Nature Journal

May 8


The Black River is nearly currentless on a calm day – waves calm, windless, the sun then settles down on the legs as you float along on kayak.  The backwaters of the upper Mississippi River teeming Sandhill cranes, the red wings, and scattered mallards.  Because the water is high you can nose into the brush of otherwise elusive marshlands through broken timber and upturned stumps.  Every square foot, as you slowly glide across the surface, slow and easy strokes, a carp rolls below and leaves streaking ripples through the lily pads.  Turtle heads poke up to peak then dart down into the shallow duckweed just as quickly.  Yet of all of this, the truest grand finale is the giant raptors eagles dangling from the crusted old growth overlooking the backwaters.  The young, unlike the more visually obvious bold white head of the mature eagles, blend into the dreary May timber.  As we approached the underbrush of a water thicket, suddenly a shadow leaped and sprung from a dead branch above our heads.  The wing spread of even the two year old is as mammoth as anything we see in these parts of the upper Mississippi, as the flap is slow and body bulky across the open sky above.  We follow through a barely cut trail in the backwater reeds.  It lands.  We follow. We watch its bulk on the branch as it leaps again and circles back around us, only feet above, the king of the river sky.