The peak of the nesting season has passed at Somme Woods, the forest preserve in Northbrook where I am helping with a survey of nesting birds. Mornings are quieter. The traffic noise no longer has to contend with hordes of male birds singing to maintain their territories. Now the songs come less often, and fewer species are singing. We are seeing more and more fledglings out of the nest, immediately recognizable by their stubby tails and awkward flight.
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We’ve had some exciting new stuff this year, starting with the blue-gray gnatcatchers that built a nest in a hawthorn near the seasonal pond at the head of the low area we call Middle Swale. We were looking forward to celebrating our first fledgling gnatcatchers, but sadly the violent storm of two weeks ago blew down the hawthorn limb that held the nest. The adults have stayed around, but we don’t know if they will try to nest again. Life in the wild is hazardous.
The storm also blew down a tall snag that held a downy woodpecker nest, and I’m sure there was a lot of other damage that we don’t know about. The long-term plan at Somme is to remove much of the forest and replace it with savanna and prairie. The easiest way to do that is to girdle trees by removing a strip of bark–and the living tissue directly under it–all the way around the trunk. The missing strip cuts off communication between roots and leaves, and the tree dies. But it doesn’t fall over until rot and boring insects have weakened it enough for a good wind to topple it. When it falls, it may take the nests of woodpeckers, great crested flycatchers, and black-capped chickadees with it.
So social are they that they nest in an almost colonial fashion. Our five nests are all within 100 yards of each other, and Bill and I both think there are more to be found in that same area. Waxwings are nomads. This year a flock nests at Somme. Next year, they may be someplace else.
The bobolinks I saw one Sunday morning were floaters. We keep hoping that a real prairie species will settle at Somme, and bobolinks certainly are that. They are among the open-country birds that sing in flight–the European skylark is another–using their wings as a substitute for the solid elevated perches that trees provide for forest birds.
So I find that my relations with nature consist of moments of intense joy–when I do manage to figure something out–that serve as punctuation for long periods of low-level anxiety. Most of the time I am either stewing over the grandiose worry that I’ll never be able to figure everything out or grappling with the more mundane fear that, though I have figured out one or two things in the past, my latest insight was probably my last. A lot of the rest of my life is like this, too. I thought nature was going to save me, but it turns out I can’t go to the woods without bringing me along.
