Walking out the door, shuttling gear to my car for turkey hunting, some small gray bird moves in the grass in front of the neighbor’s automobile carcass. It has some bold wing bars and color on the throat, but it couldn’t be a yellow-throated warbler this late in the year. I grab my binos and wait for the bird to show itself again after disappearing under the spruce tree that fell on our house months ago. It flies right for me, settling on the grass, then the chain link fence, and finally a body’s length away in the tangle of grapevine and trumpet vine. Its yellow throat is glowing. The dark patch atop its head is crisp and accentuates broken white eyelines. The bird looks at me and goes back to foraging, presumably gleaning lethargic insects off the vegetation. What a jolt to my eyes–just as the fall is moving into winter and bright colors of the land settle out of sight, this tropical traveler brings its vibrant humming hues back to the neighborhood. Juniper is out on a walk with Mabel and I text her to keep an eye out when she gets back. I also send a message to our hardcore birding group text, and continue on my way.
Having seen no recent sign of turkeys at my closer haunts
, I drive northwest a little ways to a semi-secret swamp-like forest with towering pin oaks and swamp white oaks. It is Thanksgiving, and I can’t help but mourn the failure of colonists and their primitive worldview to be respectful neighbors to Native peoples they encountered centuries ago. The first Thanksgiving may have gone well (thanks to the generosity of the Wampanoag) , but the genocide, broken treaties, and atrocious boarding schools that followed remain a great agonizing blemish on the collective human spirit. Amazingly, we still have opportunities for reconciliation, collaboration, and creating a better shared future. The Piegan Institute, for example, has been working for nearly two decades to revive the Piegan language in northwestern Montana, and anyone can donate to their innovative schools.Walking in slowly, the forest is quiet. The wet path is lined with planted white pines, young slippery elms, box elder, and other deciduous species. Fallen white pine logs are coated in green moss. I hear something ahead and pause. It’s a sound I don’t recognize but could be turkeys. I creep closer and am shocked to hear the songs of a few wood frogs spread across the swamp and adjacent forested hill. Their songs do not carry the fierce optimism and eagerness to breed as in early spring. The sound is disturbing–these frogs prefer to remain frozen throughout the dormant season to save energy. By awakening due to these warm temperatures
, undoubtedly caused by climate change, the frogs could be using up precious energy reserves.As I ponder the climate problem that we share with wood frogs
, fresh turkey scratches appear along the seam where pin oak swamp forest meets the white pine grove. You can tell which direction the turkeys were scratching because the leaves pile up on one side. They scratch the leaves back, so the bird who makes a given scratch was facing away from the piled up leaves. Though I assess as many scratches as I can find, I cannot determine their direction of travel, and follow a hunch on a loop along the old railroad grade up and over the ridge towards the wetland and back, hoping to circle ahead of this apparently small flock.Winter fungi are really showing off, making it difficult to focus solely on the hunt. I stuff my free pocket with the reddish brown, jelly-like wood ear fungi (Auricularia is the genus). Turkey tail fungus is glowing in the warm rain
, and I encounter one specimen of coral pink merulius, perhaps the mushroom with the most fun name. A few oysters are still in good enough condition to eat. Witch’s butter clings to a small dead oak twig, yellow and gelatinous. A new one for me, stump brittlestem (Psathyrella piluliformis), looks more than content at the base of an immense decaying oak. It shares the log with a proliferation of puffballs (genus Lycoperdon).I think about Paul Stamets’ perspective that fungi are driving this ecosystem, making decisions about resource allocation, fostering certain tree and plant species. He believes we should be trying to communicate more with fungi, citing an example of an experiment done in Japan where mycelium helped create a more efficient railway system. I would like to ask the fungi what tree species we should be favoring in management of the land as the climate shifts.
Witch’s Butter (Tremella mesenterica) 
Wood Ear (Auricularia sp.) 
Tuliptree (Liriodondron tulipifera) 
Coral Pink Merulius (Phlebia incarnata) 
A towering N. Red Oak (Quercus rubra)
Making my way up the ridge
, the turkey sign is older and I realize the turkeys likely headed the opposite direction. Rain picks up, and a few deer jump up from day beds and bound away, their white tails flagging and then disappearing in the sea of winter browns. I cannot see any ducks in the wetland. Again, several wood frogs sing half-heartedly. I return to the car with no turkey, but with a pocketful of wood ears for tea. When I return home, Junip informs me that she and Mabel saw a coyote in the neighbors’ field this morning. They were locking eyes with a coyote while the sycamore warbler and I studied each other.