Arboretum Diary

"I've never seen a lark and it's pointless to get up early. The lark doesn't live on earth." Renard from Nature Stories









March 7

The wild turkey, although a mammoth species, is a strange ghost of a bird.  With such wild green plumage glistening like a long patch of emerald jewels against a bright sun, and inside a forest floor that is not hidden yet by leaves, such a creature should be a glaringly obvious thing to observe.  I had been running through the western most portion of the Arboretum, what is now called the Lost City, an enormous remnant of an attempt from back in the early 1900's to create a canaled suburban plot to be butted up against the shores of Lake Wingra, but that failed and turned to vast lots of overgrown concrete.  There was little sound by creatures of any kind today, dominated instead by the twisting of the basswood and pine tops by an aggressive wind.  I had found a long path made of old concrete planks, each intersection a golden green by a hundred years of velvety moss and suddenly the ghost bird, the largest I had ever seen, walked in its casual lungeing way across the path no more than ten feet in front of me.  With head phones on there is no crackling of the underbrush to detect. As for the turkey, with the stirring of the wind above, there are no footprints of the jogger to detect, especially across the velvet of the moss.  This one, unlike so many we see marching across the Longenecker Gardens in full regiments, was alone searching the invasive underbrush.  A few more steps difference in pace, it dawns on me that this could have been a collision or a turkey hurdle, certainly a startling moment in the Lost City on a windy day alone.