Nine white egrets by the springs! The text came from a friend who was out and about early on the chilly Saturday before Easter. I had just finished my pancakes and was feeling lazy. But I’d never seen egrets in the marshy wetland known as Ho-Nee-Um Pond, between Lake Wingra and Monroe Street. Heading down right now, I texted back.
It took a while to don layers and dig the binoculars out from the back of the closet, and my friend was long gone by the time I reached the boardwalk. That was okay. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years, and I understood she wasn’t angling for a meeting or a plan. She was on her own journey that morning — walking or running, maybe riding her bike. She had news from the natural world — egrets by the springs! — and she wanted to share.
On the woodland path, I looked for early puffballs by the stump, and bloodroot, the earliest flower, but there was nothing up yet. The air was full of movement, though. Birds hopped and swooped in and out of my peripheral vision, and in the high branches of the cottonwoods and the old oaks, I heard urgent chirpings, whistlings, cheepings and cawings. The lonely spell of winter was broken. I picked up my pace, hoping I wasn’t too late for the egrets.
I thought, or maybe hoped, there’d be a crowd of people heading in the same direction, but as usual, hardly anyone was there. A guy passed me carrying a camera with an enormous zoom lens. We nodded, one bird nerd to another. I am always a little self-conscious about walking through the neighborhood with my binoculars slung around my neck. I know people are thinking: There goes a little lady hoping to add another species to her list! As it happens, I’m not that kind of birder; it’s not about lists for me. But so what if I were that kind of birder? Are bird lists any weirder than March Madness brackets?
Rounding the curve, I saw the egrets immediately, right where she said they’d be, amid a tangle of downed trees near the shore, strokes of pure white against a backdrop of murk and brush. Puffs of wind stirred their elegant plumes. In this humble abode of muskrats and frogs, these were visitors of breathtaking glamor, stretching their necks, shaking and re-arranging their wings like opera cloaks. I noted their skinny black legs and yellow bills, which I was pretty sure made them great egrets. Less than a minute after I arrived, they rose together, huge and dazzling, and soared above the scrim of trees dividing Ho-Nee-Um from Lake Wingra.
I lingered, hoping they’d return. It was the kind of day to be moseying along a wetland boardwalk. I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head and plastered binoculars to my face, seeking a better view of the tiny morsel of feathers darting erratically among the thin branches of a chokecherry. I knew it to be a warbler by its thin beak — made for stabbing bugs, rather than cracking seeds—but I couldn’t quite place its olive hue.
“Ruby-crowned kinglet,” said my husband, who had unexpectedly followed me down here.
The kinglet was displaying its scarlet crown — really no more than a brilliant dot — that means “I’m excited.” The fervor in its round eye made my heart ache a little. Miles and miles through wind and rain and snow, and here at last were insects!
Under a cottonwood, furious scratchings revealed a rufous-sided towhee, a birder’s bird for sure, with a ridiculous-sounding common name. Admiring its sooty, mussed feathers, splotches of vermilion, and wild red eye, I remembered an afternoon 15 years ago, when my then six-year-old son spotted one at Governor Dodge State Park and shouted excitedly to his friends.
“Guys, look! A rufous-sided towhee!”
The two other boys followed his pointing finger. Then they shrugged and ran off.
“Who cares?” one called back.
I’ll always remember his face, puzzled, bemused, coming to terms with the fact that bird knowledge is not useful social currency among boys.
Alas, that’s true in the adult world, too. Most of us live at a remove from the creatures with whom we share our yards, parks, woods and wetlands. It’s easy to forget, especially with all the human sorrow in the world and with the addictive lure of screens and feeds, that there is nothing short of a miracle going on right now. Over our houses and office buildings, mostly at night, throughout the months of April and May, millions of birds are traveling thousands of miles, with stopovers in our local lakes and ponds. Egrets, warblers, flycatchers, kinglets, swans, loons, sandhill cranes, buffleheads, golden-eyes, redheads, shovelers, mergansers and more, their numbers vastly reduced from pre-settlement times, and all arriving a little earlier every year due to climate change, but still coming, still beating their way through. Yet somehow spring migration is not a conversation starter.
Our broken connection with nature is arguably at the heart of climate inaction and habitat loss. But all we have to do to begin to restore it is step outside. And once you get into it, creatures are just plain fun to watch. I went to the springs to see egrets, but there was so much more! The first turtle sunning on a log, a circle of pelicans floating in a clear sky, and — oh, the drama! — a lone egret who returned to the pond, caught a fat bluegill, gulped it down with spiny fins still thrashing, and calmly sipped water to ease the lump in its throat. All while managing to remain graceful and glamorous.
I felt deep gratitude for my friend who shared the word of egrets at the springs. It makes me want to pay it forward: wear my binoculars with pride and spread the good news like the birds do — loudly, joyously, to anyone who will listen.
Mary Ellen Gabriel wrote her first article for Isthmus in 2006. She enjoys finding extraordinary stories in ordinary places.
If you are interested in writing a personal essay for Isthmus, please query lindaf@isthmus.com.
