Blog Entry 2 -- Hazy Shade of Winter

I’ve been fascinated by the ice since my visit to the pond last week. Over the weekend, when temperatures stayed in the single digits, Lake Michigan started to freeze. That water is more active than the pond, shifting as it freezes so ice forms in sheets and chunks. Along the shoreline, or what I can see of it when I’m on Lake Shore Drive, there are varying patterns of ice drifting on the surface. This is different from the South Pond, a mostly still body of water, that last week had a thin cover of shiny ice. This week the ice is thicker, its color the same bluish gray as the sky. The cracks have multiplied and stand out because snow or frost has accumulated in the indentations. Snow dusts the surface like sugar on a coffee cake. Even fewer people are at the pond. The temperature has climbed into the teens after three days near zero degrees. There are also fewer critters around. The geese aren’t here.

A view across the pond to statue of Grant. Quirk of Chicago: Lincoln Park has a statue
of Grant; Grant Park has a statue of Lincoln.

Mucho and I, however, decided to walk. He tried to pull me toward home once or twice on our mile-long trek. I forced him to keep heading south. When we arrived, crows were busy in the south end of the pond near the old boathouse. Five or six of them perched in a tall tree, and a few hovered around the open water near an aerator. As with the geese last week, they dispersed shortly after we got there. I have trouble believing it’s Mucho and me. They must be used to people and dogs. Or is it because Mucho is big?

The middle section of the pond was eerily quiet. Once the crows scattered, the only movement was small drifts of snow flitting across the pond like tiny ghosts. The snow’s not deep enough to cover the surface, so the drifts weren’t much bigger than my hand. They looked like something magic, some winter secret.

I found a sign that described life on the pond in winter. I know there are rabbits around, probably hiding from Mucho. I’ve learned that the fish, bluegill and largemouth bass, head to the bottom of the pond and burrow. The same with turtles. I still haven’t seen any insects. Along the edge of the pond near the zoo farm, where I’ve been hanging out, the shore is thick with pond grass. It’s brown and bent at the tips. I look into the stalks, but don’t see or hear anything.

Little prairie in the big city

I’ve read there’s a coyote who lives around the pond. I worry about what might happen if we saw him or her, though I’m sure the coyote avoids humans. We passed the coyote enclosure at the zoo on our way to the pond. There was a line of trees and two fences in between the sidewalk along the outside and the coyote enclosure. I could see three or four. They didn’t even turn to look at us. But Mucho stopped, his nose in the air.

My visit ended when a young man, his jacket unzipped and his face a bright pink, yelled from across the pond. As he stomped along the pristine and deserted boardwalk he screamed curse words and yelled about wanting to kill someone, finally yelling about killing himself. Part of me wanted to leave quickly, and part of me wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything to harm himself around the icy water.

This is the ecology of city life. And this is nature. There’s more to nature than the things we attach to the word: plants, animals, weather. This man’s outburst probably has to do with brain chemistry, a part of nature not many of us understand. As Janisse Ray wrote in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, "If ever there was a wilderness misunderstood, insanity is it." Some other nature writers touch upon the interior landscape versus the exterior, and the way each affects the other. I can only hope that the cold air, fast walking and quiet park did something to calm this man’s interior landscape.

Blog Entry 1 -- Going Native

There are two ponds in Lincoln Park. The north pond is a typical city-park pond, populated by ducks, geese and plants and fish that have moved into the area with the neighborhood’s human population. The south pond was nearly the same, except it was a bit bigger, close to the Lincoln Park Zoo and stocked with paddle boats shaped like giant swans. This changed in 2008, when the zoo undertook a restoration project to return the pond and its shoreline to a native Illinois habitat. In order to do this, the zookeepers trapped turtles and frogs to house them temporarily, then they drained the pond, killing off the koi and goldfish city residents had dumped in the water over the years. Apparently, it’s illegal to move fish from one body of water to another, partly because the fish can carry bacteria that might be harmful to other fish and wildlife. When we came across the pond restoration on a bike ride that summer, my son Henry dubbed it Genocide Pond.

Four years later, the South Pond and Zoo Boardwalk is a peaceful nature preserve. No longer home to some discarded goldfish, it is, rather, home to native animals such as raccoons and coyotes, native prairie grasses and shrubs and fish, such as largemouth bass, bluegills and one called pumpkinseed. I plan to get to know the pond and its flora and fauna over the next semester for this nature blog.

For my first visit, I drove instead of walked, which felt wrong. But it seemed the best use of my time to stop there while out. I brought Mucho, my aging mutt. He needs the air and exercise as much as I do, so we’re going to make an effort to walk the mile or so to the pond in the future.

The most noticeable thing for me this morning was the quiet. The pond isn’t far from Lake Shore Drive, but the sounds of speeding cars don’t make it over the hill that separates the highway from the park. When we first arrived there were about 30 Canada geese, most of them sitting on the ice. For some reason, they all stood up and walked across the ice then flew away shortly after we arrived. It wasn’t us; there were other people and dogs there as well. They left many, many piles of goose poop on top of that section of ice.

A lot of cities and suburbs share space with Canada geese. A friend told me recently that there weren’t any in Chicago until about 10 years ago, a result of climate change. There’s been more and more press about the geese and the copious amounts of poop they leave behind in parks and their unfortunate tendency to fly into airplanes. It’s become a big issue for city planners. They’ve resorted to scarecrows, noisemakers, dogs and falcons to control geese populations. But are we humans the ones who took the geese’s land originally? Where might the geese go, when so much of the land is populated by humans?

The ice that wasn’t covered with poop was surprisingly beautiful. Pond water is generally an ugly color. But frozen, it had a sheen and fine lines that swirled around and made the surface look like designer wallpaper. I realized how little I know about ice when looking at the fine lines on the surface of the ice, but only in spots. I wonder what causes the lines to form, and why only in some places. In another spot along the boardwalk, the lines were vertical running the depth of the ice. Because of the ice, the pond’s aerators were visible. When architect Jeanne Gang, who’s known for her environmental designs, restored the site she dredged the pond, making it deeper and installed aerators to keep the water from becoming stagnant. This might be a good thing for the local birds—and those visiting from Canada. They can probably still find fish in the water that’s not frozen, assuming fish don’t hibernate, something I hope to find out in the next few weeks.