Spring came late this year in Chicago. The trees are just now opening their leaves, and a few holdouts still show no signs of committal. Outside the city the season seems even less sure of itself, perhaps because the city is warmer, or because its inhabitants try to make spring's arrival as obvious as possible to themselves, with front yards planted with daffodils, tulips, and bluebells. The city birds, whose food supply isn't tied so tightly to the whims of the weather, are early adopters, too. A pair of starlings is building a nest under the eaves of a house I can see from my back porch. The cardinals have broken out their most annoying songs, advertising their territory. I saw a juvenile robin poking around in the freshly turned dirt of a garden. He was probably about 5 weeks old, which makes his parents early birds indeed.

Where humans have left things alone the laws are far more strict. The land determines what kind of plants can grow. Water responds to differences in elevation, making rivers, ponds, and dry zones. Minerals leach and collect. Plant communities change the balance of nutrients in the soil as well as the availability of light. The emergence of flowers and leaves in the spring supports different kinds of bugs. Warblers, gnatcatchers, kinglets, nuthatches, and chickadees hunt insects, but their specializations restrict them to different plants, or different parts of the same plant. Many of these birds are migratory, and a week can make the difference between starvation and plenty.


The Indiana Dunes are a comparatively recent geological feature, formed by the retreat of the glacier that once covered much of the upper Midwest. There's a tremendous diversity of habitats, from open sand dunes to meadows, oak forests, and hundreds of ponds and bogs in various stages of life. In the summer the high canopy is almost solid with green, but right now everything is only tinged, and all the leaves have that pale gauzy look. Ground plants take advantage of the unobstructed sunlight to poke through the oak leaves from last year. There's not a lot of birds yet, but the ones that are there are some of the most beautiful to watch, the brightly-colored bug hunters. Blue-gray gnatcatchers dart through the almost bare branches, twisting their heads around to look under leaves, muttering little nasal zeets. White-breasted nuthatches are also inclined to talk to themselves as they corkscrew around trunks and branches, upside-down half the time and pausing every so often to listen for the scratching of beetles or to bang on some stubborn piece of bark. The warblers (palm, yellow-rumped, blue-winged) seemed to stay closer to the ground, digging through leaf litter at the base of trees. I only saw one goldfinch: fresh in his new yellow breeding plumage he sat on a branch and sang continuously for close to ten minutes, bobbing back and forth with a motion that was hard not to interpret as joy.