Songs of the Fields

This blog is a collaboration of a hike led by Naturalist Curt Burnette at the Music of the Wild Preserve on October 27, photographs of the hike by Melissa Fey and Randy Lehman and the words of Gene Stratton-Porter from her book "Music of the Wild," Part II, Songs of the Fields, which is about this area.  We hope you will enjoy your hike with Gene, Curt, Melissa, and Randy.

I love all the music of nature, but none is dearer to the secret places of my heart than the Song of the Road. The highways are wonderful. They appear to flow between the fields, climbing hills without effort, sliding into valleys, and stretching across plains farther than the eye or lens can follow. 

The Limberlost is a wonderful musician, singing the song of running water throughout its course. Singing that low, somber, sweet little song that you must get very close earth to hear, because the creek has such mighty responsibility it hesitates to sing loudly lest it appear to boast. 

All the trees rustle and whisper, shaking their branches to shower it with a baptism of gold in pollen time. 

The many trees and masses of shrubs lower their tones to answer the creek, and he who would know their secret must find for himself a place on the bank and be very quiet, for in the thicket the stream will sing only the softest lullaby, just the merest whisper song.

Sometimes it slips into the thicket, as on the Bone farm; for it is impartial, and perhaps feels more at home there than in the meadows, surely more than in cultivated fields, where the bans are often are stripped bare, the waters grow feverish and fetid, its song is hushed, and its spirit broken.

.....and November spreads a blanket of scarlet and gold.