Voice of the Wild

This is Illinois Extension’s Voice of the Wild. In today’s episode we won’t be hearing an animals song, and learning its voice. Instead we’ll be giving voice to the array of plants and animals which can only be found where the land and the water mingle.

It's a set of ecosystems united by inundation, whether it's the long edge of a shallow pond, a cypress swamp, or a wet prairie, and It starts with an unwanted sparrow.

Everything was going wrong.

I had driven to one of the most isolated wetlands in the state with plans of capturing a recording unencumbered by the noise of everyday life.

No air conditioners whirring in the background or trucks thundering past. Just frogs, toads, and maybe an occasional sora. So too was I planning to capture something close to average. Nothing too strange or weird, just what somebody might hear next to a pond at a campground. But there under a painterly sunset the common things I wanted to be calling weren’t. In their place a rare bird that I had no use for would not be quiet. A henslow’s sparrow.

No matter where I moved around the dry edge of that wetland, it seemed to follow. Normally I would be ecstatic about a henslow’s sparrow. It's an uncommon and usually secretive bird. But I was there for the wetland, and with the periodical cicadas then set to emerge just a week later, I had to get a few clean uninterrupted minutes of recording before I went home and The sunset was already getting pretty thin.
Getting away from the unwanted everyday sounds wasn’t going well either. There were lots of cars for some reason. “Why are there so many cars out here?” I kept wondering. There are a few houses nearby, but not one of them has got a neighbor closer than a half mile away. They can’t all be coming home at this hour.
After a long frustrating time moving further and further into a darkening park, away from the road and from the henslow, I found a spot in a valley in the sound shadow of a stand of trees. I set down my recorder’s tripod and fumbled with my headphones.
The sunset was long gone. The swallows that had been catching insects over the open water were back at their nests and the red wing blackbirds and grackles had all finished wishing each other goodnight, but the gray treefrogs and cricket frogs were coming in clear and there were unseen things plunking in the water. “Good atmosphere,” I thought. This would do. I hit record and stepped aside, drinking in the cool night alongside my recorder.

The moment would not last. The unseen plunking I had heard had not been a startled frog.
Sandhill cranes, wetland specialists. The little valley I’d found, perfect for dulling the sound of passing cars, was also the perfect amphitheater for their show. I could not see them in the black of the night, except for a kind of tall, shifting, gray shape that disappeared between piercing calls.
I stood stone-still. Not only because I was in awe and wanted to record the moment, but also because I was a little frightened. At three and a half feet tall, they are large birds. Skittish, Usually. Flying off if someone meanders even a quarter as close as I was then, but we had somehow missed each other in the night. It's never a good idea to surprise a big animal like that, so crunching as few stalks and stems as I could manage, I backed away.

Wetlands have a way of doing this. They’re full of unexpected life. All may be quiet, only for every blackbird in the county to appear on the horizon and swirl into a patch of cattails that pulls them in like a sponge. A little shallow pond, by day filled with handfuls of Aquatic insects kicking and rowing about, by night a raucous and deafening party of amphibians. A low oxbow lake, the old meander of a river that curved in till the banks touched and the water left the bend behind, filled to the brim with American lotus; a throng of leaves holding their cupped hands to the sky.

Wetlands have a kind of voluptuous abundance. It is no coincidence that the impressionists so often painted at the water edge. The Extravagant color there can be uncanny. Think of Monet, who’s most famous paintings are the ones they call the water lilies. His most verdant of canvases.
They show a footbridge spanning a shallow pond bordered by emergent plants; those plants that like their feet wet but their head dry. The Irises, rushes, sedges, reeds, and tall willows beyond them. Those paintings seem commonplace in our modern world; plastered on coffee mugs and novelty pillows, so I wasn’t expecting, when I turned into the impressionist room at the Chicago art museum, to fall in love. He somehow captured the “big green” you only ever find rooted in mud.

Water lilies are an appropriate centerpiece for those paintings. Their flowers are among the most beautiful and ancient. They’re a basal angiosperm. One of the first flowering plants. They came about in a world almost devoid of flowers. It was a time dominated by the gymnosperms: the ginkgos, cycads, early conifers and, among them, the dinosaurs. Mr. Monet’s water lilies were not the ones that looked up into skies filled with pterosaurs, but they probably look very similar to those early cretaceous plants. Mother nature getting it right on the first try.

The paintings are worth seeing in person, but I would encourage you, before you go see the impression, have a gander at the real thing. A lake edge lush with spadderdock or maybe a river island dripping with mallows. Someplace filled not with well-watered plants, but with plants that have given themselves to the water; they have leaned into it. Adapted. Altered their strengths. Plants that don’t play the water conservation game; If the water goes so do they, but as long as it stays they flourish.
The verdance in those places can look unlimited just like in Monet’s paintings, but it's not that those plants have no limitations. They’ve just got different ones. Roots need to respire, they need oxygen. Most plants don’t have to worry about this. In well drained soil; the rhizosphere, the realm of the roots, has plenty. But wherever the soil is inundated, where water has infiltrated every nook and cranny, the plants must deal with that reality. Some will pump oxygen down to the roots. Others will root above the water (adventitious roots, those are called.) Others will fill their stems and roots with “aerenchyma,” holes and air gaps they can treat like snorkels; A direct line right to the open air.

Many plants in a wetland have a glaucous cast to them. A kind of powdery blue that gives them a rubbery look. It’s from a Waxy coating that’s hydrophobic. If you dunk in the water the leaf of an American Lotus, it’ll pop back up as dry as it was before. Rain drops bead up and skitter off that water repellent coat, taking dirt, fungal spores, and anything else that might clog up the leaf’s surface with it.

Even in winter, after all the leaves have died back, a wetland is full of strange adaptations. Most plants overwinter as dormant roots or seeds but some survive the cold as turions. Many aquatic plants make these. They’re bunches of cells wrapped up into a kind of dense cyst. Unlike buoyant leaves and stems, a turion will sink to the bottom and cling to life in the layer of mud beneath the frozen ice. They’re joined by brumating frogs who have slowed their body’s' processes down. On the banks and beneath the leaf litter on dryer land insects survive as pupa and toads have buried themselves beneath the frost line, so under Swamp sparrows rattling out soft calls and and flocks of Juncos foraging the snowbanks there’s diversity, its just hiding in the mud.

Much of Illinois used to be some variation of wet. Chicago, on the long and low tapering edge of lake Michigan, was the southernmost holdout for many northern wetland species. Central Illinois was mostly wetland; wet prairie and marsh kettles fed by seasonal creeks. In the southwest of the state there’s bottomland forest and Cypress-tupelo swamp, each with pools of water dyed tea brown with tannins. The inverse of Chicago, it’s the northernmost range of many southern species, among them the state-threatened Copper Iris with its delicate burgundy flowers. All in all the state was once 24% wet. Eight and a half million acres of some of the most diverse ecotype that North America has to offer.

Chicago has been developed. Raised and paved over to make space for all those people. Elsewhere in the state, where agriculture dominates, the marshes and wet prairies have been turned under. While Corn and soy do appreciate all the rain we get, they cannot tolerate inundated soil. So whether it's a former forest, marsh, or wet prairie, field tiles have been dug in to give the water someplace to go. It's only after many hundreds of miles of sewers and field tiles have been installed and those seasonal creeks dug down and channelized that the character of the land has changed to what we see today. Rain fed, but dry between storms. All that change has had its benefits, but it’s also come at a cost. There’s less than 3% of Illinois’ wetlands left. A full half of the plant species that have been extirpated from the state were wetland residents. What little is left is threatened by further draining, development, climate change, and a great deal by Invasive plants.

It's only thanks to careful preservation that we have left what little we do. The stewards who shepherd those remaining lands, the employees of forest preserves, parks, nature reserves, and the volunteers that help them like our own master naturalists, are owed our thanks for keeping that big green around. And you can help them if you want. It’s a good way to see the abundance and diversity that Illinois has to offer.

Even the finest and most beautiful forest cannot match, at least in terms of species, the sheer number of living things in a wetland. Pound for pound, it's not even close. Fourty-two percent of Illinois' native plant species can only be found in those soggy soils: delicate orchids, carnivorous pitcher plants, curious turtlehead flowers, and more sedges than you can imagine. Animals too. Strange insects ticking away, unseen. Secretive birds you rarely see and are lucky to hear. The deep gulping boom of an American bittern. The alien grunt of a Virginia rail, or sandhill cranes; their calls ricocheting through the whole valley.

I realized eventually what all those cars had been up to. The park is not only isolated from the worst of the sound polluters (interstates and airports and the like) it's also isolated from light pollution, so it's got some of the darkest skies in the state. Those people were rushing out to the park because they’d heard the news of an X-class solar flare ejecting a tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the sun’s coronal mass in our direction. A little solar burp headed right for us.

I had also heard about the flare, but I’d stayed up late looking for aurora so many times, never seeing more than a shimmer of color, I had learned not to get my hopes up. It was only by coincidence that I had scheduled myself to be out there that night and I was skeptical that I would see anything at all.
I was set up on the topside of the valley for one last recording. I was hoping for another Sora call. There’d only been one all evening. But it was getting late, my regular alarm even interrupting the recording to remind me to start getting ready for bed.

Then a shock of color appeared at the horizon. The Aurora Borealis; the evidence of earth’s magnetic field protecting us from the fury of the sun. Bending and yielding in the solar storm but holding fast. Much to my surprise, the color spread. First looming over the cattails and treefrogs and then gleaming down even from the southern sky. Shining on the sandhill cranes, on the sedges, the willows, and the henslow sparrow. A wetland’s verdance cast in violet. Now it was my turn to interrupt another of those clean minutes of recording.

Nothing that evening had gone to plan and yet everything had gone right. I should have known better than to plan for the ordinary in such an extraordinary place. Or to doubt the extravagant color I might find at the water’s edge.

I recorded many of the sounds I used today, including the sandhills, but a few came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell lab. You can see which ones in the show notes. This episode was written and narrated by myself, Brodie Dunn. Voice of the Wild is a service of Illinois Extension’s Natural Resources, Environment, and Energy program. Thank you for listening.