Orlan Love: Water over rock, the sweetest sound

Nature makes the sweetest sounds I have heard, and birds account for most of them.

Some bird sounds are pleasing in their own right, apart from any context, like the first bird song I ever correlated with its author.

As I was riding with my dad in a long ago summer, rolling quietly around a rural corner, the purest notes I'd ever heard floated through the open truck windows.

In response to my query, Dad could have just pointed to the corner fence post, on which perched the yellow-breasted flutist, but he replied, in an uncharacteristically long speech (and I quote): meadowlark.

Since that moment, the meadowlark has been my favorite bird, even though one of the most common birds of my youth has for the most part left Eastern Iowa for greener pastures.

Unlike the song of the lark, the appeal of some bird sounds is inseparable from their milieu: the cheery “threet threet” of the spring's first red-winged blackbird, swinging from a cattail as he proclaims his availability as a mate; the cack-cack-cack of a rooster pheasant erupting from giant foxtail on a golden autumn morning; the spine-tingling thrum of a drumming turkey gobbler in a spring green woods; the whoosh and whistle of teal wheeling over a backwater pond; the bewildered honk of a lone Canada goose calling for company on a foggy morning; the rattling, “r”-rolling karrrooo of thousands of sandhill cranes lifting off a Platte River sandbar at first light; the eerie tremolo of the loon hailing the end of a Boundary Waters day.

Though they make me kind of edgy, I even enjoy the raspy scolding of crows, whose raucous protests make me feel like an interloper; the guttural squawk of the great blue heron, whose retching summons images of indigestible fish parts; and the jeering of milling gulls, whose clamorous screams seem to demand every last indigestible fish part in the world.

Water accounts for many other favorite nature sounds, which include the patter of gentle rain on a tent roof or leaf canopy and the explosive splash of a largemouth bass bursting through lily pads to engulf a plastic frog.

Though it would be hard to pick an absolute favorite nature sound, I would, if forced to do so, settle on the soothing, musical coursing of water over stone.

Whenever I get near Decorah, I take time to visit to Dunning Springs, just to hear the murmur of the rivulets tumbling down the spring's limestone bed.

And in my travels around Eastern Iowa rivers and creeks I occasionally encounter a miniature waterfall, where water drops vertically over a bedrock outcropping into a plunge pool , and I know that others before me have visited these enchanted spots and hated to leave them as much as I do.