Hunt Hill Audubon Sanctuary

Our recent midweek visit to Hunt Hill Audubon Camp, an old farm that's been turned into a nature preserve twenty minutes east of Shell Lake, Wisconsin, was chock full of low-key events, which was just what we were looking for. The farm was purchased by a wealthy Minneapolis grain merchant a hundred years ago as a family getaway, and they built two modest cabins in the woods that you can now rent through AirBnB. The sanctuary today includes nearly 600 acres of woods and restored prairie, 13 miles of hiking trails, a few small ponds connected by a stream, and  a residential campus for environmental learning programs.  

The cabins are situated in deep woods at the top of a ridge, and from the small front yard of the lower cabin you can see only a hint of blue water far below through the trees. I can easily imagine someone checking in, oohing and aahing at the big stone fireplace and the wrought iron door hinges,  looking around for a few minutes, and saying, "Well, what are we supposed to DO here?"

One thing you can do is sit in a chair and look up at the trees, admiring their branching structure, while listening to the birds sing. It's getting late in the summer for that kind of thing, but throughout our stay we heard eastern wood pewees, red-eyed vireos, yellow-throated vireos, and chickadees, spiced up on occasion by sandhill cranes passing low overhead, a distant loon, or a lonely barred owl.

Of course you could read a book. I had brought along a book about the pre-Socratics, but the subject seemed out of place in such a verdant environment. (The North Shore would be better.)  I turned briefly to the Tang poet Du Fu and was soon inspired to write something of my own—the shy can try:

Wind rustling through the trees.

It's the loveliest sound on earth

on a hot August evening. Or can be.

Rising and falling. Here. Now there.

We wait for it to send that cool

air down to us.

And a pewee calls from the forest,

high-pitched and hopeful.

Nesting is over.

What is he yearning for?

Once we'd been settled in for a while, I said, "Let's go down to the lake." I'm sure Hilary was delighted to hear that, because I was nursing a sore leg and she had no idea how much hiking I would be able to do.

 

As we wandered down the leaf-covered path, we passed interrupted ferns, sensitive ferns, ostrich ferns, maidenhair ferns, and a diminutive species with delicate, almost feathery fronds that we named "delicate fern." At the waterfront there was a small sandy opening, not worthy of being called a beach, with a mass of purple pickerel weed growing nearby. Continuing down the trail, we reached a point along the shoreline from which we could see the quaint wooden bridge, but it was still a few hundred yards away.

 "I don't want to walk that far," I said. "Maybe tomorrow."

Hilary managed to pick four blueberries during our hike, about the size of BBs, which she shared with me. Were they good? Not really. But they were blueberries.

And to our surprise, as we stood looking away from Big Devil Lake into the marsh, we spotted two immature warblers—a yellow and a chestnut-sided.

The next morning we ate breakfast with some friends at their nearby cabin. After he retired Jim built a gorgeous wooden rowboat in his garage in St. Paul, and we went out in it together briefly. (Starting to contemplate my next book, maybe halfway between  "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Three Men in a Boat.")

We sat around chatting for a while, then we all returned to our place so we could show them the cabin interior.

In the afternoon a woman arrived to stay at the second cabin, which sits mostly out of sight farther up the hill. I spotted her through the window, and when we saw her again in the parking lot down at the main camp I said, "Aren't you the one staying at the log cabin?" We introduced ourselves and soon learned that we live not more than half a mile apart here in Golden Valley. She had a collapsible kayak in her trunk and was looking for the waterfront. We were headed that way, too, and she came along.

A few hours later she stopped by our cabin; we'd offered to show her the interior. "I kayaked the stream all the way up to the bridge," she said. When we went inside, she said, "Wow, this is spacious. It would be a good rental for a family." 

Pause. "But my kids aren't much into the outdoors."

"How about your husband?" I said.

"Him neither." Yet she had a fold-up kayak in her trunk. She wasn't complaining; she was exploring.

The next morning after breakfast—a reheated plate of rainbow trout and potatoes from the previous evening— we headed out early along a trail running between woods and field. It had rained during the night, with ear-splitting thunder, and in the glancing sunlight everything looked moist and gorgeous. At one point on the trail, as it knifed through some thick underbrush above a swamp, we flushed a mid-sized bird.

I knew immediately that it wasn't a grouse. The BRRRRRing sound it made as it flew up was only half the weight that a grouse would make.

"How about a baby grouse?" you say. No. I've flushed lots of baby grouse over the years, and they're always in large groups, football sized, with mama somewhere nearby.

Besides, I saw the bird's long, narrow beak during the instant that it was visible, flying off directly ahead of us along the trail before ducking for cover again.

I knew instantly it was a woodcock. A look at the bird guide back at the cabin later only confirmed the i.d. "Uncommon and inconspicuous on damp ground under dense cover within woods...Secretive and solitary; rarely seen in daylight...Wings produce a sharp twittering on takeoff."

The trail we were on led to a second bridge, but once again, we didn't quite get there. The trail was closed due to erosion. But you can see what an enchanting place this is to wander around in, like a Chinese painting come to life.( In fact, there's something appealing about those picturesque bridges you never quite get to.)

We spent some time out in the sunny fields, admiring the cone flowers and the pearly everlasting. And back in the parking lot we ran into a member of the staff.

"I love this place," he told us. "I retired from my regular job a few years ago, but I said to my wife, 'If a part-time maintenance job turns up at Hunt Hill, I think I'd take it.'"

Before heading for home we took one final trip down through the woods in front of the cabin to the big lake, and this time that bridge didn't seem so far away. When we got there, we even took off our shoes and wadded up the sandy-bottomed stream to get a better look at the pickerel weed.