Syndicated Wildly Personable Premiere: Oak Savanna’s Comma Marks the Shift to Willow Pond
By Lisa Loucks-Christenson | March 25, 2026, 11:47 PM CDT
For the record—and for the readers who will encounter this years from now in the archives—this is how the transition felt.
On the afternoon of March 25, 2026, in the Laurie (Loucks) Burt Wildlife Sanctuary, I watched an overwintered comma butterfly rise from a bed of oak leaves under nettles. It was the first butterfly I’d seen since winter locked the savanna down, and it arrived one week after I’d recorded a banded tussock moth during an earlier warm spell. Around us, the oak savanna was still more brown than green, but the air had changed; it carried the lightness of what comes next.
From that small, moving comma, the day unfolded toward water. At Pool Pond, the ice had retreated enough to show the aftermath. Two dragonfly nymphs, which I’d quietly rooted for through the cold months, lay dead—casualties of timing, perhaps of shrinking water depth, perhaps of something I’ll never fully know. I registered the loss and then did the one immediate thing within my control: I added water.
I poured it in slowly, watching the shoreline darken as the level rose by inches. Overhead, the willow tree—a central character in my upcoming book Oak Savanna Winds: Willow Pond—rustled in a mild breeze. In that moment I felt the clear handoff from Blue Lupine, which closes with winter and the spring equinox, to this new season of pond stories and winged emergences.
This column marks the premiere of Wildly Personable as a unified thread through my work: a show built from footage I’ve been filming since last fall, a column that will appear in local and online outlets, and book series volumes that hold the deeper, illustrated record. Today’s comma and the water poured for unseen nymphs are part of that record now.
If you’re reading this in real time, you can still step outside and feel the same wind. If you’re reading it years from now, know that on this date, in this oak savanna, spring announced itself with a tiny mark of punctuation and the sound of water refilling a tired pond.
Wildly Personable: Sanctuary Critters’ Daily Adventures, Archived
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