Spring 2003

Spring Song at The Grove
By Donald Culross Peattie

There may be places in the world where bird song, of a spring morning, rings out louder, from more varied voices, than the wild matins at Kennicott's Grove, but I do not know of it. Not in Florida, California, the Michigan northwoods, or Provence, have I ever heard, in one spot, at one time, so many sorts of voices uplifted.

	Photo by Bill Glass

Actually the list of birds (carefully compiled before me as I write) is not especially impressive. It is a little shorter than in the days of Robert Kennicott, who grew up here, a century ago, and under these same oaks taught himself the book of Nature. But it is to the many habitats that one must ascribe the variety of this choral. Were this square mile all forest, or all meadow, all watery, or all suburban, the music would be thinner, more monotonous. But there are chains of hidden sloughs in the woods, where bitterns cry at the intruder, and rain-filled hollows in the open grass where killdeer wheedle and complain. You slog through swamp woods of ash and linden, where the sultry song of the cuckoos and the wailing of the tree-frogs follow you, only to emerge in a sunny thicket of flat-topped hawthorns, where the yellowthroats and goldfinches pour out their music. Redwings jingle and scold from the cattails; short-billed marsh wrens lisp out their little songs in the sedge marsh. From earliest spring when the meadowlarks whistle across half melted snow, to the skirling lay of black-throated blue warblers under June's dense canopy of leaves, The Grove is a choirstall of spring hymns.

It is hard to remember that most wild song is not really conscious poetic praise of the lengthening day, the greening trees, or the tender airs — not, in short, an expression of happiness. And that it is not even, or at least not wholly, an entreaty to some coy mate. In great part bird song (as distinguished from alarm cries and other signals) is a proclamation by the males of territory. It warns other males, especially of the same species, that all within earshot is the singer's bailiwick. It promises to the arriving females that here they will find a protector. But the end result, of course, is very much the same as if the males should sing to their mates, and to the human ear all this outpouring of melody is inseparable from the emotions of happiness, of reverence for beauty. One may be pardoned therefore, I hope, for some poetic license in the notes that follow. These frankly informal passages have been gleaned from the diaries of several years lived at Kennicott's Grove, in northern Illinois, years during which the writer was not absent for a single morning.

March 1. Cardinals calling lustily, "What-cheer!" The weather balmy with pale watery sunshine and the snow melting rapidly. Tree sparrows rejoicing.

March 5. A warm, wild March day — sun and flying cloud and a western gale. A single killdeer alighted with plaintive cries upon the temporary ponds of the prairie. Made off at my approach, winging sideways and crying as if wounded.

March 12. Heard today the exquisite singing of a flock of tree sparrows; they have now left off their icy, tinkling winter song and gone into the bridal aria. Though the wind was keen and the snow in flurries went spinning through the steely bare oaks, the whole flock sang intensely, as joyfully as if spring had come forever.

March 18. Arising this morning at about three o'clock, I heard the first notes of Pseudacris, the swamp tree frogs. In the darkness the effect is shivery, sad, high, thin yet pleasing. At eight o'clock the first bluebird winged down, alighting as if the earth could scarcely hold it, to whistle a few robin-like notes, but in a rich contralto.

March 22. The piping of Pseudacris frogs sounds as if the individual frog sang pip, pip, pip in a rising key. But as there are hundreds of voices the whole effect is like the rising of bubbles, a continuous sweet, creaky-cracky effervescence.

March 23. The Pseudacris frogs show themselves now, and are so preoccupied with singing as to be unwary. They swim weakly about in shallow water with marvelously distended throats.

A single frog voice of a wholly different sort was heard in one of the wood ponds. It sounded like someone choking just under the surface. Probably a leopard frog.

March 31. Meadowlarks whistling for mates as I have never heard them before, and all this though the day was bleak and sad. Stopped in the woods to listen to the golden-crowned kinglet's lovely and unappreciated little song. It rises swiftly in a sweet twitter.

April 4. Snow began to fall five days ago, and is now about nine inches deep. Winter conditions restored, and the nuthatch again scraping his winter note. Juncos plentiful, increasing the impression that this is January. Driven in by cold, brown creepers, nuthatches, and golden-crowned kinglets continue numerous about the house.

April 6. The singing of the frogs ceases in the snow and is desultory in blustering weather. But when you walk around the icy pond you hear a faint peeping of the Pseudacris frogs as though they were very far away. Discovered that they sing under the ice!

April 11. Now the thawed ponds ring with redwing calls — angry metallic peents when you pass, rejoicing when you leave.

April 14. Myrtle warblers blowing through in a crowd, and many yellow-throated vireos. The song of these last is almost miraculously varied, swift, and tender, but so pianissimo that you have to steal close to hear the bird sing at all.

April 17. At dawn I heard the first thrush. Just a moment of song, the announcement of a heavenly theme.

April 26. Though the weather cool and the morning cloudy, the bird chorus was glorious. Jays tootling their "summer happiness" call, woodpeckers coming in heavily on the drum, chewinks and phoebes, flickers and whitethroats, robins and thrashers all a capella. Still from the fields wells the joy of the meadowlarks. Male pheasants crow in their scratchy, herony voices, and show themselves boldly now, their hens scuttling and scratching demurely about their lord.

April 30. Last night and again tonight I heard the sweet wailing of the hylas and the deep rattle of the leopard frog. Besides his "snores" he usually gives a few chuckles like the croak of a water bird. Over the housetops in the green long twilight wheel the barn swallows, peeping and wheedling that they are glad to be back.

May 2. Croaking, hoarsely screeching, a Florida gallinule wheels up from the pond and, the color of a rainy sky, storms into the trees, to sit there morose and imagining himself, apparently, invisible though he is big and conspicuous.

May 6. Walked on the prairie where only sweet vernal grass was as yet in flower. Ventriloquistic, the cries of the meadowlarks rang about me, and bobolinks, gathered into little companies of five and ten males together, sang in rivalry or scolded at me.

At dawn, the first whip-poor-will of the year, just two "whips," mysterious and southern-sounding. The bird, connoting Appalachian summer nights, seems to have nothing to do with The Grove.

May 10. The whip-poor-will again, just a few notes, and the thrush sings only a little. At dusk or when rain threatens hylas chant.

May 15. Rosebreasted grosbeaks — at last. They are always an event for the eye, but it is training to the ear to distinguish the song from the best of the robin's music. Magnolia warblers aplenty. On the prairie the grasshopper sparrows are suddenly seen. You try to follow them where they drop among the grasses with a sharp insect chirrup, but when you wade right into the grasses where they disappeared they are gone. If you will swing around quickly you can see them flying away behind you.

May 19. Enchanting now are the songs of the northern yellow-throats, out where prairie and sedge pond and hawthorn thicket meet.

May 21. In the twilight, the voice of the whip-poor-will again, coming mysteriously through the sultry warmth heavy with the odor of wild grape.

May 24. Absurdly call the crack-voiced starlings. I suppose it is spring again, love again, even for starlings! The first pewee tuned up, and black-throated green warblers are here. Midges dance over the sloughs that at last take on the dark tannic look and the decadent smell of swamps.

May 27. Silent flycatchers beyond telling are fluttering at the windows, and from the sunny oak woods rings out the squawks of the great-crested species. Three herons trailed majestically over the woods at six in the evening.

May 29. Nuthatches cry out now in their thin strangled voices in what I suppose is intended for bridal song. Vesper sparrows now call at night — as if they wakened sometimes to trill the stroke of the hour, and sleep again.

June 1. Dense foliage darkens the rooms, and flycatchers are at the panes. Willow slough is a green sargasso of algae strewn with pollen and water bloom, a jade fen smelling stagnant. In the garden at dusk — the swirl of a nighthawk round my shoulder, and, later, many of them mysteriously winging out of the woods across the fields, bird after bird, repetitive, ominous. Then the hour of the bat. Only the vesper sparrow's song, keeping faith, sleepily in the night. Fireflies joggling, winking, in the warm darkness, trotting lantern errands.

This account appeared in The Chicago Naturalist, a publication of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, in April 1938.