Leopold opens Part 2 with a description of a spring morning on the marsh, where cranes send out “a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness” (101). The marsh in which these cranes feed and breed is an ancient peat bog that has served as crane habitat since the last ice age, and the cranes’ return to the marsh every year is itself an ancient pattern, which has been interrupted by human beings, starting with the arrival of European explorers, and then with the settlers. These settlers turned the marsh into meadow, which, once drained, caught fire, leaving little habitat left for cranes. Even once the value of marshes was recognized and wetlands were re-established, the desire to build roads into the marsh ensured that wilderness continued to be encroached upon by people: “All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish” (108).

From here, Leopold goes on to another meditation on the meaning of time in the landscape, imaging an atom lodged in a rock that journeys out into the world through the root of a bur-oak, then a deer, then an Indigenous person, before cycling through various other species—a bluestem grass, a buffalo, an owl—before a fire clears the prairie and a new cycle begins.