I was bent over the passenger-side front fender of a 2015 Subaru Sunday, trying to swap a burned-out headlight for a replacement that didn’t want to fit. That’s when I heard the distinctive sound. It’s like the call of a flock of geese, but with the reverb turned up. When we hear this raucous noise sweeping over the hills around us up at the Sandhill Llama Farm, we know the tundra swans are passing through. They didn’t call ahead to ask if Covid-19 would affect our ability to host them on their travels from their wintering grounds on the Atlantic coast and Chesapeake Bay to the arctic reaches of Canada where they spend the summer. Nature goes on. The huge but elegant white birds with the black eye patches make their way through the Fox Valley each spring before Easter. They gather by the hundreds – some years by the thousands – in the flooded cabbage fields along Hwy. 54 between Shiocton and Black Creek. You can go there to see them, but they have been practicing social distancing for centuries and won’t come much closer than the limit of a 300 mm lens. I paused to listen to the […]NATURE GOES ON: Rediscovering the Rhythm of Nature in a Crisis
I was bent over the passenger-side front fender of a 2015 Subaru Sunday, trying to swap a burned-out headlight for a replacement that didn’t want to fit. That’s when I heard the distinctive sound. It’s like the call of a flock of geese, but with the reverb turned up. When we hear this raucous noise sweeping over the hills around us up at the Sandhill Llama Farm, we know the tundra swans are passing through. They didn’t call ahead to ask if Covid-19 would affect our ability to host them on their travels from their wintering grounds on the Atlantic coast and Chesapeake Bay to the arctic reaches of Canada where they spend the summer. Nature goes on. The huge but elegant white birds with the black eye patches make their way through the Fox Valley each spring before Easter. They gather by the hundreds – some years by the thousands – in the flooded cabbage fields along Hwy. 54 between Shiocton and Black Creek. You can go there to see them, but they have been practicing social distancing for centuries and won’t come much closer than the limit of a 300 mm lens. I paused to listen to the […]