denebalgedi777

When I first started writing this blog back in late 2021, it was intended to be a weekly journal of sorts. I had just moved to a new location in Western Wisconsin where I remain to this day. It was terra incognita then, and so it, in large part, is today. I have had much less time to explore my local area than I thought I would – the first year of residence here was active enough, although hampered by the extremely high gas prices for part of 2022. But since then, there were cascades of difficulties and troubles in my life that disrupted everything. In many ways, nothing has been the same in my life since 2023, and my adjustment to a new routine has been anything but smooth. Humans are creatures of habit and it took me a while just to recover from the shock of the troubles and to adjust to a new way of life, and this is a process still ongoing to this day. However, mercifully, 2024 was not as filled with troubles for me as the year before, and I at least had the chance to catch my breath. But it was not auspicious for a lot of exploration, apart from some trips with family and friends. It was auspicious for branching out in other ways, which I will have to discuss some other time as space will not permit it here.

I had always loved the nature writing of 20th century America, which popular authors like Aldo Leopold, Helen Hoover, Hal Borland and Sigurd Olson made famous, and I was dismayed at its decline – but not surprised, since spending time outside and enjoyment of nature are not nearly the part of American culture they once were. I wanted to keep that kind of writing alive if at all possible. No doubt, enjoyment of the outdoors is still alive to this day, but the country is far more urbanized, the people are less physically active or healthy, and the entertainments are taken mostly indoors these days. Nobody really reads that kind of writing because there is a smaller market able to enjoy it for its virtues. For my own part, I did not market this writing project very much, so there’s no audience to write to anyway. That last part could change, of course. The Ecosophian community where I started this anonymous online persona has actually grown, slowly but surely. There’s even a freelance occultist community that now provides blessings, prayers and divinations to its members free of charge, which means there’s a real egregore at work by now that we are starting to tap into. In a quiet and moderate way, I’m bullish on the future of this blog and the wider community it was meant to engage with.

And thus it is that this project has languished, and I’m only writing an update many months late at the tail end of the Aquarius Season of 2025, a full half-year since my last missive. But time has hardly stood still since that time. America is like much of the world these days, in a state of progressive disorder. Tribal hatreds have increased in the past decade and now show no signs of abating or cooling off. The last presidential administration was thrown unceremoniously out of office for its cavalier attitude toward inflation and its insistence that the economy was doing very well while only they seemed to believe it. There is no real prospect of America’s problems being solved by the new administration either, but they certainly have moved quickly to upset the apple cart and continue the revolution they began in 2017. As a “radical centrist” or “extreme moderate” in the tradition of Franklin, I have the strange experience of being unable and unwilling to partake of the tribal hatreds that America’s dire political divides have sown. I was no partisan of the previous administration, and in fact I think it will be justifiably remembered as one of the most disastrous reigns in our country’s history, but it’s naive to think that the incoming administration will be able to fix all that’s wrong with this country. The best they can hope for is to better manage an imperial system in decline. There is already a great deal of wailing about how things are being changed only a few weeks into the new era.

According to the teachings of the esoteric mystery schools in the 19th century, the Age of Aquarius began sometime in the last quarter of that century. Others say that the Age of Aquarius has only just begun since the Great Conjunction of 2020. Still others say that it has to be when the precession of the equinoxes moves the vernal equinox fully into Aquarius, and so we are still some ways off from its beginning. Wherever we happen to be, at the end of an old age or already in a new one, it’s clear that the energy is changing and very strongly at that. The Age of Pisces was an integral age – it was the time when unity was sought, politically under kings who were “leaders of the kindred”, religiously under institutional faiths founded by prophets and maintained by priests; it was the age in which all of humanity was again reunited by the means of water and began to freely mix once again after the Age of Aries split humanity into warring tribes and created strong distinction and division. It was the age of One True Faith and intolerance in politics and ideas, even though no one ever succeeded in uniting humanity under one banner, or in breeding a single global human race through mixing, though it was certainly tried. By all accounts, the ideals of the Piscean Age were strongly felt and pursued, but unattainable. The Age of Aquarius will have a very different emphasis. It’s an age in which there will be a progressive tendency toward atomization, and also a response by states to get more totalitarian to manage it. It will be an age of individual mavericks and rebels set against faceless systems of control. This captures both the Saturnine and Uranian aspects of Aquarius, in much the same way that expansive unification and unattainable ideals captured both the Jovial and Neptunian aspects of Pisces.

Changes in the world here below are often written in the stars above. The Grand Mutation of 2020 was the first of such changes. And I must say, the change in the outside world since that event has been profound. Among other things, the occult revival really took off after that – and so did the rebellion of the working classes. It’s not nearly finished. Others have delineated the meaning of that chart in detail and so I won’t retread old ground, but much of what was predicted by that event is already in evidence only a few years later. There’s another, more momentous conjunction looming on the horizon. That’s a Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 0 degrees Aries. In the Greco-Roman system of astrology which I use, Aries is the midheaven of the universe (not the ascendant as it is in the equinoctial systems used by most modern occultists). But, a conjunction of outer planets in the first degree of any of the cardines of the universe is a very significant event. The last time there was such an event was just before what became known as the Axial Age, which was an era of cultural awakening that transformed the known world and ushered in the civilized Age of Pisces. There is good reason to imagine such a momentous change will take place once more, but since John Michael Greer plans to give a delineation of that event as it gets closer I will leave it to someone who does such things professionally to describe in more detail.

There are more mundane and material reasons to believe that a shift to a new age is coming anyway. The cult of progress is still paid lip service, but its boosters seem more and more insincere. True believers in progress have long since turned to zealotry as it continues to lose its potency as a way of making sense of the world. The long age of Western dominance is slowly falling apart. The industrial age has largely done all of the things it could have done, it has explored all of the possibilities. The world is crying out for a cleansing and it is coming. That said, as some writers have pointed out, the only way we’ve known how to talk about this for the longest time is with two stories – progress or disaster. As we enter this new era, it looks as if we will get the option most people have no idea what to make of: stagnation, slow decline. The world of today is only possible with fossil fuels; the nuclear and green options are expensive distractions. Fossil fuels are now in decline, but it might be a very long decline, we just don’t know. Other kinds of extraction are reaching their peaks as well. The economic growth so long relied upon can no longer be taken as a given. Economic stress has lowered the birth rates across the world and the population will someday adjust downward. All the material indications are that we are entering a new era. But people are even more hysterically denying this than they do the astrological signs saying the same thing in a different language.

It will take time for the reality of the new era to sink in. In the meantime, those of us still here would do well to keep calm and carry on. Over here Western Wisconsin, we have had a cold and dry winter in great contrast to the unbelievable mild of the last winter. Hysteria aside, it appears that the weathermen got it right this time: El Nino ended, La Nina started, and we have a colder winter as a result. But the storm track has gone well south of us for most of the winter, and so we have had an abnormally low amount of snow. The cold, dry conditions have kept us indoors more, and contributed to an air of stir-craziness that is partly responsible for this article. It has been about all I can do to manage my responsibilities, get a bit of leisure in on the side, and do my best to keep the wildlife alive with feeding through several stretches of polar vortex cold. As I write this, the wind chill outside is about -25 fahrenheit. The big changes coming to the world already hit my life in the past few years, so I can only ride the waves from here and try to hang on as best I can, same with anyone else. Over the coming months and years, look for more regular updates to this project. Like the Chinese curse said, we live in interesting times, far too engrossing to go unchronicled. If I have been remiss in my duties that’s all the more reason to take them seriously now. The topics discussed will also, likely, be more extensive than before, but with a respect for the past also. As a proud Ecosophian, I will never abandon my interest in nature or the occult, especially not in an era when its ripe for rediscovery and original creations.

Well, as I sit down to write this from my Wisconsin redoubt, Taurus Season has already come and gone. And it was busy enough that I didn’t have time to write, either in my perpetually (of late) behind journal or on my web log. So now, as I do, we’re already a bit into Gemini Season and the terminus of the spring season is just around the corner. The woods are getting that distinctive look they always have around this time of year, when the transition into summertime is almost complete. There are flowers on the bushes and growing wild as forbs in the ditches. There is lupine coming up in the nearby prairie, which is the only place it grows around here, as far as anyone knows. That is always the first of the flowers to come up in late spring, and there is more of it this year than I have ever seen before. Spring migration has ended, with all of the summer residents already here by the middle of May, and the leaves have fully leafed out into summer foliage, and the flowers on the apple trees are already long gone. This was an early green up by our standards, compared with previous years, and everything I would guess is about 7-10 days ahead. That’s not really surprising given the odd year we had so far, with almost no winter and a strong humid pattern since spring.

I have documented on this journal so far the dryness of the previous years and I have an inkling that this summer will not be so dry. Often, this May, my mind wandered back to specific days I remember 10 years ago in the May of 2014, so striking was the similitude. Sometimes there are years that rhyme; 2013 and 2014 were like that. They were both years with long, almost paused winters that encroached upon spring. But eventually come May there was some absolutely beautiful weather, and I spent that time, as much as possible, as was my wont in those latter days, walking in the woods or otherwise outdoors. There was also a pronounced wetness that persisted into the summertime. This of course made walking in certain areas a bit of a challenge. Ensconced in suburbia, the surrounds are usually shot full of pesticides and a walk in the neighborhood park is fine; but go down by the river or deep into the woods and the mosquitoes can quickly become intolerable at this time of year. It’s too early to say whether I’ll be right about this – it may be that this spring wetness is a fake-out and we have yet another arduous, hot, dry summer and the drought afflicting the land comes surging back once again. But there’s this urgent feeling that the pattern has flipped somehow. Partly based on superstition I suppose: There have been unusual signs this year, which might be messages from the divine that something has changed, including the eclipse which I drove down to see, and aurora borealis visible from my home, which never happens.

The spring migration felt a bit rushed this year. Often, what will happen is that there is a patch of bad weather and waves of migrants will get bottled up for maybe as much as two weeks before heading on. There was little of that this year. The juncos were gone by April and the yellow-throated warblers were already well on their way to the border with Canada by early May. I know, because I was there visiting my old “home away from home” in the central lake country of Minnesota for a funeral around that time. One of my grandmother’s old friends finally passed away. The quick migration in the spring and the passing kind of symbolize what’s happening right now, all around me. That is, huge changes. The lake country had its own pioneer families who were well-known to one another and often dwelt in the area for generations. At the funeral, I noticed that the numbers in attendance since the last ones I attended in the area – which were for members of my own family – had gone down noticeably. There just aren’t as many of the old generation around, and the number of old families as a whole has also declined. There are a lot of newcomers to the lake country, and they don’t have much connection to the old, nor do they seem much to care about it. That’s the way of things, I suppose. It’s very clear that we are in an age of transition when little can be taken for granted, and this one corner of the known world is just a local case study in that much wider trend.

I always like visiting the north country though, because the transit takes you out of your usual context, which for me this past year has been so urgent with family difficulties and business in general. It’s just far enough away that everything is different. In the lake country, there are some remnants of the old majestic white pine forest that once covered much of that land. It has a kind of primeval and timeless grandeur to it that is rarely matched by anything in this part of the world. And I greatly love this area with its mix of oak, maple and pine forests. We’re at the intersection of two worlds here in the Upper Midwest, right on the northernmost edge of the broadleaf forest which is so congenial to the imagination of Western civilization – being so similar to that of the European plain on which it began, and right on the southernmost edge of those trackless, deep, dark coniferous woods that stretch all the way up into the wilds of far Canada, and which have their Old World equivalent in the depths of Scandinavia and the East Baltic region, a land still beset by fearsome and unfathomable pagans in an age when the Western civilization was still in its infancy. Today, there still seems to be a noticeable cultural divide between the peoples living in these two parallel regions, even if we live in a much more settled and homogenized age – the land never fails to put its stamp on the people.

I suppose if I had to describe the character of Taurus Season this year, it was one of earthly delights, albeit often of a quite or mysterious or wondrous character. In the north country, I watched loons battle all morning for the attention of a female. On occasion they were menaced by an eagle, who once was described by the early settlers of this land as the tyrant of the skies, who occasionally swooped threateningly at the loons as their dance went on. Rains came and went, leaving the land filled with a lush green I haven’t seen the equal of in years. The volume was enough to wipe out the droughts of recent years and bring the river to a flood from which it hasn’t yet come down. On occasion, there were clear, bright, warm days which conjured up the spirit of a decade ago. The forest floors were absolutely filled with carpets of wildflowers, the ephemerals of spring that bloom before the canopy crowds them out of all light. Even some thunderstorms, like unto the old summer storms of my youth, moved through in recent weeks, suffusing the entire scene with a character of nostalgia, though not wistful in spite of all that has happened. So, if I have been absent from my office, which is documenting the history of my times, it is not because I was shirking – I was simply enraptured by the unfolding life around me and for the moment had let it carry me away from my duties.

Writer's postscript: Events delayed my publishing of this piece until Gemini Season was almost over as well.

Technically I was born into the Millennial generational cohort, and one thing I remember vividly about my generation from my youth and young manhood was that people were on the move. In high school, people couldn’t wait to move out of the suburbs and into the big city. In college, people fantasized about moving to the “big city” and striking it rich. Now this was funny, because I grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, and that metropolitan area is hardly either a small city (it’s the 16th largest in the USA) or a poor one. Well, the way it’s going now, who knows, but for a long time it was a big and prosperous city. Anyway, that’s not the point. In those days, New York or Los Angeles would be the destination of choice and ending up there would’ve been a sign of one’s having “made it”. Maybe Chicago, Boston or the Bay Area might be a suitable substitute, but it was a pretty narrow range of options. The big city on the coasts, or maybe Chicago, was where it was at, and accept no substitute. This was a myth, of course, but it was the goal of many in my generation, and many of them did it – for a time.

I must have been the only one in my group who stayed in the suburbs and had no desire to move to one of those prestigious locales. Perhaps I had an advantage. My parents traveled a lot when they were working, and they took their kids along on these trips. This included international travel. As a result, by the time I reached college age, I had already seen what life was like in other states and even on other continents. So I did not have any illusions of the “grass being greener”. The truth is, and this is probably still unfashionable to say but who cares, there are not a lot of better places in the world than the Midwest. I always felt a deep connection to the land there, even despite the hazards of its many seasons – heat, bugs and crowding in the summertime, frigid and snowy or icy winters. Not many places on earth have such an abundance of wetlands naturally – in much of the USA, lakes are mostly reservoirs – and the rolling meadows and forests of western Hennepin County where I used to roam are among the most beautiful landscapes on earth. And as for amenities, it compared favorably with the best parts of the “prestigious” areas, never mind what people say – that was just marketing.

It’s also the case that any place you spend enough time, it becomes a part of you as much as you are a part of it. This would make sense in light of the traditional view that you, the human, are “mikrokosmos” – a little world, a reflection of the greater cosmos. But it seems that a great deal of humanity was, for some time, missing this primal impulse that tied them to the land. Oswald Spengler would say this was because we live in the age of the “fellaheen” – the uprooted masses of people that form when a high culture transitions into a civilization. They range from the dirt-poor farmer forced off of his land in a third world country to the younger sons of aristocrats who don’t stand to inherit a thing and are forced to strike out on their own. And be it known that these types of people exist in every age, except that in the age of the fellaheen their numbers are much greater and their impact more destabilizing. America in particular was a land shaped by this phenomenon since its inception. But the phenomenon peaked in my lifetime, which makes the Millennials something of a hinge generation, who got to see the optimum of the process and then its decline.

Their dreams were shaped by the unsettled conditions that Western civilization has been in since the dawn of the civilized period in the early 19th century. But I, for whatever reason, did not feel the same calling to wandering and migration as they did. For some reason, the idea of staying in one place appealed to me. If you’re like me, and believe in reincarnation and so on, this might have something to do with past lives and karma. If I recall correctly, in my most recent previous life I was forced out of my own homeland (Nazi Germany) and lived my whole remaining life in another country (the UK) and mostly in one city (London). There are other more personal details I won’t share just now. Anyway, having experienced exile and instability in one life, I suppose that might explain my longing for a home in this one. At the same time, as a Sagittarius, I always have been comfortable on the road, where “home is where you lay your hat” as was the case on my many travels. That’s why I was never averse to moving. But always, the longing for a place to call my own was there. I didn’t share in the typical American idea, especially among Millennials, that one simply must be blown by the winds of fate to another part of the realm in the chasing after money, status and whatever other dream.

In staying in a particular locale, you build up ties to it in your soul. I experienced this in two particular places during my lifetime. The first was the area west of Minneapolis where I grew up. The deciduous forests, lakes and fields of that area still stir fond memories, and I miss dwelling there much more than I thought I would. The other was the central lakes area of Minnesota where my mother grew up. It’s in the transition zone between broadleaf forest and the conifers of the far north, and it is a land of lakes as well, but much more wooded, a mix of pines and maples, drained by rivers. It’s a strange land in that it feels more open and light in the winter, while the dense cover of green makes it a bit dark and mysterious in high summer. I spent countless hours of my life in both of these regions and they made a very strong imprint on me, so much that I don’t think their influence would ever fade even if I would move away and not return. I got much more enjoyment from walking the wooded trails and backstreets of these places than I’d ever have got living in a big city far from the land of my birth where I’d be just another number, another cog in the machine.

So, it must be said, I never wanted to leave where I grew up. It seemed like the central conceit of our age to want to do so, and to chase after a dream, and have it end the way such things usually do (since dreams are hazy and they come to an end) – in disappointment. That was the fate of many who left. Some of my friends were among them. Interestingly, many came back, some after a short time, and some after long absences. However, I was eventually driven out of my homeland by the ravages of time and change. That was in 2021. Increasingly punitive systems of social control had forced the economy into lockdown, and the irresponsible actions of government led to an enormous increase in the cost of living. It would be an understatement to say that the events of the pandemic years were the most disturbing I have seen in my life. It was as if a collective madness had gripped the world and I had been sucked into the epicenter of it. Areas that were historically liberal, like my own homeland, often were among the leaders of irrational, aggressive and punitive government action against the populace, not unlike what I imagined the conditions in Communist China, or the Airstrip One of 1984 infamy might be. I had to get out – and I wasn’t alone. There was quite a migration out of Hennepin County in those days, and it continues to some extent into the present day.

Now I can say that it was the policy that made me leave, but it was just as much the unsustainable rise in the cost of living and the expanding ring of crime in that area. These things had been building even before the pandemic occurred, but they accelerated during that time to an intolerable degree. At the beginning of the 2010s, the Minneapolis area had the amenities of a big city without the big city cost or crowding. All of that has changed by now. It’s not the place it once was, although its natural setting still has the timeless beauty that it always had – where it isn’t chopped down or filled in to make densely packed apartment blocks and cookie-cutter burbclaves, that is. I suppose that must be for somebody, because they’re moving in, but it wasn’t for me. I should point out that I moved only across the St. Croix River, into neighboring Wisconsin. And in some ways, I still feel like a stranger in a strange land here. It is less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up, but it might as well be a different world. There are no wetlands here, apart from rivers and creeks, and the land has a much different hill-and-dale aspect not unlike New England. It’s beautiful in its own way, but I have not yet dwelt here so long that I could properly think of it as home. Nor, given the instability of our times and in my own life, can I be sure I will be so fortunate as to stay long enough that it might one day be home.
This part of the world has always been fascinating. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area sits on the confluence of four rivers – the Mississippi, the Minnesota, the Crow and the St. Croix. The first of those is the great divider of the nation. East of it begins the East, and West of it begins the West. It’s more of a continental divider than the actual divide. Minneapolis is a Western city, and St. Paul is an Eastern city. This is no lie – you can feel it as soon as you explore. The latter has much more of an “old world” feel, right down to its architecture and the rather medieval feeling of certain neighborhoods and the parochial character of its natives. On the Minneapolis end of the river, towns begin to get the “prairie gothic” look, while in the St. Croix valley they have the Yankee look of towns farther east. Not only is the state of Minnesota highly regional, but so is the metropolitan area. I’ve often thought that the districts of large cities in our time are not unlike small regions in themselves – and rightly so, given the aggregations of people living in the same, oftentimes of quite different character than the next suburb over. In any given locale, there is probably a lifetime worth of things to explore and people to meet.

I have therefore made it one of my life’s principles to repudiate the wandering mentality that defined the American people for so long, and my generation in particular. America is not a frontier nation anymore, like it was from the 17th to the 19th centuries, nor is it a strong industrial economy as it was in parts of the 20th, when a young couple could afford a home and family on a single income. This probably means that Americans will start to rediscover the importance of home, family and community, and also that there will be more intergenerational households, and so on. My generation was perhaps the first to see a world in which the wandering mentality did not pay off or in fact became a liability. Maybe I simply had an intuition that it was all an impossible dream and chose not to take part in it from a young age, and instead focus on getting to know and love a place. Now, what I cannot say just now is whether this attitude of mine will allow me to stay in one place, or whether events will impel me to again uproot. Wanderings, as I know well, aren’t always a matter of choice. But sense of place is important, it has been missing from our people for a long time, and wherever I end up, I will try to come to love that place as much as I have all the other places that I’ve given a part of myself to in the past.

It is well into Cancer Season at the time I write this, and I have not much excuse for having been absent for so long. The best explanation I can give is to say that it has been a busy year, full of events vying for my attention. On the upside, I did finish some important projects that I needed to get done, so no doubt that was part of my delay on updating my blog for so long. Overall, there was not any one thing that ate up so much time, so much as it was just a never-ending succession of distractions, interruptions and other inconveniences. But as I have the time this evening to put some thoughts into writing, I'm going ahead with it.

We have now had 3 dry summers in a row. And actually, it seems that the summer droughts began in August of 2020, when I took a trip out West with some friends during the pandemic. We had been a bit stir crazy from being locked down for so long and decided to get out. After all, what could go wrong? It was camping out and we were socially distanced. Well, as a matter of fact, I almost stepped on a rattlesnake in Colorado and I also ended up getting COVID because of that trip. Oh well. I still don't regret doing it. But the point is, an abnormally dry pattern began right around that time, and persisted into the fall. Then the next three summers ended up being dry.

And once again this year, we had a rather deceptive situation in the spring. As of the last time I updated this blog, there had been so much snow over the winter around this area (100" reported in the suburb of Chanhassen, for example) that it took almost the entire month of March for it to melt, despite moderating temperatures. So at the time of the last writing there had been a large snowstorm which basically put a period to accumulations of snow for the year. It was followed by a week of abnormally hot temperatures that were actually record highs, which had only just begun at the time of the last writing. I had mentioned that the ice was breaking up on the St Croix River, well by the end of the week it was long gone. These were July type temperatures in early April. Above 80° f.

There were actually a few more snow storms in April, including one that was quite severe later in the month, about 3 weeks after the one I wrote about in the last entry. I had been planning to go to an event and heavy snow and ice conditions on the roads made that impossible. But nevertheless, by April it was basically to the point where the snow would fall and then it would melt off within the next day. So for example on the Sunday of the last blizzard that I just mentioned, snow was gone by Monday afternoon. But nevertheless, a cold pattern persisted all the way through April as well. But because of the warm-up that happened rapidly, the massive snow pack which had built up all across the state began to flood the river systems badly. The St. Croix River ended up being among the most severely flooded. I made a habit several days of going down to the public water access and watching the water rise, almost to the point where the ramp was underwater completely. People with cabins near the water had some flooding issues.

It wasn't until May that it really began to look like spring. And even then there were some relapses. But the pattern stayed wet enough to green things up very nicely. During the month of May I decided to go up to the Gunflint Trail, which is an area I'd not been to since 2016. This is a well-known wilderness area of northern Minnesota, which was made somewhat famous by the books of Helen Hoover as well as some other nature writers over time, including the Duluth Tribune's longtime nature contributor Sam Cook. In the intervening years, more businesses had opened up there. In the old days, Trail Center was pretty much the only place to eat on the trail if I remember correctly, but now there are several places. The last third of the Trail was badly burned out by a fire in 2007. Only now is the forest is beginning to grow back, rather short forests of Aspen for now amidst some rather towering iron hills and wetlands.

This was my first time visiting the North Country in May and as a matter of fact, on the Trail, the ice had only just gone out the day before I arrived. But that day I arrived it was rather spooky , because already there was a harbinger of recent summers past. The sky was beginning to take on an eerie red light. The wildfires in Canada had already begun in the middle of May. That set the tone for things to come you might say. But the time up there was great. There's an upside involved in going to the Northern Lakes just after the ice melts, because the bugs have not yet come out, tourism and crowding is lessened, and bird migration was in full swing. The entire forest was alive with the song of warblers. I'm used to visiting in the early spring, when the forest is still quite silent, except perhaps for the distant call of the raven, the familiar sound of the chickadee and nuthatch, or the nagging call of the blue jay or whiskey jack.

Unfortunately, the trails were flooded in many places, and I had forgotten to bring my rubber boots. So the trail conditions were not quite as good as I'd hoped, but I made the best of it – the highlight being to hike the ridge overlooking Flour Lake, a hike I had done last time, only then it was in deep snow. This time the trails were clear, with occasional ponds. This area is hauntingly beautiful, the trail going along a ridgeline covered with pine forest, and opening out into majestic vistas. The lakes up there have a finger lake quality to them. Up there in the superior national forest, this is a region of true wilderness that's hard to find in the more urbanized sections of the United States. It has a very salutary effect on the soul to behold untouched wilds like this from time to time. The weather for most of the duration of the stay was cool, which I didn't mind, knowing that the heat of summer was not far off.

Ultimately, this summer ended up following the same pattern that we've had in previous years. The spring started off promisingly enough, with enough moisture to flood the rivers. But by June, drought began to shape up. This condition was not helped by a very hot stretch of weather. I'm writing this in July, and the pattern since the 4th of July was actually much milder, with a few hot days here and there, but for the past week at times resembling the pattern of September. Yet it has not rained much. A lot of the surrounding region is in moderate to extreme drought and parts of Minnesota are now in severe drought. It's a bit early to say whether this is some kind of climatic shift or just a kind of stuck pattern that sometimes happens (the 2000s had also been dry and hot, but the 2010s were wet). It is a bit concerning though, because things are starting to look like more of a Mediterranean continental climate with hot dry summers and cool wet winters. If that went on for a long time, we would probably end up with a very different biome here.

Well, I can't condense three or more months of events into just a few paragraphs. In this piece I've described some of the more important things that happened in the last few months. A rather uneasy feeling has set in over the recent months as this third summer of drought unfolds. We have had repeated smoke events from wildfires, including at least one day when the entire area was enveloped in a choking reddish haze of smog. The past few months seem to have been filled with omens of foreboding, beyond just the wildfires. Floods, severe storms, sinkholes, train derailments, infrastructure failures, industrial fires and so on happen regularly. There is both the feeling of a civilization in decline and the sense that we are seeing chains of bad omens warning of troubles to come (although I'm aware that most people would consider that superstition these days). And yet, there is a unreality to it all, as the mainstream seems to persist in a devil-may-care attitude with the sentiment that everything is fine. Rather surreal if you ask me, but until something breaks we can only watch and wait.

Until next time,

Deneb

It's about time for an Aquarius Season update – as I publish this, the Sun will be in the final degree of Aquarius. In the upper Midwest there's no real pattern for a typical year. This year couldn't be more different than the last one. I moved to the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix Valley right before the onset of winter in 2021, and it was one of the more unrelentingly cold winters that I've ever experienced. But this year is much different. Just like always in the Upper Midwest, it has had a few stretches of bitter cold, but in January and now again in February there have been extended thaws. At the rate we are going, this could be one of those winters that ends early. On the other hand, the first half of winter dropped as much snow as typically falls in an entire winter. But the pattern for the second half of winter has been air coming from the Pacific and it has been milder and drier. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that this means a very mild spring. I have seen a mild winter lead into a chilly springtime. Our climate is just too changeable to make any solid generalizations. Many parts of the USA have climates that are relatively predictable but ours is about as changeable as it comes.

The last time I wrote, it seemed as if I might update my journal more regularly. So far that hasn't happened, because the frenetic activity which started last year has not really abated. As a matter of fact, my personal life has gotten busier than I can remember in a long time. It was quite a bit more laid back last year, partly because at the very beginning of the year we still had not yet emerged from the conditions of the pandemic when things were still either shut down or at a much lower level of activity than before the pandemic. 2022 will stand in hindsight as the year when things opened back up. It was about time after 2 years of carceral conditions. There was a frenzy of activities such as I had not seen since the "before times" (if you want to use the mainstream media's dystopian phrase). The summertime was the peak of that activity, and at times I thought it was as busy as I remember it being in 2019 before the pandemic happened. What that has meant in practice is that all of a sudden social events and the like are once again back in style now that everyone is no longer deathly afraid of leaving their homes. And I too have gotten sucked into the vortex of activity.

With the mild weather, the wildlife visiting has been quite different than the previous year. All of the regulars around here continue to return to the feeder. One notable change is that we have attracted a large flock of doves, who are now regular visitors at dawn, dusk or whatever time of day they want to come in. We have large numbers of deer owing to the wooded hills of the area, so it's very common for me to see them moving in herds at various hours of the day. One night I nearly collided with one whilst driving home. This happens routinely on the local highways. It is not uncommon to see a deer having been clobbered by a large truck by the roadside. This affords an opportunity to see the local bald eagles, as they can't resist moving in for a free meal, along with the crows and all the other regulars of this area. We have had no boreal species of birds coming in this year like the redpolls or pine siskins. It has been too warm. I also have not heard coyotes howling in the hills. They have all left these parts it seems. The turkeys also have come and gone. But in the case of both of these I have just mentioned, they are migratory and so their absence needn't imply they are dead.

Unfortunately the same could not be said for a rabbit who was a regular visitor in the hours around nightfall and also around pre-dawn. This unfortunate visitor was killed by a fox one morning as I watched in dismay. The woods are still filled with predators although they mostly have made themselves scarce. But overall the nature around here is positively overflowing with vitality. Thanks I think in part to our efforts, we have established a large population of locals who stay year-round and breed, including the irrepressible even in winter breeds such as the white breasted nuthatch, the chickadee and the tufted titmouse. There are also breeding cardinals albeit in lower numbers. Depending on the duration of our winter, the next few months promise to be some of the most exciting for backyard natural historians. That's because a profusion of birds will come up from the tropics in waves as the weather improves. For now however we appear to be stuck in a holding pattern with only the year-round populations to keep us company. Fortunately the natives that stay around for all seasons are some of the most enjoyable species there are.

Speaking of holding patterns, American life seems rather stalemated. That's why my interest in public affairs has somewhat diminished with time. Thanks to too many years of questionable governance, America has come to a kind of reprise of the 1970s and '80s: economic stagnation and high inflation are the result. And right now, in order that the persistent problems should be fixed, some intellectual grasp or apprehension of the problems that got us here would be called for. Yet I do not see much of the kind. And in the absence of decisive action to fix the problems, which our rulers can't provide, the US markets are still behaving very irrationally, as they can do for far longer than you can stay solvent, inflation remains troubling, and there is little fundamental willingness to change the conditions that led us to this place. That in turn has diminished the interest I pay to political and economic matters. I tend to look on in incomprehension at how people spend years of their lives as political outrage junkies without accomplishing a damned thing. The whole thing has taken on the character of a bad soap opera, whether or not the action is all scripted or fictitious, a question whose answer I will leave up to the judgment of the reader.

One thing that did change once I became more aware of the esoteric side of life thanks to communities like John Michael Greer's is that I believe the gods or fate or whatever you want to call it sends you messages via the situations you face in this life. If the society of the spectacle no longer holds any interest, then perhaps that is a message from on high that you need to spend your time doing other things. For me 2023 is going to be a year of action. Apart from toil, I have plenty of practical skills that need improvement, I have books to finish (both the reading and the writing of them), and it also looks like a year of a lot more socializing too, and finally I would like to return to a more rigorous course of esoteric training which I began last year but which got derailed by things constantly coming up since late last summer. But somehow, all that considered, I will still find time to pen these epistles, that one small voice in the wilderness of the 21st century might be preserved for posterity. Subject to the whims of fate I suppose.

It is now over 1 year since I moved to the St. Croix River valley area and the time elapsed since then seems somewhat of a blur. Judging from this experience, a year is just enough time to settle in. It took months just to get unpacked and to learn the new locale. I had never lived in a rural township prior to last year, and it takes some getting used to for lifelong residents of suburbia who have very easy access to services. I used to live about 5 minutes drive from a retail area with “all mod cons” as the English say. There is a good sized town with all of that only a few miles away, but I am more efficient in my use of those services these days, after a crazy year of inflation in fuel and food. I have also, to date, explored but a small part of my local area, being more reluctant to drive around aimlessly, which was in earlier years a favorite pastime of mine. Something to look forward to for the next year, I suppose.

The Indian Summer lasted into November this year, which was rare. During the tail end of that I was guarding the house of a friend who was out of town for a milestone birthday. That afforded me the opportunity to visit some of my old haunts in the Western Suburbs. I visited Rice Marsh, Staring, and Hyland Lakes. The fall drought was so severe that the lakes have dropped over 20” from their high water levels. They had until recently continued to fall 0.5” each week. I have never seen the area’s lakes so low, and reportedly this is the region’s worst prolonged drought since the late 1980s when I was only a boy. There are long black and gray strands of dirt between the old shoreline and the new. I had always thought it a shame that more of Minnesota’s lakes didn’t have nice beaches, or that one couldn’t easily walk the perimeter of the lake – well, now you can. Still, even in their lowered condition they had a lot of ducks and geese passing through on migrations, and it was nice to see this, because waterfowl are now an exotic sight for me. The Wisconsin driftless has few lakes and wetlands, only rivers, and I don’t live right near a wetland like I used to. It’s not so many miles away, but practically a different world.

During that time the weather was very unusual for November: gray, cloudy, humid, and a temperature in the low 60s. It almost felt like later spring. But one day it was as if a switch got flicked. In the morning, near Hyland Lake where I went for a morning stroll before starting up work for the day, the sun had come out and the bluebirds were massed there by the visitor center singing. It felt in that moment like summertime. But only an hour or so later, a rainstorm blew in and the temperature fell precipitately. By the afternoon it was in the 30s and with a fierce wind. Nevertheless I braved the cold for a walk after work, just around sunset. No one else was out on foot in the cold gray dusk. I scarcely saw a face in cars driving by; only a suburbanite mom in a Porsche SUV who waved as she drove into her driveway. The suburbs, along with many other populated areas I have visited this year, had a strangely depopulated atmosphere. I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that life has never returned to normal after the COVID-19 era, even with the gradual opening up ongoing since the last year and a half or so. There are still crowded times and places, but enough places are obviously desolate that they give the impression there are just fewer people than before.

Ever since that odd week spent abroad, there has been a bipolar effect in the weather. There has been cold weather and the first lasting snows, but also a few days here and there reaching into the 50s. Both deer hunting season (with rifles, that is) – a major event in the Upper Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin, with a vast number of hunters – and Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. I am thankful this year that it was rather more peaceful than in the past two years, when anxiety, hysteria and anger were running amok on the populace. Thanksgiving with some of my sibling’s in-laws was quieter than in some years they have done it, with several people unable to make it, but everyone was in high spirits and it was one of the better Thanksgivings in recent years. This was definitely an improvement over the frayed nerves that sometimes accompanied that time of year in the last decade or so. I have looked on in horror as American politics became more and more damaging to the sanity of all who partake of such a vice for long enough that a year of respite was very welcome indeed.

The first significant snowfall of the season came and went yesterday. I had to make a trip out to the airport before dawn and the conditions were already extremely hazardous, and the snow raged on all day. Now it’s a bright, harsh, cold, windy day like January as I write this. It has been an interesting month as the winter pattern of wildlife begins. All the regulars at the bird feeder are still coming in, along with the juncos who arrived with the cold, as they always do. The meadowlarks and bluebirds finally went south for the winter. I saw sandhill cranes and tundra swans flying south in the past month, sometimes in great numbers. This year a large number of birds nested successfully and some of the new birds, like cardinals and tufted titmice, have been regulars since then. Just a few minutes ago I watched a sharp shinned hawk pursuing an unfortunate chickadee, and I’m not sure if it survived. The area has a thriving ecosystem, there is no doubt about that – the more species the merrier, and it is quite lively here. Large flocks of turkeys have been forming up for the cold months. The only conspicuous absentees are the deer, as hunting is ongoing, but they will return to daylight activity in time.

There’s a sense of quiet as the year 2022 fades away. Next month I will celebrate the first year of my blog’s existence and review the accomplishments of a year marked by some delays, difficulties and obstacles. I expect it will end as it began, with stargazing in the cold nights around the ragged ends of the year. I have watched as Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have all become visible again in the evening sky. It will not be long before Orion is rising to greet nighttime travelers. It’s already Sagittarius season, and the sense of ease and festivity that I always associate with that time is setting in. Soon it will be time to greet the coming year with a sense of optimism, resolve and renewed purpose. The 2020s are looking to be a difficult year for the world in general, yet I intend to make 2023 one of my best years yet.

Well, it’s already Libra season and the equinox is past, so the autumn season has officially started, and this year the autumnal weather arrived at the same time as the astronomical season, not even off by a day. That’s rather uncommon around the Upper Midwest. It’s not uncommon to have a low-key summery pattern well past the equinox, and we had such weather right up to the equinox this year, but it turned on a dime after a large storm blew in the day after the equinox. I was on a long car trip that day and it was as hot and sunny as July. Only a few days later, the warnings of potential frost came to us. It’s notable, too, that this is perhaps the driest September on record in my region, surpassing even the very dry years of 2011 and 2012 that I well remember to this day.

With that abrupt change, it became clear that major changes are ahead. Since August there have been subtle signs. I watch the prairies closely since I’ve had the opportunity to do so firsthand. This came with the move to Wisconsin late last year. There are several restored prairies, including some right nearby. However, the general pattern in Wisconsin is that prairies are hemmed in by woods and hills. It’s not like western Minnesota or the Dakotas, where you can find vast grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see. Though once upon a time, treeless prairies did actually extend into Wisconsin and Illinois. As settlement increased, people grew skittish about burning and now heavy forests blanket the land.

The prairies have a notable shift as of late summer. Before, the bluebirds were a common sight, and they are a common sight still, but since that time they have been forming flocks of increasing size and staying closer to the residential areas than the open prairie. They will be southbound at some point, though no one knows the exact date, and they may leave by night. Possibly around the upcoming full moon, when they can fly by clear moonlight. The meadowlarks are now seen to be forming similar groups in the prairies themselves, and they too will return to the sunny southlands as soon as that mysterious hour of compulsion arrives for them. The song of the meadowlark is again heard plaintively in the meadows, mirroring the sounds of spring and early summer prior to completed breeding, but soon those meadows will be silent and sleeping for another year.

The most entertaining thing this year, relative to the prairies, was watching the succession of flowers throughout the year. It continued unabated from the time I returned home in early June all the way to the past few days, when the latest asters are in high bloom. It’s a process I’ve never had a chance to watch in such detail before. I used to visit places with restored prairies like Crow-Hassan Park Reserve in high summer to marvel at all the flowers on occasion, but there was nothing close by that would have allowed for season-long observation. Each part of the season is home to its own sets of species, and these in turn are followed by waves of others. The variety is such that I’ll have to turn to amateur botany in order to comprehend it all, but field experience is a great instructor.

The visitors to the yard continue to show who had successful years breeding, at least in our small corner of the township. At least one deer had fawns and they are occasional visitors. The turkeys here were moderately successful, raising a few pullets, but nothing like the flocks I have seen on occasion elsewhere. They also successfully bred in the nearby prairie, though they hide in the grass and it’s hard to tell just how well they did. The cardinals have fledgelings coming into the feeder just now, which seems rather late. As for songbirds in general, we seem to be approaching the time that only the species that stay the year around still remain. These include the daily visitors, such as chickadees and nuthatches (supposedly these were the only year-round species in the old days before bird feeding), blue jays, cardinals, crows, woodpeckers and finches.

There are signs of warbler migration in progress, though I’ve had but little time to watch it. I noticed them while walking in the woods yesterday. No other interesting visitors have made themselves known in recent times. The bear vanished without a trace in the summertime, and neither foxes nor predators of any kind are much in evidence. Save only, that is, for the birds of prey – I have heard great horned owls and barred owls calling in the darkness. Eagles have been seen again regularly also, especially around the river. These will all stay around for the winter, I believe. As will the waterfowl who forage in the farm fields after the harvest. There is at this time a permanent population of swans, ducks and geese who stay the winter in specific spots with open water, and forage all the day in the fields once they’ve been plowed, and so get fat from the waste corn.

Jupiter and Saturn are once again visible in the night sky, after an absence. I watched them many times last year through a scope in the autumn last year, living in the lake country. Now they are much farther apart than they were then, as Saturn is still in Aquarius and Jupiter is now in Aries. Nor are they drawing closer together, as both are now retrograde, along with several other planets, including Mercury. Mercury is in retrograde in Libra, and this retrograde event has been associated with considerable confusion and dissipation in my life. It usually has some effect, but this year it was especially strong, though not very negatively, just in a lightly troublesome and perhaps overly indulgent sort of way, as one might expect from the house of Venus. All the same, I am looking forward to its end, as I need to get on with some projects.

Though there is still much autumn ahead, including no doubt a ‘squaw winter’ and then an ‘Indian summer’, I always have the sense of the encroaching season of darkness before it arrives. One can’t really miss it in these parts; this is not a part of America that stays mild year-round. Instead, we suffer increasingly early darkness and increasingly harsh weather. Life begins to slow down, society to shut down a bit, and a more contemplative and solitary air takes over from the gregarious spirit of summer. It reminds me of the way of life of the Ojibways that perhaps we are unconsciously recreating: to form packs in the warm months and to split into atoms in the cold months. Times like these are congenial for meditation and the telling of stories, and those are topics that will be very much on my mind in the times to come.

It’s almost the anniversary of my migration last year. The sun has already rolled back around to Leo. Leo is associated with the 5th house, a house of leisure and amusements among other things. Later July through late August often have this feeling of a final flurry of amusements before the world of work (6th house and sun in Virgo) reasserts itself. That has been true to an extent of the entire summer, although most of the festivities died down maybe a week after the 4th of July, but there has been an absence of the kind of high drama the likes of which we saw the past two years, so in a way it does feel like “summertime and the living’s easy”, at least for now. I’m writing this down before my life gets busier, for a few days at least.

Despite the unusually wet spring that wiped out last year’s drought, it is now one of the drier summers on record up to this date. It only took one prolonged heat wave along with a steady fierce wind to dry things out. The nearby prairie which was fantastically green all the way into July all of a sudden has taken on parched yellow highlights. Many of the previously healthy prairie flowers are now looking quite withered. The “Midwest heat dome” was all it took for the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area to flip from abnormally dry conditions to severe drought. I would be tempted to say this is the beginning of a trend that will turn the climate of this area more like the plains out west, but I’m not sure. The truth is we have had such dry spells before in the 2000s, and they reversed, with some of our wettest summers coming in the 2010s.

Finally the heat broke with the coming of a major storm front a few days ago, and recently there have been wake-up temperatures in the 50s. This was a welcome relief. The skies have also been cloudier and the wind has kept up, only now the breeze is coolly refreshing. Of course, at this time of year, such conditions are unlikely to last; there are already further heat waves in the forecast, and some models are showing a hotter than average pattern lasting well into the fall. Being an almost lifelong resident of the Upper Midwest I have noted that most summers have a period at the height of summertime where a brief hint of fall can be detected in the air, although the trend is almost certain to reverse. This is one of those times.

As far as wildlife, the feeling is “everything old is new again”. The breeding season for birds completed successfully, so all of a sudden many of the species that went missing since the springtime have reappeared at the feeder. The tufted titmice have successfully raised young and visit regularly, the baltimore orioles finally returned to the jelly feeder, and we have had indigo buntings as regular visitors as well. The catbirds, cardinals, grosbeaks, doves and all the finches stayed around as well. Nuthatches and all the common woodpeckers are often battling over seed. In the next neighborhood over new turkeys have been born. This July has been very exciting to see, because in my old home of Hennepin County some of these birds were seen only as visitors or never seen at all. And I thought the nature there was actually very good, but the east bank of the St. Croix Valley is quite a bit more vital as it turns out.

The biggest controversy so far this summer involved the appearance of a black bear. Apparently they are somewhat common in this part of Wisconsin. I don’t ever recall seeing or hearing of bears in Hennepin County despite it being on the same parallel of latitude. There is a lot of contiguous woodlands for a bear to hide out in with all the hills and dales nearby. Our bear is a young male, though it already gained weight from the bounty of the settled communities around here. Bears need to gain 100 lbs for winter hibernation. The bear would come often at night or in the late evening or early morning and raid feeders. We had a suet feeder and a peanut feeder carried off and destroyed. It showed great cunning in its behavior too; while baited traps were set for it, as residents grew tired of its antics, it has so far evaded capture. The culprit, as of this writing, is still at large.

Since this blog so far has mainly focused on descriptions and musings on the local wildlife, I should note some of the differences we have with my old community too. We have squirrels and chipmunks in abundance. Both Hennepin County and Crow Wing County did as well. However, the rabbit population here is nonexistent. We had rabbits always on our property in the western suburbs. Here they are nowhere to be seen. Well, they are abundant over at the prairie, but for some reason they are not found here. I think the locals have generally gotten rid of tunneling mammals before they can find a foothold, and this includes moles too. Coyotes roam the area and dig up burrowing mammals to eat them as well. The deer have not been much in evidence lately either, though they were regular visitors early in the year. It’s possible they are hiding because of summer poachers – this is speculation but I know such activities go on.

There is not much more in the way of novelty to describe for this summer. We have had a pair of accipiters nesting in the neighborhood, but they were too far off to identify when I saw them. I saw an eagle in the prairie on July 1st but the ones in this part of the township are once again scarce. The established population down at the Kinnickinnic River Gorge have successfully raised young. With the low water from the dry conditions, they will be hunting in areas with moving water. At dusk, a wood thrush is often heard singing plaintively. Eventually the planets will be easily visible in the night sky again, and I’ll get my telescope out to go observe, and once again share the evening with the owls and the other nocturnal things. Until then, the sun is in Leo and the quality of time is leisurely. I’m going to enjoy the spell for as long as it lasts.

As I write this, the mercury is above 70° for only the second time in many months. The sun shines brightly in the sky and the sound of bird song is insistent and never ending. The sky is totally clear and free of clouds, and there is only a light breeze. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is California rather than the Upper Midwest. But it is an illusion that can only be sustained on this day. The truth is we emerged from a prolonged wintertime that bore slim resemblance to spring as a season only a few days ago.

It is almost unbelievable, but the greening of the landscape is only about a week old. It transformed quickly amidst another spell of rain followed by bright sunshine. But the fact remains that snow and chill temperatures lingered well into the second half of April. My guess was that this year would follow the pattern of 2014, where an extended winter time shifted suddenly into a summer like pattern without much transition. This is proving to be true, although it happened later than I thought it would.

The first hints of a major change came a couple of weeks ago. The migration of certain species made it absolutely clear what was happening. Flickers began to turn up in the sandy reaches of the trails, and not long afterwards the warbler migration began. This is a surefire marker of spring. Yet because of the cold weather that persisted, they lingered for quite some time before flying north. As a matter of fact, I continue to see warblers today, even in the clement weather. They have paused at the feeders to recover some of the body mass they have lost in their long flights.

I have been remiss in my duties of chronicling the local wildlife during this period of false spring, so I will continue it now. The turkey vultures began to return to the river valley by late March, but their numbers have increased and they are almost as abundant as down south in Arkansas. Though I must confess I've never seen even close to the numbers of them anywhere else than I did there. All throughout the winter we were hosts to juncos, redpolls, and pine siskins. These winter birds are long gone. Even the first wave of migrants heralding spring have moved on, such as the white throated sparrows. The bluebirds first started to appear a month ago, and are already staking out nesting grounds in the prairies. Alongside them are large numbers of meadowlarks.

But the spring migration is in full swing now, and many transient species are moving through, too many to really list. At the nearby park, once a farm that is now a restored prairie and woods, these transients as well as large number of year round residents are seen in great numbers. Exotic warblers and sparrows pausing to feed before continuing north lives side by side with the local resident jays, robins, cardinals, crows and finches. The squawking of a pheasant is regularly heard in the distance. The park is also home to mammals, pocket gophers and rabbits digging warrens and The coyotes and foxes who hunt and feed on them. Vultures ominously perch in the dead trees – why did they prefer trees as dead as the carrion they feed on?

There's always a seasonal pulse to the activities. The deer were seen all winter, now they come in the dead of night if they come at all. The turkeys who were not long ago battling everyday are now mysteriously absent, save only for a solitary hen. The toms are nowhere to be seen and their gobbling no longer resounds in the hills and valleys. But most of the year-round bird residents are still regulars. The number of mourning doves is only increased. Surprisingly, the purple finches stayed around rather late this year. The most remarkable sight by far it was the spectacle of over a dozen yellow-rumped warblers regularly visiting the feeder. I have never known these to be feeder birds, but the extremity of the season made them seek it out.

The most grim tidings of the past couple years concerned a very persistent drought. It began in the second half of the year in 2020, with only a mild abatement during the winter time, and then continued with a vengeance in 2021 especially after the summertime. Many lakes and streams dried up. On several trips over the course of those two years, I got used to seeing dust storms not unlike what you'd expect from the American West. Usually this sort of thing is unheard of in the humid upper Midwest. But the conditions during this time were far from ordinary. The persistence of the pattern gave me a sense of unease.

However, the relentless snow falls of the winter, followed by a rainy pattern during the false spring to follow, wiped out the drought as if it had never existed. April blizzards in North Dakota led to a meltwater pulse that inundated Grand Forks. Similarly, continual waves of snow in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin fed the Mississippi and its tributaries to the extent that the river is the highest I have ever seen it at my current locale. Everywhere, waterways have risen to above their normal seasonal levels. It is a stunning reversal the likes of which I have never seen. It speaks to instability in a climate that is already one of the world's most changeable.

This season is fairly described as the spring that wasn't … until now. After a true winter, the like of which was so common in my youth, and yet is so rare now, there was a great reluctance for the pattern to change. It was blamed on a persistent La Nina signal in the Pacific. But it couldn't last forever. Tropical air from the Caribbean finds its way northward every year in the summertime as reliably as Arctic air finds its way southward in winter time. For we stand here at the Great crossroads of the world's weather. No mountains obstruct the passage of air from either direction. The character of this land is volatility. I'll await with some trepidation the conditions that this summer will bring.

This writing was slightly delayed, owing to illness in the past week. However, there was no shortage of lively activity since the last update. With each passing week, this winter seems more like the winters of old, when severe cold would stay around for long periods of time. I should note that this is more perception than reality. According to data, this winter is not really much different than an average one by the standards of the upper Midwest. There has been a slightly above average snowfall and the amount of cold is so far about average for a winter as well. But the last two years were generally milder, so even a normal winter seems out of place after a 2-year respite.

There have been several novel sightings at the feeder recently. Let me preface this by saying that there have been a few more severe cold snaps. This often brings new wildlife into the feeders. And that is what happened this time. I had my first sighting of pine siskins, just as I predicted might happen in the event of a return of severe cold. So far there are not many of them, and other varieties of finches are much more common. We have hordes of finches everyday, but most of them are the more common varieties of goldfinches and house finches. However, we have also had redpolls in, and in the past week were also the first sightings of the hoary redpoll, which is a paler version of the same species. I'm pleased that my guesses about visitors to the feeder came true. Oftentimes it's just a matter of watching and waiting.

All of the regulars have still been coming into the feeder as well. The deer are getting bolder. It took quite a while after hunting season was finished before they were comfortable enough to come when it was still daylight. But finally that occurred. In particular, there's still an 8 point buck, and a large number of does. Several of them seem to be pregnant. There is also a smaller buck with half a rack that comes in sometimes as well. This is not always a good thing. The other night they annoyed me greatly by coming in several times in the middle of the night. The outside yellow lamps with motion sensors would kick on repeatedly. I found it hard to sleep through this as I am photosensitive. They keep trying to get up to the hanging feeders, as they know there is abundant seed there, but they're not quite able to make it. But it doesn't stop them trying.

The turkeys are now very clearly entering mating season. Today I heard the first gobbling of spring. There were at least two males among a number of females. Their faces have turned bright blue and they are displaying very aggressively. This will go on for months. There is one large Tom that comes in alone. He is an older tom with a large beard, and he is aggressive. He will not tolerate any company. The turkeys are daily visitors. At times, they will have standoffs with the deer. The does will sometimes get intimidated by the large flock of turkeys. The deer around here seem to be skittish anyway and around the turkeys they are always at least tense. For what it's worth the turkeys don't seem to be very enthused about the deer either. The turkeys also chase off the crows who come into forage in the morning. The crows begin at the top of the valley and work their way down to the highway over the course of the day. There are far more of them than there were in the Western Suburbs of Minneapolis.

As for rare visitors, there was also an evening grosbeak recently. I had not seen one since I stayed on the Gunflint Trail in spring of 2016. Really I don't often think of seeing them here, in these latitudes, and I almost wouldn't have believed it, except that they have been reported around this area. Mainly when I have seen them it was up around the Brainerd Lakes area or even farther north. In the Western Suburbs, sightings of rose-breasted grosbeaks were fairly common however, but this was much more of a springtime thing -- they would often check in right around the same time in May every year, and sometimes again in September migrating the other way. Given the cold I had also hoped to maybe see a northern shrike, but that is one visitor we have not had yet. All the birds of prey are the usual ones expected around here. Just the other day I saw the bald eagle who lives in this valley soaring in the bright sunshine.

Something that crossed my mind is the migrations of water birds. Just how much migration does occur these days? I'm skeptical that a large portion of our water birds really go south. I have not been down to the St. Croix River in some time, but The areas of the river that were open earlier in the year have now iced over. Yesterday I was on a short trip with a friend. That probably warrants an entry of its own but we did briefly cross the Mississippi River along with one of its tributaries, the Crow. The Crow is also iced over, but the Mississippi River north of here was free of ice. There were large numbers of swans, geese and ducks in the open areas. This would explain the large number of these that were observed foraging for waste corn in the farm fields or congregating in fields along the banks of the Crow River. It seems that there are large endemic populations and they don't bother to go south if they can help it. This would match my observation of ducks around the Minnehaha Creek area, I would often see them flying at dusk even in the middle of winter when it seemed there was no open water. Well there was, I just didn't know exactly where.

We are now entering the tail end of January. The pattern this year has been a fairly monotonous up and down roller coaster ride. Mild spells will be followed pretty reliably by frigid ones lasting days. This is in fact the pattern that has held since November, albeit getting worse. The only major difference now that we have crossed the meteorological midwinter point is that the lows are not quite as low as they were then. A moderation is coming but seems glacially slow, and given the unremitting pattern I am kind of over this winter. Even the soggy, slushy and muddy conditions of the Pisces season will probably seem like an improvement. As I have slogged through this rather tedious winter, at least the novelties of wildlife never really let up. In not too long, it will be 3 months that I've lived here, and already a pretty lively and varied wildlife has been observed.