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The following article was written by Jason Prigge, the Development Director at the Woodland Dunes Nature Center.
There is a special kind of quiet that lives inside the observation windows inside Woodland Dunes Nature Center, with the sudden flutter of activity and wings just beyond the glass. In order to not scare the birds away you must practice patience and keep perfectly still.
From the warmth of the indoors, I found myself watching what can only be described as aerial acrobats.
The small birds move through the trees with remarkable precision. They darted, swooped, pivoted, and vanished, only to reappear moments later. One moment they perch like patient philosophers along a branch, the next they were airborne, looping through the open space with a kind of effortless joy, landing on the feeder for a bite of lunch.
I’ll be honest, I don’t always know exactly who I’m watching.
Was that a chickadee? A nuthatch? A woodpecker tapping somewhere deeper in the woods?
What I lack in technical bird knowledge, I make up for in appreciation. Watching the birds has a way of slowing my mind down. The world outside the preserve can feel loud and chaotic these days with politics, headlines, the constant churn of human urgency. But out here, the birds seem blissfully unconcerned with any of it.
They are busy with the ancient work of being birds: hunting, feeding, calling to one another, moving with the rhythm of wind and weather a reminder that nature keeps its own calendar.
Just the other day I walked the Cattail Trail during one of those strange Wisconsin gifts, a sixty-degree afternoon in the middle of winter. I had the Merlin Bird ID app open on my iPhone, letting it listen to the sounds around me. Every few minutes it chimed in with another possibility: a mourning dove, a cardinal, maybe a sandhill crane rehearsing for the approaching spring.
It felt a bit like having a patient naturalist walking beside me, quietly whispering names into the breeze. But truthfully, to me, the names matter less than the experience itself. The amazing work of nature going on constantly, ever present, always untamed.
Standing along the trail, or sitting quietly at the observation windows, you begin to notice things. The way a bird pauses before launching into flight. The tiny adjustments of wings as it rides a current of air. The intricate dance of life is always unfolding all around us.
For a moment, the world grows quiet.
Peace is still out there, fluttering just beyond the glass.
I was inspired to write a haiku about it.
Winter marsh breathing
small wings stitch the open sky
the world softens here
