. The Audubon annual bulletin. Birds; Birds. ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 13. -» NEAR BYRON, ILLINOIS A Boyhood on Rock River The readers of the Audubon Bulletin would, perhaps, be interested in a boy's reaction to a Rock River environment. To get the setting, imagine a great shallow bowl about two miles across, not much over a hundred feet deep, very gently sloping sides and a level bottom about a mile wide. On this level bottom lies a sleepy little village, on a terrace well above even the flood waters of the stream which has been trenching the valley ever since the time of an earlier glacier. T
. The Audubon annual bulletin. Birds; Birds. ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 13. -» NEAR BYRON, ILLINOIS A Boyhood on Rock River The readers of the Audubon Bulletin would, perhaps, be interested in a boy's reaction to a Rock River environment. To get the setting, imagine a great shallow bowl about two miles across, not much over a hundred feet deep, very gently sloping sides and a level bottom about a mile wide. On this level bottom lies a sleepy little village, on a terrace well above even the flood waters of the stream which has been trenching the valley ever since the time of an earlier glacier. To the boy mind the rim of the bowl was the boundary between the seen and known, and the great world beyond. The second-growth forest which topped the rim, its irregularity softened by distance, gave a somewhat wavy but nearly even sky line. To the east the rim was sharply notched where the trees had been felled to make way for the steel rails tying the little community to the metropolis more than eighty miles away. Day after day the boy looked from the doorstep at this gateway notch, its vertical sides as high as the forest trees, and watched for the swift emerging of the smoking iron horse with its train of coaches bringing strangers and messages from the cities and people beyond the rim. To the north and to the south were other notches where wagon roads had long ago been cut thru the timber, notches whose sides were softened in outline by the healing growth of shrubs and saplings. Thru these came the wagons of friendly folk with their burdens of farm produce. The bowl sagged to the west and opened in a deep notch cut, not thru the trees by the hand of man, but deep in the hills by the gnawing tooth of the river. From points of vantage you could get glimpses of the shining water as it turned around a rocky point and was lost behind a bluff it had made. The boy never dreamed that hundreds of thousands of years ago, before the time of the glaciers, this wide valley had been mad
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookcollectionbiodiversity, booksubjectbirds
