The Season of Waiting for Morels

After two days of rain, the river has risen a foot or so, and we now enter the season of "Waiting for Morels." Everyone seems to have them except us, but we are maintaining our vigil.

We are obviously into full spring and happy not to have to haul in firewood. And now with exam week upon us, I can see through to the summer and turning to the next Audubon work full-time. The book about the 1843 "expedition" to the Upper Missouri River is going to be challenging, but I'm truly enjoying reading all those early accounts of the fur trade and of navigation on the rivers through the first decades of the nineteenth century, during the transition from canoe, bullboat, keelboat, and Mackinaw boat to steam travel. This is fit reading for the boy in me: adzes, cordelles, snags, sawyers, pronghorns, bear oil, prairie chickens, air holes, roaring ice dams, and wrecked riverboats. Since one of the main purposes of this book is to contextualize Audubon's 1843 trip, I'm reading about the voyages and travels made by others in the decade before him, especially the remarkable artist and ethnologist George Catlin and the European nobleman Prince Maximilian of Wied, who brought with him the artist Karl Bodmer. So when Audubon is writing home to Manhattan from Fort Union at the confluence with the Yellowstone telling Lucy and his sons to keep the newspapers informed of where he is and of what he is doing, he wants the spotlight moved from those earlier travelers onto himself.

Recently Alison's approach to her graduate work in Michigan State's anthropology department is accelerating. After a nearly overwhelmingly inspiring and encouraging meeting with her two advisors, she decided to take two courses in her first semester. But now, since a third seminar has been redesigned and rescheduled--a seminar in the study of American Indian women--and since one of her advisors personally invited her to take part in it, she thinks she'll be taking three graduate courses in the fall. This is exciting, of course, but also, of course, a little intimidating. But while she was an undergraduate at Alma College, she worked full-time, raised three kids (daughters to boot), and who knows what else and survived to tell about it. So she can do this. We'll have fewer movie nights, she'll get her graduate work done, and I'll get the Audubon book done sooner than I would have otherwise.

But enough of the human news. A few days ago, a Great Egret visited the pond two miles north of us, and yesterday morning the year's first White-crowned Sparrows were crooning outside our bedroom window. And today when I went out deliberately to make a photograph at 11:00 a.m. to contribute to a global moment I read about in the NYTimes this morning, the year's first Nashville Warbler (top photo above) sang and posed for me in a hawthorn at precisely the right moment. A few minutes later, down in the marsh, the year's first Common Yellowthroats were singing.

The bottom photo above is one of the Sapsuckers, some twenty-five feet up on an aspen. What you can't tell is that he is actually sipping sap from the carefully carved grooves he makes in the bark to cause the sap to puddle up. His newly excavated nest hole is on the far side of the tree at his level.

The wild flowers have been coming on delightfully. The spring beauties, the wood anemones, the mayapples, three species of violets so far, pussytoes, and others are blooming, and the formidable golden ragwort is sending up its stalks in the marsh.