New York State – Michael Stephen Wills Photography

Juvenile Cooper’s Hawk at a Winter Feeder: A Backyard Predator in the Finger Lakes

On a frigid winter morning, a young Cooper’s Hawk claimed a backyard feeder roof, revealing how predators, snow, and survival intersect in an ordinary Finger Lakes yard.

February 17, 2026February 17, 2026 MichaelStephenWills14 Comments

These four images and YouTube video document a winter visit by a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) to our backyard feeder, captured on February 7, 2026, during a snowstorm in mid-morning light in sub-zero temperatures. The metadata places the sequence between 10:35 and 10:37 a.m., recorded on an iPhone 14 Pro Max with a 9 mm f/2.8 lens at low ISO (32) and fast shutter speeds—conditions that make sense for a bright, snowy day when reflected light is abundant and a moving subject demands short exposures. The bird itself, however, tells a longer story than the camera settings can.

Cooper’s Hawks are medium-sized accipiters, built for pursuit in cluttered spaces. Short, rounded wings and a long, banded tail allow them to thread through trees and shrubs with startling agility. In the Finger Lakes region in winter, they increasingly overlap with human habitats because bird feeders concentrate prey. The metal feeder roof in these images is mounded with snow, and the hawk has chosen it as a temporary perch—an elevated, stable platform that offers both a view of potential prey and a place to rest after a chase or to wait out a flurry of weather.

The bird’s plumage marks it as a juvenile, likely hatched the previous summer. Instead of the blue-gray back and fine rufous barring of an adult, this hawk wears brown upperparts patterned with pale, teardrop-shaped spots and a buffy, vertically streaked breast. In the first image, where the bird faces forward through a lattice of branches, those bold brown streaks on a whitish background are especially clear. The eye is yellow rather than the deep red of a mature adult—another reliable sign of youth. Over the next year or two, those eyes will darken and the plumage will transition to the cleaner, more uniform adult pattern.

In this first image, the hawk faces forward, squarely watching the yard.

The long tail, visible in the rear views, shows broad, dark bands and a pale tip. That tail is not just decorative; it is the rudder that lets the hawk brake, pivot, and surge forward in tight quarters. The posture here—upright, alert, feathers slightly fluffed against the cold—suggests a bird conserving heat while remaining ready to launch. In winter, energy balance is critical. Each failed chase costs calories, and each successful one must pay back the effort many times over.

In this second image, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning.

Cooper’s Hawks specialize in birds roughly the size of starlings, doves, and jays, though they will also take small mammals. Feeders unintentionally simplify the hunt by bringing many potential targets to a predictable spot. The hawk’s presence does not mean the feeder is “bad” for the ecosystem; rather, it shows the food web functioning in real time. Predators follow prey, and prey follow resources. In snowy conditions, when natural seed and cover are harder to find, that concentration effect is even stronger.

Click me for my Cooper’s Hawk photograph on Getty Istock.

The sequence of images reads like a brief behavioral study. In the first, it faces forward, squarely watching the yard. In the second and fourth, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning. In the third, it turns again, keeping its head in near-constant motion—classic raptor vigilance. Accipiters often hunt by surprise, bursting from cover rather than soaring and stooping like falcons or buteos.

In this third image the hawk turns, keeping its head in near-constant motion—classic raptor vigilance.

Winter also shapes the hawk’s relationship with humans. Juveniles, in particular, are more willing to explore unfamiliar structures and take calculated risks. A feeder roof is not a natural perch, but it offers height, stability, and a clear line of sight. Over time, many individuals learn the rhythms of a yard—when sparrows or doves are most active, where cover is thickest, where escape routes lie. Some succeed and stay; others move on.

In this fourth image, the hawk looks over its shoulder, scanning.

From a broader natural history perspective, this bird represents a conservation success story. Cooper’s Hawks suffered declines in the mid-20th century due to pesticide use, but populations rebounded after bans on DDT and related chemicals. Today they are again common across much of North America, including upstate New York, occupying forests, edges, and increasingly suburban landscapes.

Watch Cooper’s Hawk behaviors in this video.

The file metadata anchors this encounter in a precise moment—February light, a cold morning, a quiet pause between hunts. The images, however, capture something timeless: a young predator learning its craft, reading the winter landscape, and testing the boundaries between wild and human-made spaces. For the backyard observer, it is a reminder that even in the most familiar settings, the ancient choreography of predator and prey continues, written in feathers, snow, and a long, banded tail poised for flight.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Memories of Valentine’s Day: Family Beginnings and a Lifetime of Shared Journeys

A Valentine’s Day reflection spanning childhood, family, and partnership—where a homemade cake, a living room, and an ocean voyage reveal love’s enduring thread.

February 8, 2026 MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

Our culture insists that Valentine’s Day is about hearts and chocolates, about gestures that can be wrapped, written, or eaten. My memories tell a longer and more intricate story. Valentine’s Day is thread that runs through decades—binding childhood, family, and shared journeys into a single, evolving narrative.

An early Valentine’s Day memory of mine is anchored in a living room at 107 Deepdale Parkway in Albertson, New York. It is 1959. The room is familiar and ordinary, yet in memory it glows with a particular warmth. My sister Theresa is two, Christine is four, and I am five. We are gathered together, small figures in a modest suburban home, unaware that this fleeting domestic moment will outlast nearly everything else in the room. What I remember most is not an event, but a feeling: the sense of being held within something stable and loving, a family rhythm that proved enduring.

Theresa (2), Michael (5), Christine (4) in the livingroom of 107 Deepdale Parkway, Albertson, New York on Valentines Day 1959

As the years passed, Valentine’s Day shifted its shape, as it does for everyone. Childhood gave way to adolescence, and later to adulthood, when the holiday began to carry expectations and interpretations shaped by romance and partnership. Yet even then, my earliest associations lingered beneath the surface. Valentine’s Day was was beyond an exchange between two people; it was about continuity, about the quiet reassurance that one was part of a larger story.

A part of our celebration this Valentine’s Day cake—chocolate, homemade, and unapologetically generous. Baked by my wife, Pamela, whose acts of care often expressed themselves through the kitchen. The cake was not elaborate by modern standards, but it does not need to be. Its value lay in what it represented: time taken, effort given, and love made tangible. Long after the plates are washed, the memory of that cake remains inseparable from the idea of Valentine’s Day itself. Love, I learned early, could be simple, nourishing, and shared.

Chocolate Valentines Day cake by Pamela Wills

That understanding deepened over time, especially through my life with Pam. One Valentine’s Day memory stands apart not for its extravagance, but for its improbability. Pam and I found ourselves aboard the Oceania ship “Regatta”, sailing the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. The vastness of the water, the steady rhythm of the ship, and the sense of being suspended between sky and sea created a striking contrast to the small living room of my childhood. Yet the emotional register was remarkably similar. Once again, Valentine’s Day was marked not by spectacle, but by presence.

The following day we reached Puerto Montt, a port city framed by water and volcanoes. The journey itself became a metaphor for the way love matures. Where childhood love had been rooted in home and routine, this later expression unfolded through shared experience and mutual trust. Standing on the deck together, watching the coastline emerge, I was struck by how Valentine’s Day had come to encompasses where we had been and where we were going.

Pam and I aboard the Oceania Regatta sailing the Pacific Ocean off Chile. The following day we reached Puerto Montt.

In that sense, Valentine’s Day functions much like memory itself. It selects certain moments and holds them fast, allowing others to fade. A cake, three young children in a living room, two partners standing together on the open sea. These are not scenes one could have predicted would endure, yet they do, because they are threaded with care, attention, and shared time.

Now, looking back across the span of years, I understand Valentine’s Day as a recurring prompt that asks us to remember where love first took root, how it was tended, and how it has carried us forward. The details change, but the essence remains remarkably constant.

In the end, Valentine’s Day does not demand grand gestures or perfect words. It asks only that we recognize the quiet continuity of love as it moves through our lives—sometimes in a childhood living room, sometimes on the open ocean, always leaving its mark in ways we only fully understand in retrospect.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Stones That Traveled: Glacial Erratics, Deep Time, and the Stories They Leave Behind

Glacial erratics are immigrant stones—carried south by ice, dropped without explanation, and left behind to challenge our sense of permanence, place, and deep time.

February 3, 2026January 27, 2026 MichaelStephenWills22 Comments

There are rocks that merely sit where gravity has placed them, and then there are rocks that arrive with stories already embedded—foreign syllables carried south on ice, dropped without explanation, and left for us to puzzle over. Glacial erratics belong to the second category. They are migrants with no passports, refugees of deep time, whose presence quietly contradicts the landscape that hosts them.

Long before anyone reached for a hand lens or an ice-flow diagram, people answered such contradictions with imagination. In Ireland, a boulder perched just so on a mountain side is not a geologic problem but a resting place. Leprechauns, we are told, favor such stones—high enough to observe human intrusion, solid enough to outlast it. Skepticism, as folklore reminds us, is not always a stable position. Kevin Woods—better known as McCoillte—found that out the hard way when doubt collided with experience on the slopes of Slieve Foye. What followed was not merely a conversion story, but an act of modern mythmaking: folklore translated into bureaucracy, imagination petitioning regulation, and “The Last Leprechauns” entering the unlikely language of conservation. Stone, story, and belief hardened together into something oddly durable.

Rocks such as this are a favorite perch for leprechauns to rest and contemplate the works of man who have invaded their world. Inhabitants of Carlingford who wander Slieve Foye have come upon them often enough, their stories and certitude in the existence of the Little People are resistant to manifold doubters with their reasons and arguments. Kevin Woods, aka McCoillte, was a doubter until worked on a stone wall on property he owned on Ghan Road, Carlingford. His belief did not arise on the discovery of the leather purse, covered with ages of dust and lime, nor with the gold coins inside. McCoillte pocketed the coins for luck. As luck would have it, McCoillte loved to walk on Slieve Foye. It was on one such walk he and his dog encountered Little People who paralyzed them to escape. His unexplained absence led to troubles with the wife. This experience brought McCoillte around to enough of a belief that he, with lots of help, succeeded in petitioning the E.U. European Habitats directive to recognize leprechauns a protected species. A reserve was establish on Slieve Foye to protect the “Last Leprechauns” and you can google this phrase to learn more about McCoillte’s stories.

Back in the Finger Lakes, we tend to use a different grammar when confronted by an out-of-place rock. We name it, classify it, and trace its lineage northward. Erratics scattered across Tompkins County are geological sentences that begin somewhere else entirely. The bedrock beneath Ithaca—Devonian shale and sandstone—cannot account for crystalline intruders left behind like forgotten punctuation marks. These stones speak of ice sheets thick enough to erase valleys and decisive enough to transport mountains in fragments.

Some of those fragments have been domesticated. Cornell, for example, has never been shy about rearranging its stones. An unremarked erratic along the Allen Trail may once have been shrugged off as inconvenient rubble, while another—dragged from the Sixmile Creek valley—was carved into a seat and made eloquent. The Tarr memorial boulder, resting near McGraw Hall, transforms erratic stone into deliberate monument. It invites rest, contemplation, and perhaps gratitude for those who taught us how to read landscapes written by glaciers.

We find boulders of crystalline rock, commonly derived from Adirondack sources, left behind on the surface of ablation moraine, in the Finger Lakes Region. Cornell finds some and move them, maybe the case for this unremarked erratic found along the Allen Trail of FR Newman Arboretum. Another enormous erratic, brought in from the Sixmile Creek valley, was carved into a seat as a memorial to Professor R.S. Tarr who deciphered much of the glacial history of the Finger Lakes Region. Find it at the southwest corner of McCraw Hall on the Cornell University Campus. Reference: “The Finger Lakes Region: Its Origin and Nature,” O.D. von Engeln, Cornell University Press, 1961 page 106

Elsewhere, erratics remain defiantly themselves. In winter, one along Fall Creek alternates between anonymity and revelation, depending on whether snow smooths its surface or retreats to expose lichen constellations. Bridges pass overhead, traffic flows, semesters turn over, yet the rock remains unimpressed. It has already endured pressure sufficient to rearrange its crystals; a passing academic calendar is not likely to trouble it.

Glacial erratic with and without a snow covver and spotted by lichen along Fall Creek in a winter afternoon as seen from Cornell Botanic Gardens. That is the bridge over Fall Creek on Forest Home Drive. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

This boulder, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

This rock, a glacial erratic, was found near Fall Creek and the Cornell Botanic Gardens Horticulture Building. Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Then there are the stones that confront us most directly—those we stumble upon in fields, pulled from soil by plow or frost, demanding explanation. A white, iron-stained marble boulder in a Tompkins County field is not subtle about its foreignness. It does not belong to the local vocabulary of shale and sandstone. Its pale surface, crystalline texture, and mineral scars point insistently north, toward the Grenville terrane of the Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards–Gouverneur marble belt offers the most persuasive origin story: metamorphosed carbonate rock carried south by Laurentide ice, released when climate and physics finally lost patience with one another.

I found this white marble erratic in a Tompkins County field. The highest-probability source is Grenville marble from the NW Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County (Gouverneur/Balmat–Edwards marble belt), delivered by southward-flowing Laurentide ice. I say the most probable source is metamorphosed carbonate (marble) from the Grenville terrane to the north—especially the northwest Adirondack Lowlands / St. Lawrence County marble belt (the “Gouverneur Marble” and related Grenville marbles), transported south by the last Laurentide ice sheet. Why that’s the best bet: Ice-flow geometry favors a northern source. In the Finger Lakes, glacial ice advanced with a flow direction that was very close to due south, guided by the north–south bedrock valleys. Tompkins County erratics are “exotic” imports. Local bedrock around Ithaca/Tompkins is Devonian shale/sandstone, but the region contains many nonlocal (“exotic”) glacial erratics carried in from much farther north (including southern Canada and beyond). Marble isn’t local to the Ithaca area, but it is abundant in the NW Adirondack Lowlands. The Balmat–Edwards/Gouverneur area in St. Lawrence County is a classic Grenville Lowlands district with marble belts (the same province that yields cream/white building marble around Gouverneur).

What makes this particular erratic compelling is not just its provenance, but the improbability of its journey. Ice moved with purpose here, flowing south along bedrock valleys like Fall Creek and Cayuga troughs, turning the Finger Lakes region into a conveyor belt for distant geology. When the ice melted, it left behind evidence that refuses to blend in. Erratics are geological truth-tellers. They announce that this place was once unrecognizable, that what seems permanent is merely provisional.

Perhaps that is why folklore clings so naturally to stone. Whether leprechauns or Laurentide ice are credited, erratics insist on a larger frame of reference. They ask us to imagine landscapes in motion and beliefs under revision. A boulder can be a seat, a marker, a perch, or a puzzle—but never merely background. It waits, quietly confident, for us to catch up to its story.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Where Fall Creek Turns: An Esker’s Quiet Authority in Malloryville Preserve, New York

An ancient esker redirects Fall Creek at Malloryville Preserve, revealing how Ice Age meltwater shaped the land and still quietly governs water and wandering feet.

January 20, 2026January 12, 2026 MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

The esker rises like a glacier’s spine, a long-backed remnant left behind where an ice mountain learned how to leave quietly. It is not loud geology—no cliffs shouting their age, no cataracts announcing force—but a patient, sinuous fact. A frozen river’s footprint, pressed into the land and then abandoned, it lies there still, grading itself gently on both sides, as if unwilling to offend gravity or time.

At first glance, it could pass for a human thing: a railroad berm, a raised roadbed, an engineer’s solution. Yet this ice-scribe ridge was shaped without blueprints, drafted by meltwater racing beneath a retreating glacier, carrying gravel like a hoard of stories. The stones settled where the ice allowed them, stacked by pressure and patience, forming a ridge long enough—nine-tenths of a mile—to tell a stream where it must turn.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

Fall Creek arrives with purpose, confident in its descent, until it meets the esker and must reconsider. Here the water performs bows, an abrupt acknowledgment of authority. The creek becomes a liquid negotiator, redirected by the ridge’s quiet insistence. This is the esker’s work: not domination, but persuasion. Land teaching water a new sentence.

This video provides a better feeling for the esker. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.

Standing at the foot of the esker, the slope to the right reveals itself slowly. It does not announce, I am important. Instead, it waits to be noticed. A swamp settles nearby, the water-mirror lowland, collecting what seeps and lingers. Together, ridge and wetland form a conversation: height and hollow, drain and gather, spine and lung.

Before there was signage, before placards translated glacial grammar into public language, the land already knew itself. Knowledge preceded explanation. My son and I pitched a tent atop a kame at our front door — another ice-left hill, a deposit of ancient momentum. That night, the ground beneath us was older than memory and younger than myth. Camping there was not recreation so much as apprenticeship.

A kame is a meltwater’s knuckle, rounded and abrupt, shaped by collapse rather than flow. To sleep upon it is to rest on uncertainty made solid. The tent fabric whispered in the breeze, a thin membrane between human breath and glacial aftermath. Fireflies stitched brief constellations above the grass, while the earth held fast, remembering ice that no longer needed remembering.

Walking along Fall Creek later, watching it turn west where the kame insists upon geometry, one begins to sense the land’s authorship. This is not random scenery. It is edited terrain. Each ridge, each bend, each saturated hollow is a sentence left behind by ice that once covered everything and then, mercifully, withdrew.

The esker itself is a time-ladder, inviting slow ascent. Step by step, gravel shifts underfoot—rounded stones, carried far from their origins, now loyal to this place. Each stone is a traveler without a passport, naturalized by pressure and pause. Together they hold their line, resisting erosion not by hardness alone, but by collective agreement.

From above, the ridge reveals its length, its deliberate curve. It does not hurry. It does not apologize. It simply is, a memory ridge, reminding the present that absence can be as powerful as presence. The glacier is gone, yet its handwriting remains legible.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

In the nearby swamp, water pools in dark reflection. Frogs tune their throats. Sedges write vertical poetry. This is the after-ice sanctuary, where meltwater’s descendants linger and life reclaims the margins. The esker drains; the swamp receives. Between them flows a balance older than names.

To walk here is to practice a different kind of attention. The land does not reward speed. It rewards listening. The ridge asks you to follow its curve, to feel how it shapes movement, how it choreographs water, wildlife, and wandering humans alike. It is a path-without-intention, yet it guides all who encounter it.

Long after the tent is folded, after the creek continues its bent course, after the placards fade and are replaced, the esker will remain. It will continue directing water, lifting footsteps, and teaching geometry to anyone willing to notice.

Eskers and kames are the glacier’s farewell letter, written in gravel, signed by time, and left open for reading.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Atkinson Hall and the Quiet Confidence of Good Design

A new Cornell building settles into its hillside, glass and weathered metal catching sky and trees—less a declaration than an invitation to pause, wander, and think together.

January 13, 2026January 12, 2026 MichaelStephenWills10 Comments

Learning the Shape of a New Building

I first noticed the building from above.

Not in person—on my screen, late at night, when I should have been revising a draft and instead opened Google Earth the way some people open a window. There it was, just off Tower Road, close to Stocking Hall, pale and newly settled into the slope. From that height it looked careful rather than confident, as if it had arrived recently and was still deciding how much of itself to show.

Atkinson Hall, Google Earth from August 2023, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

I remember thinking: good placement on a former triangular parking lot. Enough distance from the older buildings to breathe, close enough to feel included. The hill does most of the work. You can see that even from an overhead height.

The next morning I walked there.

Atkinson Hall as viewed from the open field south of the Nevin Welcome Center of Cornell Botanic Gardens

Across the open field the building didn’t announce itself. Trees intervened—pines, bare hardwoods—so that it came into view in pieces: a curve of metal, a long line of glass, brick holding the ground. It felt less like approaching a destination than like gradually realizing you were already there. I liked that. Buildings that reveal themselves all at once tend to exhaust me.

The slope matters. You feel it in your legs as you walk, and the building seems to acknowledge it, stretching rather than standing tall. It does not pretend the land is flat. It follows the descent toward the creek, toward the older geological story underneath all of us.

Up close, the materials settle my attention.

North Side of Atkinson Hall, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

Brick at the base—solid, Cornell-familiar, not trying to reinvent anything. Above it, bands of weathered metal curve gently, already carrying the muted browns of fallen leaves, old stone, and stream-worn shale—colors long familiar to the slopes and ravines that shape this campus. They look as though they have agreed to age, which feels like an underrated design choice. The glass holds the sky without insisting on transparency. Some days it reflects trees so clearly that the building nearly disappears into them.

Compare the facade brickwork of Warren Hall, one of the earliest buildings on the Cornell University campus, completed 1868. This is the southwest corner with facade signage, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

I stop near the windows longer than I intend to. The view steadies me. The hillside, the trees, the quiet persistence of winter light. My notebook stays closed for a few minutes. No one seems to mind.

View near Atkinson, Nevin Welcome Center, Cornell Botanical Gardens, 124 Comstock Knoll Dr, Ithaca, NY 14850

Inside, the building does not behave like a department.

That is the first thing I notice once I begin using it regularly. No single discipline claims the space. Offices and meeting rooms feel provisional, lightly held. Conversations drift. Someone from engineering crosses paths with someone from policy. A food systems researcher borrows a chair from a planner. No one looks lost.

It helps to remember who gathers here. The building hosts people from many parts of the university, each arriving with partial expertise, incomplete questions.

Cornell College / Unit	Areas of Engagement
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS)	Food systems, agroecology, climate resilience
College of Engineering	Energy systems, materials, infrastructure
College of Arts and Sciences	Earth systems, ecology, human dimensions
SC Johnson College of Business	Sustainable enterprise, supply chains
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP)	Urban resilience, adaptive design
Cornell Law School	Environmental law and governance
Public & Global Affairs	Climate policy, diplomacy

I keep this list taped inside my notebook. It reminds me that no one here is meant to arrive fully formed. The building expects us to be unfinished.

Cobblestones with fallen oak leaves along Feeny Way, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

There is a quiet confidence in how the place is run. Systems hum discreetly. Heat holds steady even when the weather rips. Somewhere nearby, unseen, a generator waits, a reassurance. Work continues. Conversations do not end mid-sentence. I think about this more than I expected to. Stability has become a form of generosity.

On certain afternoons I walk the exterior again before heading home.

The curves soften what could have been institutional. Corners ease into one another. Nothing feels sharp. The building does not posture or instruct. It listens. It seems content to let weather, foot traffic, and time finish the job.

I have overheard visitors describe it as “restrained.” I think that is right. It does not wear sustainability as an emblem. It does not ask to be admired. It offers something quieter: space to think without being hurried, to talk without being territorial.

From some angles it nearly disappears into the hillside. From others it asserts itself just enough to be useful. That balance feels intentional, and also rare.

When I sit near the glass and look out, I sometimes imagine the building learning us in return—our habits, our pauses, the way we linger in doorways when a conversation matters. It seems designed for that kind of noticing.

If I were forced to describe it the way a realtor might, I would say it is well built in all the ways that matter. The structure is sound. The site is excellent. The materials will age well. But what I would mean is something less technical.

It is a building willing to wait.

Seen from above, it is still new.
Seen from the field, it is already settled.
Seen from inside, it feels patient.

That patience makes room—for uncertainty, for collaboration, for the long work that does not resolve quickly. I think that is why I keep returning, even on days when I do not strictly need to be there.

The building does not ask what I am producing.
It asks only that I stay awhile.

And for now, that is enough.

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Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Glacial Kettle Bog Wonders: Photographing Pitcher Plants at the O.D. Engeln Preserve in Freeville

Step onto Freeville’s O.D. Engeln Preserve boardwalk and meet purple pitcher plants in a glacial kettle bog—carnivorous beauty, hidden blooms, and macro-photo magic.

December 30, 2025December 19, 2025 MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Seen from 1000 feet above in Google Earth, the O.D. (Von) Engeln Preserve at Malloryville Road lays itself out in two glacial “kettles,” pond and bog; a simple diagram drawn by ice and time, then complicated by everything that has happened since. In my photograph, taken from the bog observation platform on a July morning, the sky is rinsed blue, clouds billow, conifers stitch along the rim around open space. Step closer, or lower your lens, and the openness resolves into a crowded, intimate architecture of sedges and moss, twigs and standing water, sunlight and shadow.

I came here for a plant that does not announce itself the way wildflowers often do. The purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, is a quiet scandal: a green vessel in a place where green should be satisfied simply to survive. I arrived equipped for attentiveness—an iPhone for the broad scene, and a Canon DSLR with the F2.8 100 mm macro lens for the stars of this bog. The macro lens is an instrument of humility. It forces you to admit that the important drama is often no bigger than your palm.

In earlier years, the pitchers could be found right where a visitor naturally looks—within the central cut-out of the observation deck, close enough to lean over and study. But the bog is not a museum display; it is a living negotiation. This season, highbush blueberries pressing in from the margin had crowded the pitchers out, pushing the flowering plants into the grasses eight to ten feet away. The shift is small in human terms, the kind of distance you cross without thinking. In bog terms, it is displacement—an erasure of a familiar scene, a reminder that rarity is not only about numbers but also about space.

The pitchers themselves—those “turtle socks,” as they’ve been nicknamed—sit at ground level in a rosette, their mouths open to weather. Sunlight floods the cups and turns them into something both domestic and uncanny: a set of green, veined slippers left out to air, or a cluster of small amphorae awaiting an offering. In the bog’s thin soil, nourishment is hard-won. The pitcher plant answers that poverty with invention. Instead of arguing with the chemistry of peat, it borrows from the animal world—luring and taking what the air can spare. The cup is a trap, yes, but also a reservoir: rainwater gathered and held, a miniature wetland that mirrors the preserve’s larger one.

There is a tension here that never quite resolves: the plant’s beauty, and the plant’s appetite. We admire the cup’s red veining, the glossy rim, the way the opening flares like a lip; then we remember what the lip is for. We admire the flower’s elegant sheltering forms; then we realize the shelter is also a funnel, a choreography. This is not cruelty—no more than winter is cruelty. It is adaptation made visible, a lesson in how form follows need, and how need can produce something unexpectedly lovely.

And yet the real marvel—the reason I came that day—rises above the traps on a strong stalk, lifted clear of the dangerous mouths below. The flower is not purple in the obvious way its common name promises. It is subtler and stranger: a suspended structure with the poise of a lantern and the protective logic of armor. It struck me as a flower unlike any I have experienced, resembling an insect carapace, with the reproductive element underneath a hood. That hooded design feels less like ornament than strategy—an architecture that guides a pollinator’s route, controlling entrances and exits the way the pitcher controls the fall of an insect.

Even the flower’s back side refuses to perform for the camera. From the posterior angle, “there are only bracts”—plain supporting structures, the botanical equivalent of scaffolding left in place once the facade is finished. The bog, too, shows its scaffolding everywhere: dead stems, old wood, peat-dark water, last year’s leaves. A preserve is never only what is blooming. It is what persists.

I found myself thinking about the details I wanted but could not quite capture that day: the downward facing hairs inside the pitcher—those one-way bristles that make retreat difficult once a victim has slipped in. I or my lens was not up to this challange. The shortcoming was minor, but instructive. The bog offers glimpses, not guarantees. It invites return visits, different light, different seasons, a different kind of patience.

Standing on the platform I felt the preserve’s central truth: these are landscapes shaped by constraint—by ice, by water, by nutrient scarcity, by the slow encroachment of shrubs—and yet they keep producing improbable forms. The purple pitcher plant is one of those forms: a green cup that drinks rain, a flower that wears a hood, a turtle sock that turns hunger into design. In a place where the ground itself seems to refuse abundance, the plant answers with a different kind of richness—an elegance that is also a solution.

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Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Bells for Christmas

The symbolic power of the numeral three, reflected in various cultural, religious, and secular contexts, underscores its universal significance. From the mystical trinities of gods to the practical applications in rhetoric and storytelling, and the fundamental structure of our physical world, the number three resonates with a sense of completeness, balance, and harmony. Its pervasive presence in different aspects of human thought and culture attests to its enduring and profound symbolism.

December 23, 2025December 21, 2025 MichaelStephenWills40 Comments

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Exploring Malloryville Preserve: A Hidden Glacial Wetland Gem in New York’s Finger Lakes

Explore the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, a hidden Finger Lakes wetland where glacial eskers, kettles, and springs reveal the deep story of ice and water.

December 9, 2025December 4, 2025 MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

In the heart of upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region stretches out like a handprint left by the last great ice sheets—long, narrow lakes aligned north to south, their steep-sided valleys feeding into a lattice of creeks, waterfalls, and wetlands. It is a landscape defined by water and time: glaciers grinding south, then melting back north some 12,000 years ago, carving deep troughs, piling up ridges of gravel and sand, and leaving behind a terrain that is anything but simple.

The O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, near the small village of Freeville, is one of the quiet places where that story is written most clearly on the land. It doesn’t shout like Taughannock Falls or Ithaca’s famous gorges. Instead, it whispers—through the curves of its hills, the softness of its ground, the unexpected appearance of a spring at the base of a gravel ridge. Here, in a relatively compact area, you can see how ice and water worked together to shape the Finger Lakes region we know today.

By the time the preserve officially opened in 1997, the name O.D. von Engeln was already familiar to anyone curious about local geology. His classic book on the Finger Lakes helped generations of readers understand that the scenery around them was not random, but the result of powerful, understandable processes. Reading von Engeln, the rolling hills and quiet valleys near Freeville become more than background—they become evidence: of buried ice, rushing meltwater, and the slow settling of sediments into the forms we walk on now.

Malloryville is an outdoor classroom for that lesson. The preserve is built around a cluster of glacial landforms—eskers, kames, and kettles—that create a three-dimensional mosaic of ridges and hollows. Eskers, those long, winding gravel ridges left by rivers that once flowed inside the glacier, snake through the forest like frozen currents of stone. Kames—steep, irregular hills of sand and gravel—rise suddenly from the surrounding lowlands. Kettles, the depressions left behind when buried ice blocks melted away, now cradle wetlands and pools.

Beneath and between these features, groundwater is constantly on the move. It seeps through layers of sand and gravel, emerges as cold springs at the foot of slopes, and spreads out into swamps, fens, and marshes. In the Finger Lakes, water is always telling a story; at Malloryville, it’s simply easier to hear. Follow the trail and you move through a succession of wet worlds: a seep-fed fen with delicate mosses and sedges, a shrub swamp where skunk cabbage thrusts up in early spring, a cattail marsh that hums with birds and insects in summer.

For my family, the story of Malloryville began even before the preserve had a name. We lived nearby along Fall Creek, itself a thread in the larger fabric of the Cayuga Lake watershed. My son and I camped for the first time on top of an esker just beyond our front door, our tent perched on what I would later learn was the remnant of a stream that once tunneled through the base of a glacier. At the time, it was simply a magical narrow ridge in the woods. Only later, with von Engeln’s guidance and the preserve’s interpretive signs, did that ridge become a sentence in a much older, longer narrative.

That is one of the great gifts of the Finger Lakes: the chance to move from simple admiration—“this is beautiful”—to understanding—“this is how it came to be.” The steep slopes along Cayuga, Seneca, or Skaneateles; the drumlin fields near the north ends of the lakes; the hanging valleys and waterfalls; and the quiet wetlands of places like Malloryville are all chapters in the same glacial chronicle. Once you learn to read one place, you begin to read them all.

Walking into the O.D. von Engeln Preserve, you enter that story at a small, intimate scale. The parking area and trailhead give way quickly to a world where the ground feels different—sometimes firm and gravelly, sometimes soft and yielding underfoot. Wooden walkways and narrow paths thread through shady forest and open wetland. Each bend offers a subtle shift: a new plant community, a change in water clarity or flow, a small sign explaining what lies beneath your feet.

This is not grand scenery in the postcard sense; it is something quieter and deeper. Malloryville invites you to slow down and notice. To ask why a particular ridge is so narrow, why water emerges here but not there, why one hollow is filled with shrubs and another with moss and sedge. In learning those answers, you gain not only an appreciation for this modest preserve but also a richer understanding of the entire Finger Lakes region.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is named for the mottled brown leaves resembling marking on trout.

In the end, the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville is a lens—a way of seeing. Through it, the familiar landscapes of central New York—valleys, hills, streams, and lakes—come into sharper focus as the lasting work of ice and water. Stand on an esker, look across a kettle wetland, listen to the quiet trickle of a spring, and you are standing inside the very processes that shaped the Finger Lakes.

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Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Monkey Run: History, Geology, and Scenic Fall Creek

A contemplative walk along Monkey Run where Fall Creek writes the valley’s history—sycamores, bridges, and Devonian stone speaking across seasons in Cornell’s living classroom.

October 14, 2025October 12, 2025 MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

On a morning in late March, when the hills about Ithaca still hold the night’s frost in their shaded folds, I took the path called Monkey Run and went to see how Fall Creek spends its winter earnings. The air had the bright sting of thaw, a kind of vernal austerity that keeps a man honest in his steps. Along the high bank the sun spilled its coin onto the water, where it broke and flickered like a school of silver minnows. A rim of snow clung to the shale ledges, and the leaves of last year’s oaks—curled, fox-red, and faithful—whispered as if to keep the woods awake until spring fully claimed them.

Sunlit bend of Fall Creek viewed from a high bank at Monkey Run in early spring.

Monkey Run is one of the outlying parcels tended by Cornell Botanic Gardens—once called the Plantations, and now, more fittingly, named for the living charge it keeps. These gardens do not end at beds and borders; they encompass the wilder rooms of the county, more than a thousand hectares of glens, pastures, and ravines where the university’s first and oldest teacher—nature herself—still holds class. Fall Creek is one of her principal lecturers. Rising beyond the high country of Cayuga Heights and slipping under stone and snow, it shoulders its way across the campus, idles a while in Beebe Lake, and turns turbines of memory at Triphammer Falls before shouldering on toward the lake that receives nearly everything here—Cayuga—long, deep, and glacial in its thinking.

Tall white-barked sycamores leafless against a blue March sky at Monkey Run.

If you would learn a valley’s mind, walk a meander. The creek here composes with easy cursive, laying down a bar of gravel, nibbling at a bank of clay, then sweeping back to consider its work from the opposite shore. The geologist says the rock is Devonian, pages laid flat and damp with time, and the ice of ten thousand winters ago scoured them into the open. A creek is a patient mason, working without rest and never in anger. I admired these sycamores—their clean bones shining through the leafless canopy like the ribs of an old cathedral. Winter reveals their whiteness; summer grants them shade. A stand of white pines keeps a dark counsel in the background; on the muddy edge, green tongues of skunk cabbage push up, pledges made by the swamp to keep faith with the sun.

Rust-stained steel pier above calm water on Fall Creek along Monkey Run trail

I came down to the water near an old steel pier, a bridge remnant, hanging on each end without purpose. It wears graffiti the way a boulder wears lichen; human wishes, briefly rooted, coloring what they can. The river accepts it all, the pilings and the scribbles, the cast limb and the bottle’s glint, and continues its one unarguable gesture downstream. That is the old instruction of Fall Creek: use, refuse, endure. Before the university drew students from every quarter, the creek turned wheels and powered the small ambitions of a frontier town. Even the name Triphammer speaks of iron struck to purpose. Now the water powers something quieter: the studies of herons, the almanacs of kingfishers, the quick arithmetic of minnows over limestone.

Looking back while climbing the steep bluff

Steps cut from logs ascend the bluff, each tread pegged with iron, each rise a short confession of breath. I climbed to the ridge, paused halfway, and through the gray lace of March branches saw the creek shining at a bend far below. A man cannot help but measure his own life against such a course. The path goes up and down in obedient red blazes, but the water keeps its own counsel. Where the bank slumps the river shoulders through; where the bottom rises it lays down a mirror. In my youth I wanted the straight run, the short work. Now the curve pleases me. To go with the current and not be carried away—that is a lesson suitable to the grey in my beard.

Clear, shallow run of Fall Creek with shale bottom and pine stand in distance

When I returned five months later, on August 23, the same path had forgotten the word austerity. The cathedral of sycamore was fully leafed, the white pillars now vanished behind a nave of shade. The pines perfumed the air without trying. A new footbridge—clean timber arching like a bent bow—spanned one of the wet flats. Its braces, black-bolted and handsome, looked as if they would hold the weight of an ox team or a file of schoolchildren. Such crossings are a kind of promise from the present to the future: we found a way through here; may you, too. Below, the floor was upholstered with moss, oak leaves, and a scatter of pinecones—the slow currency of the woods accumulating interest.

Arched wooden footbridge in summer forest on Cornell’s Monkey Run trail.

Summer makes a confidant of every plant. Ferns unrolled their scripture at the bridge abutment; jewelweed held its tiny lanterns along the seeps; a kingfisher rattled downstream, blue lightning with a bill. The creek, glassy over its shale pavement, showed every wrinkle of its stride. I waded a little, feeling with the sole what the eye could not—where the current took an extra thought around a stone, where it forgot itself in a warm eddy. Trout lingered in the dimmer reaches, quick as commas; a great blue heron lifted off with that surprising tidiness of wing, ungainly only in our imagination.

In all seasons the trail carries two histories: one written in rock and water, the other in the footfall of people. Cornell’s founders, Ezra and Andrew White, believed the university should place the hand near the thing studied; here that principle is plain. Botany students take their lectures in leaf and bark; geologists read the creek banks as if the pages might soon turn by themselves; children learn the oldest calculus—how long a stick will float before it catches in the weeds. The caretakers from the Botanic Gardens mark, mend, and interpret, but they do not overtalk. The woods speak enough.

Moss, grass and pinecones on an overlook of Fall Creek

As the afternoon eased toward evening, I climbed once more to the bluff. The light had gone honey-colored and the leaves of the maples, those careful accountants of September, were just beginning to weigh their green against gold. I looked down on the bend where I’d stood in March—cold, bright, expectant—and felt the year’s circle gently close. As John Burroughs wrote, “The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts… to be able to detach yourself and see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own… prepossessions… that is to be an observer and to read the book of nature aright.” Monkey Run obliges that humility. The creek moves as it always has—glacially taught, mill-forged, campus-wise, and freedom-loving—and the trail, with its modest stairs and honest bridges, invites us to walk beside it, to match our breath to its turnings, and to leave, if we can, a lighter trace than we found.

References

Ways of Nature (1905), “Reading the Book of Nature,” pp. 275–276 (The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverside ed., vol. XIV, Houghton Mifflin)

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Glacial Echoes: Dryden Lake Park’s Mirror-Calm Morning in Upstate New York

Morning clouds hang over Dryden Lake as hills kindle first color; reflections hold breath while a lone walker reads the valley’s glacial and human-written past.

October 7, 2025October 7, 2025 MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

He came to the water before the people woke, the road a still ribbon of cold tar snaking beneath the low hills. Mattocks of cloud hung over the valley and the lake took in the sky like a mirror dropped yet not broken. The trees were beginning to color. A patient fire working from within the leaves. He parked where the grass ran down to the shore and stood a long while without moving. Birds made small sounds in the reeds. Somewhere a single truck labored up the grade and was gone. The surface held the hills with a steadiness the hills themselves could not keep. He thought how the quiet of a place can be the loudest thing it owns.

He went along the margin along the damp sedges where old drift lay silvered and light as bones. A drowned trunk angled from the shallows. The lake was old in the way of things made by ice and time. A kettle in the outwash of the last glacier, some men said, a bowl left when the buried ice eased away. He pictured the ice receding into the valley heads, the meltwaters choked with gravel, a hand larger than memory scribing the floor of this country. The earth never told it plain but the lay of it was witness enough. Across later centuries men cribbed a dam across the outlet and drew the water to a shape that pleased them and served their work.

A trail ran the length of the water on the old rail bed. The ties were long gone and the iron and cinders buried under years of leaf fall and gravel. He had walked it as a boy beside his father and now he walked it alone. Benches stood at half-mile intervals like waystations in a country of small pilgrimages. The signs told what once was here and what remains. They had renamed the path for a townman who argued it into being after the railroad had passed from the world and the right-of-way grew up with sumac and rumor. It was an easy trail and he carried nothing. His hands hung at his sides as if the day might place something in them when it was ready.

In another era the lake was a workshop. Men whipsawed timber in the wet air and fed small mills with the grove’s dark boards. Winter flowed over the flats, and they built icehouses and set the blocks within like blue stone, an industry that died when cold could be called from a switch. The hills have learned to forget the noise of it, though on certain mornings the fog takes a shape and you could believe rising from the ponded sawdust and the lading of sleds. He thought of the labor of those gone hands and of how work is a scripture every place keeps in its own tongue.

Before any of that, the ground here was a summer camp. People came with the season and went with it, laying their fires in the lee of the knoll and taking fish where the cattails thin. He could feel them in the open places, not as ghosts but as the first understanding the land ever had of itself. The words used for them now are museum words, yet the wind still crosses the water as it did and empties the same smell of iron and leaf into the lungs of whoever stands to breathe.

The town took its name from a poet long dead, a scholar’s choosing in the years after the war for independence when this tract of country was parceled out to soldiers of that same war. Virgil lay to the east as if they were shelving Latin across a map. The creek that bears that name threads the villages and finds Fall Creek at Freeville, and the combined waters go their own slow way toward Cayuga where the glacial hand scooped deeper yet. He said these names under his breath and they tasted of chalk and river stone.

A kingfisher rattled across the cove. The fish rose in rings that spread and vanished like time seen from above. Out on the water an old man pushed a skiff with an electric motor that hummed like a trapped bee, for the lake allows no gas engines now. The wildlife area ran around the shore in a ragged collar of field and wetland and alder, near two hundred acres under the state’s keeping, and the lake itself a little over a hundred. He watched the man aim for the lily line and thought how rules arise from the wish that a thing endure, though nothing does. Still we make the rules and we keep them as if the earth were listening.

Wind came down the slope with a smell of rain. He turned back and the hills lay again in the water, entire, and for a moment he could not tell which world had claim to the other. He thought of the rails pulled up and the mills gone to weeds and of the icehouses fallen into their own shadows and he thought of the people before all that and of the long winter pressing its thumb into the land and lifting it away. He thought of his father walking the rail bed beside him a lifetime ago and saying nothing. There are places where the past crowds close and will not be argued with. He stood until the first drops dimpled the surface and the reflection shattered and reformed. A train no longer runs here. The only sound was the soft percussion of rain on water and the slow turning of the earth beneath both. He put his hand to the damp trunk of a fallen tree and felt the grain and the coolness and the old patient labor of rot. Then he went up from the reeds, his pockets full of acorns, and out to the road where his truck waited and the day, austere and sufficient, came along with him.