cabbage catches my eye-the venerable and pungent plant whose spicy odor fills the air when its succulent leaves are snapped off underfoot by passing deer, raccoons, red foxes, or people. A staggering of sunspots hitting sap flowers on tree trunks hints at secrets within the bark.

Suddenly, less than twenty feet away, a flutter of blackness appears, as if a shadow passing, drawing my attention to an illuminated tree trunk. A skittish mourning cloak, one of spring's first butterflies, has just alighted on the frothy brew of a fresh sap flow. As tough and cunning a beast as any fox, this small angle-wing butterfly has survived the brutal winter in a cold-stunned state. Richly cloaked in chocolate-brown, yellow-tipped wings, two-thirds the width of an average man's fist in span, the butterfly flits through the woods in search of its first meal of the new year and finds it on this tree. Nuthatches and sapsuckers have already gouged holes in the trunk in search of their own food, and these wounds are bleeding sugar-rich sap that ferments on contact with the air. This fragrant concoction always lures insects, mostly flies and honeybees, but also an occasional angle-wing butterfly, like the mourning cloak, question mark, or comma. From the moldy sap, male butterflies get energy needed to fly about in search of a mate. Females search for scattered willows, elms, and birches on which to place eggs as new leaves unfurl.

As if by some uncanny clockwork, almost invariably when I spot a mourning cloak, I also hear a red-winged blackbird-two of the most familiar harbingers of spring. By summer, the blackbird's song will be blotted out by the mixed concerts of many other birds, and the mourning cloak will seldom be seen against a...