Singing Sands

Singing Sands

Singing sands speak of people

And in a high pitched key

Lake sands sing secrets—

Sing me to sleep.

Waves sort myriads of quartz grains

That sing of glaciers that crunched hard

Stone and sing of cities buried

Under the dunes.

I dream of First Nations

And flint spear points

10,000 years old buried under

 The singing sands.

                                 Barbara Spring

Books by Barbara Spring and Amazon page

My Amazon page linked to Twitter 

 click link above for my updated Amazon Author page

Sophia's Lost and Found  click the link for information about books by Barbara Spring

Three books of poems and one non-fiction: The Dynamic Great Lakes

                                                                                                                                                                            

 above: The Wilderness Within: poetry                                    

Great Lakes Systems

Everything is Connected

Click the link above for a two hour program on Youtube about our ecosystems in the Great Lakes.

Warbler Migrations around the Great Lakes

This is a good time of the year to look for warblers.  It's easy to see them since the trees in Michigan have not unfurled their leaves.

I love to hear the silvery songs of warblers in the air.  It's a sure sign of spring.

Once when I was on a small fishing boat on Lake Michigan, several migrating warblers landed on our boat. Fog caused them to lose their bearings and so they were grateful for the hospitality of our boat.  They rested there until the sun came out again and then they were off.

The Great Lakes are on the migration routes of birds.  Bird watching is a favorite thing to do on and around the Great Lakes.










Water color by Barbara Spring

The Great Lakes Rock

The Great Lakes Rock

From the round surf-polished rocks of Lake Superior’s shore to the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, I have roamed and picked up stones: agates, pudding stones and some bearing copper or fossils.  And I hiked the alvars on the Door Peninsula and Ontario’s Bruce with their layered limestone shores bearing fossils of ancient salt seas.   Lake Huron’s green waters pour into Lake St. Clair and its silty marshes and then to Lake Erie teeming with birds and fish. The waters pick up speed in the Niagara River to take a tremendous plunge over Niagara Falls.  The rock underlying the falls will wear away in time I am told, but not in my life time.  Lake Ontario’s flat shores have good soil for vineyards and farm lands.  Sailors and sports fishers enjoy Lake Ontario’s riches and the lake flows out through the St. Lawrence River with a myriad rocky islands. 

The Dynamic Great Lakes a non-fiction primer about the five Great Lakes and their connecting waters

The Dynamic Great Lakes has been critically acclaimed.  It is a green book that encourages people to learn about the Great Lakes and then to do what they can through the democratic process.  It encourages us to think globally and act locally.

Reviews of the Dynamic Great Lakes by Barbara Spring

Great Lakes Hold Surprising Information   

Peter Wild    (5/6/2002)        U. S. Water News Co -Published by The Freshwater Society

Are dinosaurs cruising the benthic depths of the Great Lakes even while we go about our daily tasks? Not exactly. Yet sturgeon, fish weighing up to 300 pounds and similarly plated with armor,are nosing around down there. Occasionally you can see the monsters appear, making their spawning runs up rivers and surfacing like submarines in the pools beneath waterfalls... The five Great Lakes, holding nearly twenty percent of the earth's fresh water, are quite young. Gouged out by glaciers, they assumed their present shapes a mere 3,000 years ago. For that, they are a dynamic shifting system, still changing and exhibiting surprising differences. Lake Ontario, for example, the easternmost, although smallest of the bodies, holds more water than Lake Erie, its shallower nearby sister. Here's a handy primer for all such things, from the interaction of phytoplankton and calcium carbonate that gives a white cast to these inland oceans come August and helps clean the water to the charming ice volcanoes spouting chilly "lava" in the winter. This is intriguing stuff for adults, but the straightforward presentation also lends itself to use in schools, beginning about the sixth grade and up. And yes, we get the latest news on the zebra mussel, the tube nose goby, and other threats to the natural scheme of things. Also good news; how since the banning of DDT in the 1970's, the bald eagles have come back.

The Dynamic Great Lakes   

BOB GROSS , Of The Oakland Press USA  (3/19/2003)        This is an impressive little book. Not quite 110 pages long, it's a read of about an hour or so. The author has, however, managed to jam it full of facts and information about the Great Lakes. It's the kind of book that you might keep on a desk, ready at hand when you need to know something like the native fish population of Lake Superior. OK, so maybe not everyone has that need. The point is that you'll probably learn something about the lakes that you didn't know before. I, for example, had never heard of the whiting effect whereby the lakes regulate the balance between acid and alkaline and also cleanse themselves of pollutants, including metals - and that's coming from someone who has lived along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior. The author also sprinkles a strong environmental ethic throughout the book, coupled with a belief that the democratic process can make a difference.

Very Informative   

Lisa Y NJ  (1/30/2003)        The Dynamic Great Lakes was full of information I never knew about our Great Lakes. The lake chapters contain basic facts about each individual lake, yet the author never lets you forget they are a system. What happens to one, happens to the others and the entire ecological niche.