Duck watching this time of year is very hard. In the beginning of the season the males are in full bloom. Females found near males are almost always of the same species. (Unless the male is a mallard. They do not discriminate.) So you can use the male and female view of the species to narrow it down and it is never hard to identify the ducks. A little bit later in the year there are ducklings with females, and you don’t see the males very often. For some species, the males have gone into the woods. For others, they may have actually started to migrate early. In any event, the females are easy to spot because they are more or less tethered to miniature flocks of miniature ducks, and as they are fully mature females, they look just like they are supposed to in the bird book.

Over time, the number of ducklings goes down, thankfully, or we would be living on a planet with ducks piled all the way to the moon. One might wonder where all those ducklings go. Well, they go here.

By the end of the season, the very small number of ducklings that remain have become “mature” in that they are not any longer dependent on their mothers (or crèche keepers) and are off on their own looking rather adult. But the problem is, they are looking rather adult what? Yesterday we saw a duck alone on a pond in a remote woodland west of Itasca and had a hard time identifying it. The duck was floating around with it’s bill in it’s chest sleeping. After several minutes, he finally woke up enough to stretch his head and we could instantly see that he was a wood duck. Not recognizing a male wood duck may sound rather absurd, and you might wonder why I’m even admitting that. It’s a little like looking up at the night sky when the fully lit-up Goodyear Blimp is going by and not being sure which were the stars and which was the blimp.

But a male wood duck born this year and not yet fully mature almost looks like a female teal or something. Especially when it is curled up on the pond sleeping at some distance.

It happened today again, at a small pond off the main road at the Tamarack Nature Preserve. We think it was a female gadwall (though it looked a lot like a whistling duck), but it did not quite hit all the points. Then we realized …. oh, right. Immature female gadwall duck. That works.

A very large number of nighthawks seem to live among the Tamaracks. We saw no fewer than three flocks, all active mid afternoon.

And back in the dense old growth forest that our cabin is in, but just on the other side of the narrow Lake we are on (Itasca) we came across wolf scat. As I poked at it, revealing a nice piece of enclosed bone, I suddenly realized that it was quite fresh. Fresh enough that I checked over my shoulder.

There were no visible wolves. Just ducks. But then, the wolves are always invisible.

Eventually, I moved to Minnesota where there are probably between five and ten thousand lakes that a) are about the right size to walk around in several minutes to an hour or so and b) have a path to do so. That number could be way off, but in any event, it is a very large number.

So after being here for a couple of years, I started to become acquainted with the process as a form of geographical perambulation, socialization, and even, yes it is true, mating. My first real exposure to the charms of Minneapolis involved a visit to the rose garden along side one of these little round lakes. Later, my then significant other an I would meet daily at a certain lake that was between our places of work and walk around it. Some days, when we had the extra time we’d walk extra fast so we could get in two rotations. For our first date, my wife and I walked around a lake then went to get a beer.

I should not mislead you. Walking around the lake is not a Minnesota thing so much as a Twin Cities thing, and then, it is probably more of a Minneapolis Thing than a Saint Paul thing. Saint Paul has it’s lakes, but Minneapolis is “The City of Lakes” (thus, the name of our basketball team is The Lakers, or at least it was until they moved somewhere else), and there are several round lakes of just the right size with the path all around them. But really, when I think about it even further, I’d say that the walking around the lake thing is more of a South Minneapolis thing … because that is where almost all the lakes are in the city, and that is where the cultural behavior is most strongly manifest.

If you put my previous post on lakes together with this one, to put a longer term time perspective on it, it is not hard to imagine all these Minnesotans spinning around the rim of the lake which is really just a large mass of water ultimately flushing into the ocean.

Well, anyway, I’m pretty sure that the average person who walks around these lakes has very few thoughts of the geology, geomorphology, physical geography, and paleoclimatology that they are experiencing. For instance, with respect to lake physical form: Imagine standing along side a lake that is small enough to see the other side but big enough that you can’t quite make out the people on the shoreline across the way unless they are wearing blaze orange and jumping up and down (which is not uncommon in these parts). Now, somebody sidles up to you and says “This is a deep lake, according to this fishing map I just bought at the Mule Lake Store.”

So you look across the lake, and you think about it being deep. Imagine that. Imagine the slope, the contours, of the bottom of the deep lake, and imagine those contours being realized in your mind’s eye as the person continues, “As a matter of fact, out there, between here and that shore over there, is the deepest part of this particular lake” .. Now, the contours in your mind’s eyes deepen and steepen.

Now, ask yourself, are you even close to imagining something accurately here? And chances are, you are not.

Here’s a simple fact: In Minnesota, for the vast majority of lakes, no matter how deep they are, you can pick up a stone and with a good heft toss that stone horizontally out into the lake a distance that is close to the maximum vertical depth of the lake. Most of the lake will be less deep than the width of the average city street. The deepest part of a pretty deep lake will be about 60 feet, or slightly deeper than a city lot is wide, slightly less deep than a suburban lot is wide. Maybe the stone you throw will have to bounce a couple of times to get to that distance (depends on your arm) but I think you get the point. If the far shore of the lake is as I described above …. just that far away that you can barely make out a person … and the lake is about 30 feet deep, then it probably true that if the lake were empty and covered with mixed grassland/woodland vegetation and you were standing in the same place, you’d call it flat. Only an expert eye would recognize the stranded shoreline ringing the somewhat low spot at exactly the same elevation.

The lake is given its psychological depth, of course, by the water. Even in a clear lake it is hard to see below six to ten feet on a good day, and when one is looking through water at depth of 10 feet or more, if you can see the bottom, it is hard to estimate the depth. Of course, if you are a boater and you have a fair amount of experience, and work with soundings and maps, you can get good at this, but uninitiated, you’d probably miss-estimate. Then, if you are told “this is the deepest lake in the township” and you are out in the middle, and you see nothing but murky depth below you as you stare into the water along side the boat, one imagines a depth that is deeper than what is there. It is hard to perceive that most likely the average telephone pole would stick way up above the lake’s surface. If there was a telephone pole right in that spot.

The average person walking around the average lake in Minneapolis is ALSO walking around within a channel of an ancient, giant river. They may not have noticed driving down the bluff of the ancient river valley when they approached the lake, or the fact that they have parked in what must be the top of a sediment deposit several tens of feet thick within which huge chunks of ice were once trapped, subsequently melting and forming the lake about which they are about to perambulate. Those extinct rivers are why those lakes are there, and the whole process is linked to ancient glaciers and glacial cycles. That is probably worthy of further discussion.

(Read all the “Lakes” posts here.)

But despite the importance of lakes in our recreational regime, lakes were actually fairly uncommon in Upstate New York and New England. A surprising number of lakes in the US Northeast are actually rivers or streams that have been dammed. Much of the landscape was glaciated and much of that was blanketed with glacial drift, in which ponds and lakes often form, but since the landscape is hilly (often mountainous), rivers and streams have joined low spots together into a dendritic network of flowing water. Many of the lakes that may have been there right after the glaciers retreated had been swallowed up by this network.

For example, this is the region of upstate New York where I spent much of my childhood and teenage years:

There are lakes, but most of the terrain is uplifted and drained by streams and rivers. Indeed, many of the lakes you see on this map are formed by dams and are not natural. One of the main walleye fishing lakes in New York State is the Great Sacandaga, a reservoir.

Where I now live,in Minnesota, there is not that much change in elevation, so there are lots and lots of lakes, to the extend that this is called “The Land of Lakes.” If you’ve ever seen “Land o’ Lakes” butter or other dairy products … well, that’s from here. Land o’ Lakes is one of our local businesses.

For example, this is where I spend much of my time during the summer here in Minnesota:

The same glacier covered this area and upstate New York, but here there are more lakes, owing mainly to the flatter terrain. Also, very few of these lakes are regulated by dams (though more were in the past during logging days, the dams now in disuse) and I’m 99 percent certain that not one of the lakes shown on this map are human-made. (This map and the one above of New York show roughly the same land area.)

It is worth noting that people who live in Upstate New York can typically tell you where various rivers and streams are, and can tell you what river or stream feeds into what other rivers and streams. In contrast, I’ve found that Minnesotans often have no idea what the nearest stream or river is, or where it goes . In the region depicted here, if you ask someone which way the Mississippi River is (all the water you see here drains into it) people will simply not know or will point in a random direction.

A lake is the landscape thumbing its nose at time. All elevated regions … all places on Earth where you can stand in one place all day and NOT have the briny sea lapping at your ankles (or knees) at least a couple of times a day … are subject to being eroded down to sea level, someday. Wind, rain, phytochemical activity, and running water will eventually flatten any and every continent to the level of the ocean’s tides.

Or at least, that is what the forces of erosion would do were it not for forces of uplift and deposition happening at the same time. And as mountains or uplands rise above the theoretical tide line, rivers cut down into the emerging hills, and seas grind away at the edges, every here and there forms a low spot that does not drain gravity-ward, and that can hold water for a time. Sometimes that time is days, after a rain. Other times, it is tens of thousands of years, until the low spot is breached by erosion and let out to the sea. Eventually, every lake may give up its basin to a stream, and thus its water to the ocean directly, by surface flow (it had already been feeding the sea indirectly via groundwater movement and evaporation).

(There is another way to think of lakes that views them as windows into an underground system of rivers and reservoirs. That perspective works better in a different kind of discussion, so we’ll set it aside for now.)

There is no reason to believe, by the way, that the forces of uplift and deposition on continents is in balance with the forces of erosion. There is no reason to expect that there have not been times in the past when most of the continental regions of the Earth was inundated by shallow seas, with few rises and almost no mountains above them. Conversely, there may be times where much of the world’s water is trapped in ice, so the ocean rests much lower than the continental margins, and much of the land is high and dry. I sometimes wonder how one would characterize the present day in this regard, relative to other time periods. There are major “inland seas” (the Caribbean, for instance) but it seems some major seas and low areas have been elevated in recent millions of years (the Tethys Sea, which once ran from Gibraltar to the Black and Caspian seas, cutting off Africa from Eurasia; The Miocene seas and lowlands of South Asia now known as Pakistan and Afghanistan; the sea that was an arm of the Pacific, where the Amazon now stands; etc.)

For many lakes, their death precedes their capture by the growing network of rivers and streams, as they are filled in with sediment, converted to bog and eventually become a flat marshy spot. The cost you pay for being amenable to settling water is muck and other sediments filling you in. Lakes with outlets don’t have this problem to the same degree, but those outlets are essentially topographical hemorrhages, cutting down even if there are ephemeral human dams in the way, stranding the shorelines and making the lake into an ever growing valley or canyon.

So when you see a lake, take a good look. It might not be there tomorrow.

Well, OK, it probably will be there tomorrow, but at the medium to large temporal scale, all lakes are temporary features of the landscape, thumbing their metaphorical noses at the tide line, to which, eventually, they are bound to sink. Unless something else, much more severe, happens to them, like being ground up by a glacier or subducted into the fiery mantle of the earth. Or the sun exploding. Or it turning out that the Universe is only a simulation game being played in some other universe that does exixt.

The likelihood that your yard slopes one way or the other … statistically … depends in large part on what region you live in. (Here I’ll be speaking mainly of the US, but the principle applies broadly.) If you live in New England, your yard is more likely to slope up. If you live in the Midwest/Plains, your yard is more likely to slope down

This is because in New England, we humans build our settlements around rocks. Because there are rocks. (If you don’t believe me, note that all the famous rock farms are in New England.) You get a big aircraft carrier size rock, you build your streets around its base, the houses face the streets, and the yards travel up the rock in the back.

In the glaciated Upper Midwest, we build our settlements around swamps and ponds, again, because there are a lot of them. They don’t call Minnesota the “Land of Lakes” for its rocks! In fact, rocks are so hard to find around here that when people do find them, they put them out in their front yards like sculptures.

So, you build your road on the high ground, put the houses along the road, and by definition (high vs. low) the yards slope down to the swamp. Which, of course, you fill in with dirt, but it’s still low ground.

This is why dogs in New England are less hyper than dogs in the midwest. When all the yards slope down, even tall fences do not cover the view from the back windows to all the neighbor’s yards, and thus, all the neighbor’s squirrels and all the neighbor’s dogs. But in New England, what with the rocks and all, the view from a person’s yard may consist mainly of the person’s yard and not so much the neighbor’s yards. So, in the Midwest, a dog may have an acre or more of wooded parkland squirrel habitat to look at, while in New England, maybe one squirrel, maybe none. (And, removing the squirrels in New England has a better chance of working long term as well.)

Obviously, this will vary a lot. What I’ve just said applies more to suburbs than to urbs (though not entirely). In South Minneapolis, for instance, the swamps are all parks. Really. Go look at any park in South Minneapolis and you’ll see that it’s a major low spot. If it is big enough, there will be a lake down there, if not, just a filled in swamp. The local geology dictates that the yards are mostly flat (and that, therefore, the airport is nearby!) and that the main thing you see in your yard is your garage and the alley. So, South Minneapolis yards are more like New England yards than one might expect. And, in New England, if your yard backs on a stream, obviously, you have a low area, but you don’t get the above described view, because the stream will be accompanied by an edaphic woodland riverine forest. People who live in those houses have very nervous dogs, because … of the raccoons.

This relationship between landscape and lifestyle is fairly trivial, but there are a thousand (well, OK, dozens) of ways in which regional geology and physical geography shape your life, and they can add up. These aspects of the land add to cultural feature of a region to form a palpable gestalt.

Look around you. How is your cultural landscape shaped by bedrock, sediments, drainage patterns, and patterns of natural vegetation?