A Few Observations for Today

Now that I'm back at this, I'll try to choose a few things each day to focus on when I'm in town.  The temptation to write about everything that's happening all at once is great, and choosing just 2 or 3 things is terribly difficult given how many things I'm not choosing...

One of the most noticeable things out on the trails today isn't one of the many flowers blooming, but these hawkweeds that are done doing so.  This photo doesn't convey what makes these seedheads so noticeable -- their size.  Each globe is about 3 inches in diameter, a perfect sphere of parachute seeds waiting for the wind.  The plants are 2 to 3 feet tall, so at this time of year, they hang above most of the surrounding foliage. 

The flowers are all but finished blooming... there were hundreds of seedheads and this was the only bloom I found still in the flowering phenophase:

Astute observers will notice the similarities in flower and seed structure to its cousin the dandelion.  These yellow hawkweeds are also not native, but they don't colonize lawns and gardens the way that dandelions do, and in my world they don't cause a problem -- though some would disagree.

Bindweed, on the other hand, most definitely causes issues.  These morning glory relatives are problematic weeds in the garden world... the flowers -- whether the smaller, white variety on the left or the larger pink variety on the right -- grow from these skinny, string-like vines.  They wind around and around plant stems, making themselves inextricable from the desirable plant.  Often, I end up sort of following the vine down tot he ground and pulling it out from the root, and just leaving the vines wrapped around the other plants to die there, as they presumably will with no connection to the earth.
 
Bindweed is just one example of where, sometimes, I hate knowing things.  I mean, in general I like knowing about the natural world and what's what, and I don't think I fall prey to the pitfall of mistaking naming it with knowing it.  (Many people, I find, once they learn the name of a species, check it off some sort of list as a plant or animal that they know, and they're done with it.  No more to learn, no more observations needed.  Of course, the name tells you very little about the species... doesn't tell you what eats it or what it eats, what niche it holds, how it reacts to wind, the patterns in its veins, or what light makes it look the lovliest, or any one of a million things you can learn about something beyond its human-given name... but I digress.)  My actual point was, there was a time in my life whan I could have looked at those flowers and just seen beauty.  I remember (long ago) a time when a buckthorn forest was an awesome place to hide or play or build forts or follow deer trails.  Now I tend to see the problems in every landscape, and I can't get past the negative impacts.  A lot of people just look out at the field and it's green and waving in the wind and there are colorful flowers and it's beautiful, and I just can't divorce myself from the knowledge I have to not see what's problematic.  Ah, well... I guess when I see a place with a balanced native community, I appreciate it all the more.

I can't end on a nasty note, so here's a lovely indigo, displaying the typical branching pattern of Baptisia alba (white false indigo), which stands out in the prairie.

We typically see three species of Baptisia in this area, and they are all early blooming (with the white being the last).  Cream wild indigo (B. bracteata) blooms first... it's probably finished now, though there was a ton of it in Rollins Savannah just a couple of weeks ago.  It's got a much different habit, arching toward the ground and therefore never getting tall.  The flowers are creamy in color (thus the common name) and larger than the other species and have the typical irregular shape of legume flowers.  (Being legumes, all three species are nitrogen-fixing, and therefore do great things for the soil in the prairie!)

The next to bloom is the blue false indigo (B. australis).  These are almost finished blooming (and some have started to form their seed pods, which are pretty cool) but I found some still in flower.  The blue indigos gow quite tall, where they're happy, form a big closter that looks like a small shrub. 

(See how I did that?  Got to write about three plants for the price of one!)
Until tomorrow, then...

Prime Prairie

I'll admit it... There are times of the year when the prairie isn't the most aesthetically interesting ecosystem. But she is coming into her own now, and from June through October, the prairie will display staggering biodiversity.  A slowly but constantly changing cast of colorful characters will appear in the endless sea of waving grass.

Here is a partial (because I won't remember them all) list of what I saw blooming in the prairie today:

Shooting stars (still holding on!), golden Alexander, spiderwort, cream false indigo, wild indigo, wild roses (pictured below), lupine (pictured below below), wild hyacinth (pictured way below), wild geraniums, Canada anemone, daisies, fleabane, mustards -- yellow, white and garlic (I didn't say all the flowers were desirable), cow parsnip, bladder campion, hawkweed, irises, a patch of something bright red and far off the trail in a wetter area, no idea what it was... That's all I'm remembering at the moment.  I'm sure there was more, but I probably got the best ones. Even so... That's a lot!

Up North

I spent the week in the north woods, where a first frost -- presumably weeks ahead of ours -- has already started turning the maples red and orange and yellow. On cloudy days, their brightness popped against the grey of rain, and on sunny days the blue of the sky contrasted starkly with the autumnal oranges... it really was beautiful. I wrote in my nature journal, during one of our reflection times, that I think I must have nature ADHD... this after a sentence about mergansers, then one about autumn colors, one about the sound of the lapping of the water on the shore, and one about the shape of the dead log, already harboring a small oasis of new life, jutting into the water. But upon looking at my photographs, I have determined that I am surprisingly mycology-minded.

And, if you think that this is overkill with the fungus photos, I would like to state, for the record, that a) I edited a lot out of these, and b) I would have taken a LOT more pictures of fungi if I hadn't had 58 lbs of canoe on my head for a lot of the time, which seriously diminishes the ease of... and desire to... take pictures.

We saw mushrooms in every color but blue and green. The first one here, though the photo doesn't capture it that well, was light purple!

I think the eyelash cups are so cute, don't you?

That last one was very crazy... about 4 inches in diameter, covered in dark purple-grey powder above and below, and curved up. Students noted that it looked like the empty paper of a Reese's peanut butter cup.

You made it this far? Here were a few non-fungal discoveries...

a brightly-colored leopard frog

This moth LOVED me, sat on my hand and probed my skin with its proboscis, and came back several times even after I got tired of not being able to write and brushed it off. It landed on my head for a while, where its wings buzzed by my ears like a tiny helicopter, and spent time on both of my hands. Eventually, it tired of me and decided that a yellow flower was more to its liking.

Such pretty colors in this hawkweed.

How can a Rock be Starved?

Spent the weekend at Starved Rock -- about 100 miles south -- with my entire extended family. Here are some of the interesting plant and arthropod discoveries there...
Sumac Catalpa flowering. Up close, the flowers are about 1.5 inches, irregular, and stunning.

Black raspberry ALMOST ready to eat...

Hazelnut (on which hazel) not nearly ready to eat, but formed!

Some sort of hawkweed-like thing. Goat's beard?

Poison Ivy -- easily the most common plant at Starved Rock -- this one is hanging form a vine and its flowers are visible under the leaves.

Bell flower.Berries on a cedar.

Lungwort? Some sort of non-vascular plant clinging to the sandstone cliffside...

I have no idea what this is. But it's cool.

Ditto. This flower is TINY.

Another hawkweed-esque thing, this one a perfect yellow-orange color.

One of many millipedes, about 3-4 inches long.

With its wings spread, this butterfly was blue; closed, they look grey. Maybe an Azure? Saw several other varieties of butterfly as well.

Kankakee River

Spent the last few days in Kankakee River State Park.  Saw this cool cup fungus.  

Some flowers blooming there:  

some sort of ragwort(?)
anenome
black raspberry
fleabane
something in the Caryophyllaceae family(?)
hawkweed.

Upon arriving home, I found that the garden plants had grown noticeably in 3 days... and we harvested spinach, have many radishes ready, and some lettuce as well.