There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
— Albert Einstein
Twinflowers are tiny! That I’d somehow spotted a miniature forest of them blanketing a spot of sun in the cool damp woods of Northern Michigan was the first miracle. Surviving the swarms of mosquitos long enough to get a couple shots was the next.
Is there any sweeter distraction than that of baby birds?
Oh and don’t worry about the one in the middle… it does have a head. I think it might just have been mid-nap when I snapped this pic.
THE pic I missed was when a spotty-breast baby robin perched itself as the fourth beggar in the row and was rebuffed by the parent kingbird… made me giggle for a half-hour at least.
😉
Hmm… which is prettier?
This Eastern Kingbird considers himself the watchman of the neighborhood and since they’ve bloomed, has been landing amid the small patch of daylilies beside the courtyard here.
Whether he’s just appropriating a convenient hunting perch or instead has some aesthetic sense of his own handsomeness, I’m not sure.
What do you think?
😉
Our nation’s list of imperiled species includes some celebrities… sexy ones like the Whooping Crane and the Florida Panther.
Most, however, are virtually unknown.
The Kirtland’s Warbler, one of the rarest of songbirds, is a specialist and nests only within a very particular habitat.
The habitat itself, even, is imperiled.
The scrubby, non-descript trees that emerge from sandy and fire-scorched terrain in isolated parts of Michigan are the bird’s touchstone. Jack Pines, like the Pitch Pines more familiar to me, require fire for regrowth.
Fire isn’t very popular in residential or commercial or agricultural areas, but the Kirtland’s depend on the mosaic of changes inherent in the destruction and subsequent renewal caused by fire.
They nest only in those areas where fire has created the conditions that select for early successional plants… plants that typify a pine barrens community. Without proper management, gradually the Jack Pines grow too tall, the canopy closes in and the grassy understory where they build their nests disappears because of low light levels.
The birds move elsewhere… or try to. Aggressive management has allowed for the hope of recovery and populations are increasing.
None of this has anything to do with what it felt like to wander in those pine plains searching for a Kirtland’s.
This is not a bird that I’d hoped ever to know.
The Kirtland’s is near mythic among birders and the makings of a pilgrimage for many.
I was just along for the ride.
Please click on the pic! It’s one of only a dear dozen or so and is especially sweet because he’s carrying food in his beak.
Along the northern shore of Lake Michigan… a pic taken at a stop along the way to somewhere else… a chance to stretch our legs and see what there was to see.
I was struck by the familiar… the feel of the wind in my hair and dunes dotted with tansies. I filled the pockets of my jeans with tiny purple mussels cast ashore and wondered at a sea without salt and waves without a tide.
Explorers believed the world had an edge and they could fall off if they went wrong.
I think they were right.
This world is full of edges and falls. That horizon might be a new world or it could be a cliff.
Still, this is true.
I look around me and find the horizon is only a line drawn in the sky… a kind of dare.
For navigating… there’s the fear map that directs me back to shore where it’s safe and dry and comfortable. But following that map means going backwards. And backwards causes my heart to sink, really.
Always, there’s the straight line, the *I know exactly where I mean to be* map. I keep thinking I can somehow convince myself of this, so long as I keep both hands on the wheel and don’t let my hair become undone.
Mostly I’ve given up on that, lately. My record at trying to control the world ain’t so great, plus it makes my shoulders hurt.
😉
Instead I find myself wandering willy-nilly, easily distracted and with too much play in the steering wheel as I look at the sky… my heart and my head in their own happy argument… an argument that’s sweetly wrong, but which pushes me into trouble at awkward times and which laughs me through disaster.
Who can deny it?
“Breathe,” I keep telling myself. Feel. See. It seems simple, but is so very, very hard.
I keep forgetting.
The sea reminds me. This sea. The waves pound it at me, each a different ride, each a different possibility of diving or floating, of swimming or drifting.
The world insists itself like a lover. “Take me. Take this moment… this, now.”
“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”
“No use to them,” said Alice, “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose.”
— Lewis Carrol
A person who goes traveling to far-flung places with the express purpose of seeing things should, I guess, be concerned with the naming of those things.
I rather enjoy the mystery, and the magic, of meeting these fierce-looking creatures in their own strange paradise of wet meadows and sunny paths through the forest without knowing much at all about them.
Their names don’t much matter when I find them basking in the sun on a weathered plank bridge or stunned with the chill off one of the Great Lakes. Theirs is a world entire and to be allowed entry, however briefly with the lens of my camera, is enough.
Mostly.
😉
Some are so beautiful, so otherworldly, their faces so expressive…
or their existence so threatened that even the shimmer of an iridescent wing is enough to inspire me to learn more.
For those of you Type A personalities that just HAVE TO KNOW (grin) each photo is tagged with a name, as best I can guess or remember. Click on each to enlarge.
A beautiful Indian Paintbrush glimmers from damp sedgy meadows on the Door Penisula of Wisconsin. This gorgeous member of the figwort family is saddled with the rather ignominious rank of a hemiparasite. Oh! What is a hemiparasite you may ask… a hemiparasite is a plant that derives some of its sustenance from other plants. In the case of our beautiful paintbrush, it taps into the roots of various grasses.
Our orange flamer has a bit of Spanish flair to it… the genus name is Castilleja. This name honors the great Spanish botanist Domingo Castillejo, who plucked plants in the 18th century. The specific epithet is coccinea, which means scarlet – a fitting descriptor for our showy hemiparasite.
Many believe the brilliant orange floral parts to be flower petals. No, they are not. The eye-catching sprays of orange are in fact brightly colored bracts, which are modified leaves that subtend the true flowers. And it’s a good thing the paintbrush is adorned with those festive bracts, as the true flowers are greenish bits of nothingness.
Beads of water glisten like jewels on the tepals of a stunning Wood Lily. Uncommon and always a treat, these lilies glowed like beacons from the perennial gloom of a boreal forest edge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I think that orange flowers are especially attention grabbing. Perhaps this is because orange is not a particularly common color in nature. In any event, these plants, when in full bloom, hit the eye with the force of a barreling Mack truck.
Another reason that the Wood Lily is conspicuous is that it is our only native Lilium in which the flowers are held perfectly upright. All of the others droop or nod.
Suffer a spider bite lately? Native Americans would have you believe that this is the cure… they ground up Wood Lily plants and made a thick paste, which was then slathered onto the area affected by the spider bite.
The allure of lilies dates to the beginnings of the written word… witness this quote from the bible: “… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matthew 6:28-29)
Rising from stormy waters and crowned by old forests, the sandstone cliffs of Pictured Rocks stretch for 15 miles along Lake Superior’s southern shoreline.
Historically the land of the Ojibwa, the rugged beauty of Pictured Rocks makes it easy for one to imagine a world shaped by unseen spirits, when in fact the formations are a work of nature, carved by water and time.
A couple hour boat ride from the little marina in Munising is the way we saw them today and despite the choppy seas and cold temps (50 degrees!) – any discomfort was quickly forgotten once I had a cup of coffee in hand and stable ground underfoot.
The pics speak for themselves, I think. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is remote, but breathtakingly beautiful in so many ways that make the trip worthwhile.
Here’s a hint: pic taken today in Northern Michigan at a state park’s feeder. Happy guessing! 
Yep… it’s still raining here. 
