The Wednesday Seedpickers hit up Sauganash Prairie Grove
today--somehow, my first visit ever; the only North Branch site I've
managed to avoid thus far. It helps when a site is infested by
neighborhood anti-restoration crazies--I regretfully admit that their
antics and ass-hattery have been successful in keeping me away. I'm not
sure how it got the label "prairie grove"--there's a tiny prairie, and
there's floodplain forest, and nothing much in between. It's an eerily
quiet little stretch of the river with red oaks towering over it on both
sides. I like it.
We were there for Carex crinita,
for the most part, which we didn't find until the very end. Mostly, we
ended up harvesting a few sedges, the identities of which we were
uncertain. (What we seedpickers lack in expertise, we make up for in
enthusiasm.) We got a lot of this one, which I'm fairly sure is Carex
scoparia, but since nobody had ever collected it before, nobody believed
me:
Most
of them called it the football sedge (Carex footballii) because, well,
you can see for yourself. I think it is too smooth and elegant to be
given a nickname alluding to an inane, brutish sport. The wet (in
normal years) prairie had some other drab sedges, like tenera & normalis &what was probably lacustris; it's not yet the season
for the charismatic sedges like grayi, squarrosa, and lupulina.
Score one for the drought: Nary a mosquito was to be seen today. Sauganash is legendary for its bugs.
No comments:
Post a Comment