Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Dad said the animals would move to a new place. His life in the military and
recent conversion to a career in real estate lent more than his usual authority
to the response. In fact, the stakes marked a new subdivision he and his part-
ners were developing. But I think we both knew the answers weren't that sim-
ple. The animals couldn't just resettle elsewhere. There were other animals in
the places that might harbor the refugees. The wildlife would either have to
adjust to their new human neighbors or perish.
Four decades later, it was time to i nd out which alternative had played
out. The place I knew as a kid was transformed into the one that now stood
before me.
At dawn, on an April day in 2012, I parked the rental car in the old neigh-
borhood where the bean i eld used to stand and headed into my childhood
woods. Spring seemed to be in a hurry to erase a winter that never really hap-
pened. The once-mysterious small creek still cut through rusty and white
limestone as it headed north toward Baldwin Creek and the muddy Kansas
River. A mix of native and introduced vegetation along the waterway provided
an occasional buf er from new roads and homes. Exotic honeysuckle bushes,
something unknown in my childhood, were everywhere. (Scientists studying
a site in Ohio have discovered that these invaders provide birds with cover
and nesting places but that nests in honeysuckle often suf er high rates of pre-
dation.) Today, along with blooming native black locust, they perfumed the
air. Vines of Virginia creeper provided a tropical cloak to the locust, Osage
orange, redbud, catalpa, and feral fruit trees that made up the forest. If I ig-
nored the honeysuckle, the types of trees and bushes I remembered still re-
mained. But what would have been an all-day adventure in my youth was now
a thirty-minute stroll on paved sidewalks and a mowed powerline right-of-
way. The forest that had beckoned young explorers was mostly reduced to a
riparian amenity for huge homes. Massive lawns fronting streets that boasted
of a wilder past isolated the trees that remained: Tallgrass Drive, Timber
