What the Scarlet Tanager Knows About Showing Up on Time
I heard my first scarlet tanager of the season yesterday morning, and it stopped me mid-step on the trail. That flash of red against the new oak leaves is so bright it almost looks wrong, like someone dropped a tropical bird into the Missouri woods by accident.
But here’s the thing about scarlet tanagers: they’re exactly on schedule. They arrive in our oak-hickory forests during the second week of May, almost to the day, after flying from South America across the Gulf of Mexico in a single overnight push. Some of them travel 5,000 miles to nest in trees like the ones on this preserve. And they’ve been doing it for longer than any of us have been paying attention.
That kind of faithfulness to a place gets me thinking about the people who mapped this land before there were roads or surveys to follow.
Navigation and the Osage River
On this day in 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped near the mouth of the Osage River, not far from what’s now the Lake of the Ozarks area. With them was George Drouillard, a scout who grew up in the Ozark borderlands and knew how to read rivers the way most of us read street signs. The expedition traded with the Osage Nation that day, gathering information about western waterways and the karst springs that fed them. Those springs weren’t just landmarks. They were navigation tools, drinkable water, and signs of the limestone country that defines everything about how this region works.
Understanding Karst Topography
The Ozarks sit on more than 7,000 known caves, carved over millennia by water dissolving limestone. Every spring that bubbles up, every sinkhole that appears in a pasture after a hard rain, every creek that disappears underground for a quarter mile and resurfaces downstream — that’s karst topography doing what it does.
If you want to show your kids how it works, here’s something we’ve done with groups at the preserve. Collect a few limestone samples from a creek bed or gravel road. Put them in a jar with plain white vinegar and watch what happens over the next few hours. You’ll see tiny bubbles forming where the acid is dissolving the calcium carbonate. Measure the pH before and after. Talk about what happens when rainwater, which is slightly acidic, seeps into rock over thousands of years. You’re not just doing a science experiment. You’re watching the same process that carved the caves under your feet.
The Wisdom of Knowing
The scarlet tanager doesn’t need to understand the geology to know this is the right place to raise its young. It just knows. The oaks are leafing out. The caterpillars are hatching. The timing is right.
I think about that kind of knowing a lot — the way the land teaches you things if you pay attention long enough. Not from a book, though books help. From showing up, season after season, and noticing what comes back and when.
An Invitation to Listen
This weekend, the whip-poor-wills will start calling at dusk. If you’ve never heard one, it sounds like the bird is saying its own name over and over, sometimes hundreds of times without stopping. Find a quiet spot outside after sunset and just listen. You might hear something that’s been part of Missouri springs for longer than anyone can remember.
That’s the invitation. Not to learn about the land from a distance, but to stand on it and let it teach you directly.