Immediately after pushing my canoe from Quiver Lake’s shoreline, I was joined by several tree swallows, each on a unique flight path back and forth over the lake. Some came so close that I could almost feel the air breaking over their wings. This late spring morning was cool and clear, with only barely perceptible breezes now and then. So I drifted on a nearly frictionless glide to the opposite shore, lightly paddling once in a while to orient the canoe, feeling warmth from the sun’s rays on the side of my face, occasionally looking back at the familiar bluffs with our cabin.
Quiver Lake, with the Mason County bluffs on the right.
The Illinois River was on the down side of its spring flood, but still high enough for much of the wooded bottomlands between the lake and the river to be under about a foot of water. More than enough for my canoe. So I paddled forward into the woods and soon found some black willow trees growing close enough together so that I could wedge the canoe between them and prevent it from drifting off. I then carefully slid myself to the bottom of the canoe, leaned back, unpacked my books and breakfast sandwich, and settled in to memorize the scene for days when I would be compelled to do other things.
Tree swallows were also busy in the flooded woods, chattering to each other as they returned to or left their tree-hole nests or while foraging for insects over open water between stands of willows. The bird communitya here was highly active, engaged in the serious business of raising young. I was especially pleased to count so many prothonotary warblers. This species, also a tree-hole nester, does not inhabit upland areas, and so, to see one of these birds requires a trip to the bottomlands during the short songbird breeding season (at other times, they are either elusive or have migrated south); but logistics, weather, and other priorities may not always converge to allow for such a trip at the proper times. Even as I heard their songs sounding from the trees around me, I realized that it could be a full year before I would see this species again.
After reading a chapter in Larry McMurtry’s book Roads, I paddled through an extensive stand of willows that earlier in the spring supported a colony of double-crested cormorants. On calm days in mid-April, I could hear sounds coming from the active colony, including the birds’ guttural communications, from over a third of a mile away at our cabin. On this day, although the trees still held their stick nests, there were no cormorants nearby. The young, I thought, had probably fledged not long before, dispersing throughout the river valley, as it seemed unlikely that the adults would have abandoned their nests before that could happen. For this year anyway, preoccupied with certain of life’s unavoidable obligations, I had not been around enough to know of anything that might have happened at Quiver Lake. On one day, the area was full of cormorants, and now it wasn’t. Not much more could I say.
Black willow trees with double-crested cormorant nests, 11 June 2022.
Tree swallows were with me all morning, up until I returned to our sandy beach to call it a day. The next stage in the yearly cycle would have the river falling to its usual summer low-water levels; at the same time, Quiver Lake would drain into the river, and leave behind mud flats and water too shallow for a canoe. And then the migrating shorebirds, some from the high Arctic, will show up to forage for invertebrates hidden in the mud. I looked forward to following tree swallows, with my binoculars, flying over the bottoms, until they leave for the south in October. And I know I will be thinking about those distant willows, across from the mud flats and patches of lake remnants, that once held nesting swallows and singing prothonotary warblers, fairly confident that we’ll all be back again next year.
aBird list from the Quiver Lake area, Mason County, Illinois, 11 June 2022.
Wood duck
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Killdeer
Mourning dove
Yellow-billed cuckoo
Red-headed woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Northern flicker
Great crested flycatcher
Eastern wood pewee
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
American crow
Tree swallow
Northern rough-winged swallow
Tufted titmouse
House wren
Carolina wren
American robin
Wood thrush
Gray catbird
Prothonotary warbler
Song sparrow
Eurasian tree sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Common grackle
Red-winged blackbird
Baltimore oriole