Nature Journal

"An eagle soaring above a sheer cliff, where I suppose its nest is, makes another striking show of life, and helps to bring to mind the other people of the so called solitude...." Muir, from My First Summer in the Sierra



April 10


The vast backwaters of the Trempealeau Wildlife Refuge teem with waterfowl in spring.  There are so many pockets of back bays, so many made dikes splitting ponds, bunches of floating marsh grass and timber for beaver mound construction that you are seemingly never more than a short walk along a path away from some new flock of species.  We parked at the head of the Wildlife Drive

down below the Prairie Road.  The bike trail is fine gravel and easy to bike – a side channel waterway to the right and a vast naturally occurring savannah to the left.  By late spring bloom the prairie is an array of hundreds of splashed colors from spiderwort to lupine.  Underneath the unseeable portions of the marsh grasses a heavy croaking hum of spring frogs. At the beginning of the bike loop, besides the occasional solo mallard or black tern, the main species of bird that we saw was the utterly majestic American White Pelican.  Flying up over the tops of the sparse Savannah oaks, maybe 30 pelicans circled the hill lines, slowly flapping their wings, then diving down in unison with one another, their

wings peeled back for the sake of aerodynamics.  At various spots along the biking loop, we would encounter the pelicans again and again as they must have been determining their preferred landing zone in the backwaters.  Sometimes they would shake no more than a hundred feet above us.  What would strike us and leave us standing in amazement, was the sheer size of these birds, considered one

of the largest North American birds.  The overall sound of a bird that close becomes somewhat equal to its size.  As you sit below two geese leaving their own comfortable roost floating on the lake, you can hear their wings flap and the wind literally split in their wake; as for the pelican, they are virtually silent vocally, but their bodies carry the same kind of wind energy as a small craft as they fill sky directly above you.

Geese sat in their marsh reed roosts, honking as we approached.  White and Sandhill cranes flung up from the deep edges of bays. Across the surface, this visit anyway, were hundreds of black ducks with particularly astute radars.  Any motion from two hundred yards or inward and these black ducks quickly bunched together and rose up to find another spot along the water roadway a few more feet down and went on about their business.