EVEN ON A COOL, gray and cloudy Sunday morning, a slow stroll around the Church O’ The Island is rewarding. The view from high atop Moonlight Ledge is outstanding, while down the cliff-face pale pink corydalis flaunts its pink and yellow blossoms. White-throated sparrows and yellow warblers sing their hymns. Near Jackpine Point the blueflag iris shows its colors, and
THE MORNING cuppacoffee view from the cottage screen porch down the historic ‘voyageurs’ highway’ is worth the trip up to Rainy Lake all by itself. Rained all day yesterday, supposed to rain the next few days. But this morning, with song sparrows and yellow warblers singing, with the ghostly echoes of old voyageurs’ chansons and with sunlight glinting off the
THIS MORNING, after returning from guiding Road Scholars, it feels good to sit on the deck in my grandad’s old Adirondack chair from 60 years ago. To be under the big pines and beside my little bonsai friends. And to listen to the nearly full chorus of the Church O The Pines choir, flitting from limb to limb in the
IN THE GORGEOUS Bluff Country-Driftless Area, gazing across the Mississippi Valley at the cloud and sun mosaic of the Minnesota hills, we find ourselves in Wisconsin. Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge is spectacular, for scenery, wildlife, and particularly birds—from double crested cormorants to great egrets, bald eagles to red-tailed hawks to barred owls to gray catbirds to red-headed woodpeckers, all of
ON TODAY’S Road Scholar adventure we took in Whitewater State Park and its surrounding wetland marshes. What a grand day! Including a highly unusual bird-sighting. In the park, on the Trout Run Creek trail, we found the palm warbler and eastern towhee, our first rose-breasted grosbeaks, and others, while enjoying a woodland carpet of violets, spring beauty, trout lily (yellow
IT IS A FINE DAY in the Pine Point woods, as two of our favorite migrants among the passeriformes—perching birds—have returned. The little yellow-rumped (Myrtle) warblers have traveled from the southern US and Mexico, on their way to the North Woods of northeastern Minnesota and Canada. They are usually the first of the warbler tribe to push the boundaries of
ALL THE MEMBERS of the Church O’ The Pines were excited this week, as temperatures soared and spring breezes blew. The eagles chirped loudly from their nest tree, and chickadees sang their two-note, ‘Spring’s here’ mating song. Down at the river bank, male hooded mergansers practiced their sweet little growling sounds to attract the attention of impressionable females. Sparky the
SOMETIMES, here at the Church O’ The Pines, when a gibbous moon dangles among the limbs of the tall timber, I can almost imagine I am camped on some old, favorite campsite, deep in the North Country wilderness. Of course, this is a favorite campsite, too; and in the times of Zebulon Pike and Schoolcraft, this, too, was wilderness. And
THIS MORNING AT THE CHURCH O THE PINES, the Father of Waters is booming and cracking as new river-ice forms. In this warm open winter the making of ice has seemed less common than the melting of it. With the Church thermostat turned down for the moment the sounds of winter have returned. Even with the colder temps the sun
AT THE CHURCH O THE PINES, it is a day for truths. As all days are. Truth. Truth. Truth. Truth. It is repeated over and over, from every tree, every animal and bird, every cloud passing overhead, every whispering breeze. The message never varies, and never is there so much as an interruption for a lie. And one is suddenly,