Last Sunday, my nine-year-old son and I hiked the perimeter of Pike Island in nearby Snelling State Park. With the Minnesota River bordering one side and the Mississippi River the other, the small wooded island is home to a plethora of wildlife. Early winter is upon us here in Minnesota and there was a light dusting of snow on the fallen brown leaves.

Theo and I have always bonded over sports, and in talking to him I realized how little he knows about the natural world. I spied a bald eagle in flight and asked him to identify the species thinking I had lofted him a softball. He guessed that it was a loon, our state bird. Clearly, I have more work to do as a father and as a naturalist.

Along the hike we also saw mallards, Canadian geese, a flicker-tail woodpecker, ring-billed seagulls, a black-capped chickadee, several turkeys and a lone crow. Most of the birds were on the Minnesota side of the island where the wind is calmer and the river flows at an idle pace. The lens of my iPhone camera was inadequate for any good bird photographs so I took a lot of pictures of dead trees. I felt like an arboreal proctologist at times, and it was a wonder I never got bitten by an angered raccoon.

I believe the combination of a pandemic and an overabundance of both misinformation and information on the internet has made hypochondriacs out of all of us. We fear our insides, what’s under the skin, so these images under the bark may be unsettling. We are like the mighty trees in the forest, and we can never be sure when the rot inside will cause us to topple. The only thing to do, really, is to spread our limbs and enjoy the sunshine for as long as God allows. Thanks for checking out this dispatch from Crow City. As always, in these parts, the beavers were busy.