Coming to the kames

When people learrned I had moved to Illinois after growing up in Connecticut, I often heard a comment like this: “New England is so beautiful. You must miss living there!” I did miss the wooded hills, rocky terrain and fall foliage splendor. Yet I have always appreciated one aspect of life in largely flat northeastern Illinois: the skyscapes. Growing up in a hilly area covered with trees that obscured most of the sky, I never saw a clear view of a sunset from my childhood home. When I lived in Chicago, I often saw spectacular fiery sunsets on my el ride home from work, and the Lake Michigan shoreline affords limitless views of ever-changing cloudscapes. Unlike where I grew up, where weather sneaks up on you, here you can often see it coming and going. I have stood in awe on a lakefront beach watching towering thunderheads billowing, expanding and climbing higher and higher over the lake. I love the sense of expansive space I experience here in the wide open Midwest.

Since moving to West Dundee northwest of Chicago, I have learned some parts of northeastern Illinois are not so flat. We live in the Fox River valley, which is graced by gentle hills sloping down to the river, and some years ago we discovered kames. Never heard of kames? I hadn’t either, until Steve and I visited a couple of area forest preserves that include this geological feature. Here are the basics on kames: As the glaciers retreated 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the melting ice sometimes formed depressions or holes. The meltwater left behind large sand and gravel deposits in those depressions and, as the ice melted further, the deposits settled as mounds or small hills; the bowl-like depressions at the foot of the kames are called kettles. Over thousands of years, soil gradually covered them and vegetation took hold. The kames and kettles now stand as clear markers of the glaciers’ path through this region, as well as pleasing counterpoints to the overall level terrain.

The closest preserve with these kame features, Freeman Kame-Meagher Forest Preserve, is about a 15-minute drive from our house, west of the Fox River valley. As you approach the park from the east, you can see the kames rising up in the distance, rounded hills covered with trees or grasses breaking up the otherwise flat plain. This park is one of our favorite places to walk in the area, as it has a bounty of habitats. In addition to woodlands and oak savannas, it has an area of open grasslands. Throughout the park you find ponds, streams and marshes, affording opportunities to see waterfowl in addition to songbirds, like the bluebirds we often see flitting in a bank of shrubs in the grassland. It was with the hope of seeing nesting cranes that we visited Freeman Kame preserve this week. In the past we have seen sandhill cranes occupying a nest in the center of the marsh pictured below, which is situated between the woodland and grassy slopes. And it was in that marsh that, on a day last fall when cranes were migrating south, that we thought we might have seen a family of whooping cranes. The “whoopers,” as birders call them, are an extremely rare species that conservationists are working hard to bring back from the edge of extinction. We didn’t have binoculars on that fall excusion, so we couldn’t be certain of our identification, but on our visit this week we hoped to see some cranes there. This time we remembered to bring our binoculars.

We decided to take the long way around the hiking loop through the woods before reaching the marsh that was our final destination. Among the delights we spotted along the way were two logs poking up in a kettle pond serving as a sunbathing platform for painted turtles. One of the logs sported seven or eight small turtles congenially lined up in a row. From our spot looking down on them from the trail, at first they resembled mounded knobs on the log. Many of the woodland wildflowers are not blooming yet, but we saw an abundance of white trout lily. Some specimens were just starting to emerge, the pointed ends of their unusual mottled leaves of green and dark purple poking up here and there along the path. In places where more sunlight is reaching them, they were full grown and blooming profusely, forming pleasing bright patches of white.

When we reached our destination marsh, instead of nesting cranes we saw a Canada goose sitting contentedly on the thick stand of marsh grass that forms a small island in the water. We carefully scanned the marsh and its perimeter, but no cranes were to be seen. As if appearing on cue to mollify our slight dismay at not seeing any cranes, a kingfisher flew around the far shore of the marsh, cheering us with his merry, unmistakable chattering sound.

We made our way up the hill from the marsh on our way back to the parking area, pausing on the path where it overlooks a secluded woodland kettle pond. We have seen turtles there on occasion; in one instance last year we spied a large snapping turtle that was napping on a rock. Noticing a small group of waterfowl actively swimming around near the opposite shore, we trained our binoculars on them. What a wonderful surprise: they were wood ducks.

To my eye the most strikingly beautiful of all North American waterfowl, wood ducks are not a common sighting for us, as they prefer hidden ponds and marshes in wooded areas. Seeing a group of seven or eight of them was a first for us and a thrill. Near extinction in the early twentieth century from overhunting by man, wood ducks are now making a comeback and, thankfully, are no longer listed as an endangered species. From our location above them, we enjoyed several minutes observing them peacefully paddling about until something startled them and they took off, en masse, before settling back down in the far end of the pond.

Once again, when my wish for a particular sighting was not fulfilled, nature provided abundant riches more than sufficient to end any feelings of disappointment.