Marshland Elegy

     Aldo Leopold opens “A Marshland Elegy” with fog rolling “like the white ghost of a glacier” across the peat, until a “pandemonium of trumpets” announces the dawn arrival of sandhill cranes. Their voices, he writes, are the “trumpet in the orchestra of evolution,” reminders of a past that extends back to the Eocene and a future ticking away in geological time. What strikes me is Leopold’s insistence that the cranes lend depth to the landscape: without them a marsh becomes just another wet field, its history silenced.  

Rereading the essay, I thought back to my Spring Morning in Monument post, where I watched robins dart across newly greening grass and felt the tension between winter’s chill and the sun’s promise of renewal. Those robins marked the season’s turning, but Leopold asks us to feel something even grander, the weight of millennia embedded in a these calls. My observations captured a moment of change, but Leopold’s cranes reveal the continuity that makes change legible in the first place.  

Yet both scenes converge on a common ethical insight: attentiveness breeds responsibility. In my journal I noted that change “often goes unnoticed until intentionally observed.” Leopold pushes that intuition further. He warns that when we drain marshes or cut roads we erase not only habitat but also the memory of Earth’s own storytelling, “revocable only by shotgun.” If neglecting to look risks missing a season, neglecting to care risks ending an era.  

Leopold helps me re‑evaluate the robins’ everyday chorus. Their song, too, carries evolutionary echoes, albeit less ancient than the crane’s. The task, then, is to allow ordinary birds, or any other being, to anchor us in longer, overlapping narratives of land, time, and belonging.  

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