The Drama of Un-named Pond

This post describes an adventure that I had this morning at 6 AM. Some people think these days are dangerously hot. At six, the world is so cool, gentle, and beautiful. If our culture could adjust our schedules, people could be so much happier. Certainly, in the early cool, I am.

I love the pond of this post, and it actually has a name.
But too many endangered secrets are revealed to use it here.
The Chicago metro area has so many human feet - that excessive publicity (and thus visitation)
risks death by trampling.
If you visit the Somme preserves, please stay on the trails during the growing season.

Un-named pond has sensitive wildlife - and populations of five endangered plant species: an orchid, a gerardia, a sundrops, a speedwell, and a grass. Two are among the largest populations: on the planet (in one case) or in Illinois (in the other). Un-named Pond has more than one hundred species of plants that are uncommon or rare. (We planted most of them - a complexity that's discussed below.)

Today I was happy to find American slough grass - an endangered annual with the impressive Latin name of, Beckmannia syzigachne. We don't find it every year.

This is one of the region's rarest grasses. An annual, it pops up in Un-named Pond
some years by the hundreds - and some years not at all.
Today I found it in 5 areas, for a total of 11 plants. 

People originally told us that the Somme preserves were too degraded to merit conservation resources. We argued that we had volunteer time that conservation seemed to have no other use for, and we could restore it from seed sources that were otherwise going to be lost to development or neglect. Thus, seed for the endangered slough grass that seems to thrive here came from a population that was subsequently lost. The same is true for the federal endangered "prairie white-fringed orchid" (or "eastern prairie fringed orchid"). The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service now considers the large population at Un-named Pond one of the world's most important.

When we started caring for this pond, it was mostly covered by dense cat-tails with little diversity growing underneath. Remnants of richer vegetation survived here and there, at the edges of the cat-tails, so we started swiping the cat-tails with herbicide to protect the biodiversity they seemed to be displacing. It turned out to be easy to kill the cat-tails without damaging the surrounding vegetation. At first we planted no seed. We waited to see what would come from the seed bank, but little came, especially in the deep water areas where the cat-tails were densest. Especially there, much of the current vegetation came from our seed mixes.

Where only cat-tails - and then bare soil - once stood, the pond now is now diverse and complex.

Does the photo above look like a pond? This pond is "ephemeral" - meaning that it sometimes has water and sometimes not. Always after snow-melt in spring - and any time after heavy rains, there's water and ducks. Following our recent hot and rainless period, it dried for the first time in 2017. Today it is moist but with no standing water. Its tadpoles have turned into frogs and are off hopping across the surrounding grassland.

Once we started seeding, following our usual practice, we tried to find, gather, and broadcast all species of seed that historically would likely have lived in the muck that faced us when we'd controlled the cat-tails.

Our experience has been that many species are slow to establish. So - while I'm here looking for aggressive invasives like reed canary grass - that need control - I keep one eye open to discover new successes. Soon I see bur-reed, for the first time in this pond, from a recently discovered population in another Somme pond nearby.

Newly restored, bur reed will be popular with the ponds ducks.
They prospect for its large seeds in the pond's muck.

Another success here is the threatened species, marsh speedwell. It was a dominant species in one nearby pond - but absent here, until after we moved seed here. In recent years, this speedwell has vanished from that other pond but is doing very well here in Un-named.

Marsh speedwell likes the parts of this pond that are shaded by oaks.

The quiet nobility of the little speedwell flower is shown so much better in Lisa Culp Musgrave's elegant photo.
Except for Lisa's beauty, above, all the photos in this post are from my cell phone, this morning.

Another puzzler is a sedge (see photo below). Tufted lake sedge is abundant in a similar pond about 300 yards away. In 2012, we'd killed especially large areas of cat-tail. So - in addition to our other mixes - we gathered a shopping bag full of tufted lake sedge and broadcast it in Un-named Pond.

A bagful of rare seed. Some years, this temperamental species produces none.
How many plants would result?

For many summers, I saw no results in Un-named. Then a few years ago I saw one plant. Every year it seems bigger, but there's still only one.

One big plant of tufted lake sedge (front left) stands annually alone, for now. 

It seems to make at least some fat seeds every year. Will the population explode some year when conditions are right?
This is a continuing story - for so many species.

Many ecologists believe that natural communities are typically diverse. Before I learned modern ecology, I used to think that a solid cat-tail marsh was great "nature." Now I see it as a marsh that is suffering - and poor for most species of wetland plants and animals.

But how much diversity can such a degraded marsh recover - through restoration?  Our stewardship of Un-named Pond is one experiment that may help answer that question. We have offered it seed of hundreds of species (if you count the various sunny-to-shady and wet-mesic-to-deep-water species).

Here - where cat-tail was recently herbicided - crow's-foot sedge competes with blue-flag, water parsnip, water plantain, and others. In some places where seed was not broadcast, Iris is now nearly a monoculture.

We were "less aggressive" or "neglectful" earlier in our stewardship of this pond. At first we controlled the cat-tails and assumed that nature and the seed bank would restore diversity. That didn't happen. Large areas became solid patches of blue flag iris or bluejoint grass. Then we had monocultures or "few-cultures" of those species. How much better is that than cat-tails? In this experiment, we're gambling on the approach of "pursuing diversity through added diversity." Over the decades and generations, various experiments may teach us a lot more than we know now.

Un-named Pond was naturally a savanna pond. The 1839 public land survey and other data indicate scattered and clumped oaks here. The farmer cut the trees on the north and west sides - and planted crops. Part of the recovery now is to get some trees back there. Seedlings abound. But, pruned by fire and deer, they remain small. I note that the bur oak nearest the north edge of the pond has had its top eaten off. A one-year set back.

Make note: raise the cage.

On the south edge, the problem was too many trees.

At one point, invading green ash covered most of Un-named Pond. We controlled it.
Now it's coming in again near the oaks - which are the only large old trees around this savanna pond. 

Today I flushed woodcocks three times. Recently it's been very hot and dry. Ephemeral ponds may be life-savers to them. In the first flush, a mother hovered with her distraction act. I knew babies must be near by. It turned out that these babies were fledged. When I finally started to walk carefully, watching each step, three chicks also flew up and away.

My third woodcock sighting was also of a hen performing her "distressed-looking" decoy flight. I froze again. Just yesterday I'd seen chicks too young to fly. But in this case, there seemed to be no chicks near - except the one dead one shown below. It wasn't eaten. I wondered if it had been stepped on, by a deer or a person. They're well camouflaged. Stepping on them is a serious danger.

It's mother seemed to be protecting it - but too late.

Some of the pond's rare orchids and false foxgloves, (neither in bloom yet) are vulnerable to trampling like that woodcock chick. I've seen massive damage from human feet here - apparently by people who "loved" the place or at least found it very interesting. We need bigger areas like this.  

We the well-intentioned stewards, sometimes, probably, unintentionally, step on and injure or kill salamanders, snakes, baby birds, rare caterpillars, snails, and other honored neighbor creatures. We feel bad certainly in the rare cases when we know it. But it's a cost that we balance out with the great help we provide and which, in the bigger picture, provides for vastly more successful seedlings and babies that would otherwise be replaced by the barren chaos of invasives.

Frankly, we stewards don't go into Un-named Pond ourselves this time of year, unless some management or monitoring need requires us to do so. But we're happy to enjoy its magic when so required. If you'd like to help, you'd be very welcome.

So, let's end with a photo of hope:

See the empty spaces among the dense vegetation. These indicate where some bigger, short-termer species have died.
They also indicate examples of where some of the next generation of quality plants will take root.
We will continue to collect and broadcast seeds of species that may want to become part of the diversity here.
Our work is a mission - and an adventure - and also full of mostly inspiring surprises. "Stay tuned."

And if just knowing about the increasing richness of this pond (and the rest of the Somme natural communities) makes you happy, then you're a lot like us. Join us for a "workday" or a tour, if you live near by. Or, in any case, it's a pleasure just to be in touch, through this blog. Feel free to leave a comment.

(A more technically science-and-stewardship-focused post on Un-named Pond - that partly overlaps with this one - was also published today at http://woodsandprairie.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-science-and-secrets-of-un-named-pond.html)

Birds Moving Into Open Woods

Today we found this woodcock chick, deep in Somme Woods. I used to think of woodcocks as birds of thickets and prairie edges. But as we restored quality to this formerly-buckthorn-choked preserve, the woodcocks started doing their spectacular mating dances/performances - deep in the woods, surrounded by  the tall oaks. And now today - while we were out controlling invasive reed canary grass - suddenly a woodhen springs up, hovering, tail spread wide, with a low-hanging, labored, slow flight.

I know this trick. Whenever I see it, I tell everyone, "Freeze!" Young woodchicks are around our feet. Often after careful looking, we can see all four. Today we backed off, but took this photo of one,  from a couple of feet away, motionless (as their instincts insist they be).

Baby woodcocks freeze - as their mothers perform diversion tactics. The return of breeding woodcocks
to Somme Woods after many decades absence seems like a happy vote of confidence in restoration efforts. 

What is an open woods? Why might such be worth restoration and research? The photo below gives a sense of what Somme is starting to look like. Though improved enough for many bird species, this habitat is still far from natural (defining "natural" as what this kind of woods was like as its species evolved over millions of years).

In the photo below, all the trees are tall and thin. That's in part because the old spreading oaks have mostly died, and the young ones struggled against each other for light. This woods was so dense with buckthorn that it was difficult to walk through it. At that time, no birds sang in the dark tangle. 

Old bur oaks and young pole trees. Still far from natural,
but many birds of conservation concern seem to like it. 

We've been surprised at the birds that moved in. Brown thrashers this year seem to spend a lot of time singing and foraging in the woods. They've joined indigo buntings, yellowthroats, red-headed woodpeckers, and northern flickers - all of which we thought needed more open areas. But how would we know what would have been the breeding birds of open oaks woodlands? They degraded swiftly after the natural fires stopped, and open oak woods haven't been present to study during the rise of ecology.

As we get to know the ecology of woods with-and-without shrubs - and with-and-without sufficient openness for the reproduction of open-grown and woodland-grown oaks, we'll no doubt continue to have exciting surprises. In the meantime, they're already wonderful.

Below are some photos - taken at Somme by Lisa Culp Musgrave - of birds now breeding in Somme's open oaks:

Indigo buntings were common in the open areas. Now they're singing, building nests,
and defending territories well into the open woods. 

It shouldn't be a surprise that humming birds didn't nest in dark buckthorn. But we were surprised how many we started to find wherever the woods was opened up enough for columbine, Michigan lily, and cardinal flower. (Hummingbirds like red.)

The wood pewee is now perhaps the commonest bird in the woods.
They sing all day long. We wonder if they follow us to eat mosquitoes.

Scarlet tanagers live high in the trees. Why would they care if there was buckthorn underneath?
But they seem to nest where we've cleared it out. This year we have three pairs nesting
in the about-one-hundred acres of woods we've begun restoring. Sometimes we see them down among the grasses and wildflowers, hunting delicious bugs. 

Other birds that we've found nesting in the open woods include yellow-billed cuckoo, hairy woodpecker, great-crested flycatcher, blue-gray gnatcatcher, yellow-throated vireo, white-breasted nuthatch, eastern bluebird, Cooper's hawk, red-tailed hawk, and great-horned owl. 

It feels like an honor to have this kind of mutually positive relationship with all these feathery wonders ... as we all learn and grow. 

Twelve Animals To Save

Seventy wildlife conservationists met at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum on January 31, 2017 for a Chicago Wilderness campaign to save a dozen Priority Species of the region’s critical habitats. This initiative is headed by 28 agencies and organizations. Goals includes measurable improvements in numbers and habitats for all 12 species in five years and beyond.

Species were chosen for their "geographic/biological" significance. In other words, "How important is work here to the future of this species?"

This post focuses on four of the priority species that live in oak savannas and woodlands:

Rusty Patched Bumble Bee 

Blue-spotted Salamander

Smooth Green Snake

Red-headed Woodpecker

Of course, saving the habitats for these species, if done well, will also conserve hundreds of other species of rare animals and plants.

Rusty Patched Bumble Bee 

This large furry bee was common in our prairies and savannas but has decreased by 95% (nationwide) in recent years. It is the first bee given Endangered status by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. 

Local trends and threats are poorly known. If you (or volunteers you’re in touch with) might be willing to learn to recognize these bees, search for them, and report findings - go to Bee Spotter: https://beespotter.org/about

Allen Lawrence of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum explained that bumble bees are especially good pollinators of some plant species because of their impressive “buzz pollination” abilities. They unhinge their wings and buzz to shake off large amounts of pollen that lesser bees don’t get.

Lawrence listed three threats to this species:

- pathogen spillover 

- habitat quality

- sub-lethal effects of pesticides

The big surprise here was the threat of pathogen spillover from commercial bumble bees. There has been a steady increase in the commercial rearing of bumble bees for pollination. This has not always been a blessing. Farmers are allowed to transport commercially-reared bumblebees onto their land, for pollinating crops. 

This has spread diseases, with consequences for local populations of wild bees. The Xerces Society submitted a petition to the USDA requesting laws to protect wild bumble bees from disease by regulating the movement and health of commercial bumblebees. You can read more about this issue on this page and this one.

The habitat quality problem is the result of invasives, of course. If buckthorn shades out all the flowers, the bees lose the diverse food sources they depend on. Thus, “SAVE THE RUSTY PATCH” is one more good reason to restore and maintain diverse prairies and savannas. 

Is there any place where politics doesn’t rear its ugly head? When the Fish & Wildlife rep at this meeting was asked if Donald Trump’s recent decree would block the agency from regulating threats to this Federal endangered species, he said, “Yes.” But that shouldn’t stop us from voluntary work to protect this species in yards and forest preserves, as Chicago Wilderness proposes. And that’s the main help this deserving bee needs anyway. 

Smooth Green Snake

Fairly common until recently, this soft and gentle snake is recognized in Illinois as a Species in Greatest Conservation Need. It is on the Endangered list in Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio. 

It has been found in 25 Chicago Wilderness locations in the past five years, but researchers have found nest failure rates ranging from 42 to 86% over the last three seasons.  Of the failed nests, 70% of failure was due to abiotic conditions like desiccation or mold. The other "~20-30% was due to predation (typically by insects) or unknown fate," according to team leader Allison Sacerdote-Velat also of Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.  The conservation team is also concerned about unscrupulous collectors stealing snakes as pets as well as the spread of snake fungal disease. Research is under way to determine best management practices for green snake habitats.

Why such a high nest failure? One possible culprit is the lack of large diameter rotting logs, which keep the eggs moist and hidden. To increase this species’ odds in the short run, three agencies (DuPage, Lake, and McHenry Forest Preserve and Conservation Districts) do what they call "head-starting." A Head Start Program for smooth green snakes consists of incubating and hatching out the eggs - either through captive breeding or through collection and protection of "wild nests or wild-sired nests" to assure that eggs don’t desiccate and die - or go down the gullets of predators. Young snakes released into good quality prairie or savanna habitat are thought to do well.

To help monitor this species, citizen-scientists are encouraged to record sightings on Herp-Mapper at: https://www.herpmapper.org.  It's important to click “mask location” so that the data can't be used by poachers. At present, the smooth green snake project doesn’t have a designated project page for this part of the effort. It is planned for the coming year. Then the information will automatically go to the research team, which may get in touch with you for follow-up.

Red-headed Woodpecker

This flashy woodpecker was also common a century ago. But it "declined by over 2% per year from 1966 to 2014, resulting in a cumulative decline of 70%," according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Bird Conservation Network data shows it declining at 5% per year in the Chicago region. That can go on only so long, if sustainable populations are to survive. The red-head is “a signature species of a singular habitat” according to John Legge of Illinois Nature Conservancy. Like a great many other plant and animal species that depend on oak woodlands and savannas, this one is threatened by habitat loss due to excess shade from invasive species, both native and non-native. According to Legge, “In my experience many people hear ‘invasives’ and only think of non-native invasives, but in oak systems invasion by sugar maples (and other species more typical of non-oak communities) due to lack of fire and other disturbance are as much of an issue.”

Legge sees this flashy woodpecker as a symbol of oak ecosystem recovery. “This is a species that responds well as oak habitats are opened up,” he said. 

The Bird Conservation Network’s Breeding Bird Survey has helped establish recent trends and nesting sites.

Legge recommends “a good summary of one of the more notable regional efforts to recover oak woodland habitat that would benefit this species along with many others” at: http://www.lcfpd.org/woodlands/

Many conservationists focus on publicly owned land, but Legge pointed out that 70% of oak systems in our region are on private land, so private landowners with oak habitat can potentially do a lot for the species.  A good summary of a broad regional approach is the CW Oak Ecosystem recovery plan, which is dense but has good info: https://www.dnr.illinois.gov/conservation/IWAP/Documents/Chicago%20Wilderness%20Oak%20Ecosystem%20Recovery%20Plan.pdf 

The CW Priority Species page for the Red-headed Woodpecker has some fun and cute contributions to outreach on this species: http://www.chicagowilderness.org/page/redheadedwoodpecker

Blue-spotted Salamander

“These salamanders may be locally common by perception. But perception may be wrong,” said team leader John Crawford of the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center.

Key threats are the loss of ephemeral ponds and adjacent oak woodland habitat. Blue-spotted salamanders are excellent indicators of the health of ponds and adjacent woodlands. As with the woodpeckers, saving the salamanders goes hand-in-hand with restoring the health of the whole ecosystem.

Salamander lovers with contaminated boots may pose another threat - the spread of disease from pond to pond. Crawford takes special care: "We follow a pretty strict disease prevention/transmission protocol (as do most researchers) when sampling multiple wetlands. After each wetland is sampled we scrub our boots, waders, etc. with a 10% bleach solution which has been scientifically shown to eliminate chytrid, ranaviruses, etc. Additionally, all sampling items (dipnets, traps, etc.) are also sterilized with the bleach solution after use."

At Somme Woods in 2015, forest preserve volunteers noticed that large numbers of salamanders were dying from road salt. Forest preserve conservation staff then implemented a program that successfully protected the amphibians and the ponds from salt in 2016 and 2017. Yes, friends of nature. With a little effort, conservation works!

For more on the salamanders of Somme Woods, check out: 

http://vestalgrove.blogspot.com/2015/03/dead-salamanders-why-did-this-happen.html

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For more on the Priority Species program, check out: http://www.chicagowilderness.org/?page=PrioritySpecies

Chicago Wilderness Priority Species Campaign

The eight other species and their habitats:

Blandings turtle – prairie marshes

Bobolink – moist prairies and marshes (especially those burned frequently)

Henslow’s sparrow – rank prairies (that aren't burned annually)

Ellipse mussel – cool streams

Little brown bat – caves, hollow trees, and air with flying insects

Monarch – prairies, savannas, gardens, and anywhere that milkweed grows and flowers bloom

Mottled sculpin – clean streams

Regal fritillary – prairies with specialized violets (especially bird's foot and arrow-leaved violets)

Priority Species Campaign Lead Partners: 

Audubon Great Lakes| The Field Museum | Illinois Audubon Society| Illinois Natural History Survey | Lake County Forest Preserves | Lincoln Park Zoo | National Great Rivers Research and Education Center | lllinois Nature Conservancy | Openlands | Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Advisors: Chicago Botanic Garden | Forest Preserve District of Kane County | Shedd Aquarium | US Forest Service

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Thanks to Allison Sacerdote-Velat and John Legge for providing additional input for this post.

The photos in this post are from the Chicago Wilderness website.

Animals, Cuteness, and Pain

We who love nature have conflicts over cuteness and pain. We give animals human attributes. Identifying with animals isn't all bad.

Whenever we're with a group and have an opportunity to grab a white-footed mouse, a meadow vole, or a smooth green snake, we do - for Show and Tell. We apologize to the animal, which means nothing to it, but it means something to us.

The Morton Arboretum's Ray Schulenburg, a great conservationist and ethicist, was critical of people picking up animals. He said it was demeaning to the animal. Just because we have the power to dominate them against their will, should we? He said, No!

But we want to show the mouse (or snake or salamander) to the people with me because, chances are, some of them will gain some level of empathy they hadn't had. Regularly, people start out "Argghh! Get that away from me!" and slowly move to "Well, ewwww, well, could I look a little closer?" And then, "Can I hold it?" Soon they'll be purring, "It's soft. It's beautiful. I never thought I'd like ..." a snake or a mouse or for some, even a strange mushroom.

Many people ultimately feel these experiences are valuable to them. Identifying with animals helps them care more for life and its future on this planet.

Later in this post, there will be photos of two recently dead animals. They died violently. If you don't want to be subjected to animals looking more like meat, don't read past the bird's nest with nut.

Most people never see a mouse, or snake, or salamander. Such animals need to be shown to them. On the other hand, they do see birds.

Birds are the great ambassadors of conservation, because they're out and about - visible during the day time. Not nocturnal, or under logs.

They also leave evidence as nests. The weaving below was the only evidence of an animal I saw on one winter walk. The maker was "rascally" or "cute" in that it made off with a piece of flagging that we had tied somewhere to mark some restoration need - and the bird wove it into her nest.

To take a better photo (to show you) we pulled out some dead leaves that had fallen in, and then saw another surprise.

Lying in the nest was a hickory nut. It didn't fall there, because the nest was far from any trees in a shrub copse. It was carried there by a white-footed mouse while it was storing autumn food away for the hard times of winter. Once we found a whole nest full of pure tick-trefoil seeds - little beans, stored by some industrious mouse for a snowy, hungry day. Wild mice are cute, precious, and a main food of hawks, snakes, owls, and coyotes, which do them violence.

Winter is harsh and raw, and challenging to delicate senses. We don’t see colorful flowers or butterflies. Even the birds that stay for winter in the temperate zone lose their bright colors and tend toward brown or black and white. All the mammals are mostly black or white or brown or gray.

Young animals have their first (and often their last) major struggles in their first winter. Later, we found the remains of a young red-tailed hawk. 

It still had its juvenile brown tail. We at Somme had been watching that hawk all fall. It was this year's baby, relatively curious, tame, and friendly. It had itself "viciously" torn apart a great many white-footed mice during its short life. But great-horned owls eat hawks - that don't know better than to sit on exposed perches during the night. Now this one was gone. Its parent flew nearby.

Some of us found the corpse fascinating - an opportunity to see this raptor up close. Some, who treasured nature when it was beautiful or tender, now were sad, bummed out, conflicted.

We at Somme are conflicted by the great-horned owl generally. We rarely hear or see a screech owl or a barred owl, largely, we believe, because the great-horned owls eat them all. The only long-eared owl we've ever seen at Somme was lying in pieces beneath a great-horned's perch.

We used to have foxes, but the coyotes killed them or scared them out into odd niches in nearby suburbs. Most preserves are not large or varied enough to have their full diversity of animals. The great-horned is a super-adaptable omnivore that, in a simplified habitat, wipes out smaller owls and certain other species.

But overall, larger predators mean healthier nature and richer biodiversity. Would that our little preserve could have eagles and wolves.

Colorful patches of coyote urine and blood puzzled us at first. We felt bad for this predator (that rips apart cuddly-looking baby raccoons and opossums). Did some human miscreant injure our coyote in some way? Fortunately, steward Paul Swanson could enlighten me when he saw that photo. As female coyotes are getting ready to breed, their urine starts to show blood. "When a male coyote loves a female coyote very much," the two travel and hunt together, and every time the female pees, the male pees next to it. Very tender.

Coyotes help the ecosystem big time. When foxes were the biggest predator we had, there were so excessively many meso-predators (especially raccoons and opossums) that some snakes and ground-nesting bird species were in danger of being wiped out. Coyote predation restored a more natural balance.

Coyotes kill fawns. They also eat most of the Chicago region's adult deer, sooner or later. But they don't kill them. Most are killed by cars (or sharp-shooters working for the Village or the Forest Preserve District if there's a good culling program, which most preserves need, in the absence of the Potawatomi, wolves, and mountain lions).

Also at a workday, Russ Sala noticed what looked like a deer lying on the railroad tracks. We investigated.

A commuter train had cut this young buck in half. How horrible is this! What a way to die! And yet, would you rather die by wolves, or sharp-shooters?

In the absence of any kind of predator, deer become so over-abundant that they utterly destroy many species of shrub, bird, orchid, and other victims.

So we feel pain for the deer when we see a dead one, but at the same time we feel glad for the ecosystem. Doing conservation and loving nature means coming to terms with these conflicts. We pulled both halves of the deer off the tracks and into the forest. Would it have been "more natural" for it to stay where it was? To leave it there felt wrong. When we checked back two days later, the coyotes had eaten all the best parts. Over the winter they and others would leave nothing but bones.

Bones seem to grow more abstract and more eloquent as they get older.

For us at least, they are not mostly reminders of death. They remind of life in the preserve - often the lives of species we rarely see. They remind of complexity, richness, and the honor of being a human who can enjoy the ecosystem, and try to do some good, as the world turns.

Photo Credits
Mouse: Eriko Kojima
Nuthatch: Lisa Culp Musgrave
Others: cell phone camera.