Solo Bender: Sandy Soil Sites of South Cook

I had nothing on my calendar yesterday, so I took a little tour of the ol' lake plain, checking out some preserves in southern Cook County.  Four of them, to be exact.  Here is the scoop:

#1:  Sand Ridge Nature Center.  One might assume that something called a "nature center" might have some respectable nature in its boundaries.  I am slowly coming to the realization that "nature center" is synonymous with "dump in which your children can run wild without harming anything".  The nicest thing I can say about this place is that it had an indoor bathroom.  Every "natural" area in the joint seemed highly impacted by humans and full of nonnatives.  I set out along the Lost Beach loop trail, figuring hey, it's only two miles, so even if it sucks I'll get some decent exercise and I'll still be out of here in half an hour.  At one point, while still on the spur trail to the loop part of the trail, I stopped and turned around, my skin crawling from the walls of buckthorn and other nasties looming above me, and had to persuade myself to keep going.  I then reached the loop, which had a solid understory of buckthorn.  (For some reason, when I first saw the name "Sand Ridge", I was expecting nice open sand prairie.  Ha ha ha, I'm so naive!).  I turned around for good and got the hell out of there.  Maybe there were actually some nice ancient beach ridges farther along, but I was not going to get my hopes up.  On the way out, I used the bathroom again for good measure.  Take that, FPDCC!  Here are the only decent shots I got:

Phytolacca americana, pokeweed.  It's actually kinda pretty before it becomes a huge bulky purple-berried monster.

Polygonum sagittaria, arrow-leaved tearthumb, with the cartilaginous, retrorse, thumb-tearing prickles evident

#2:  Sand Ridge Nature Preserve.  This is just to the east of the nature center, one of those preserves they don't really label because they don't want you going there.  #39 on my all-time list of Illinois Nature Preserves (that's a tally, not a rank...I can surely think of worse ones).  You can just park at the Burnham Greenway Trail along 184th St. and walk down Campbell Street, which goes right through the preserve.  Then, take a deep breath and plunge into the tall, rank vegetation.  That poor place...the INPC listing has all of these great species listed, but it's been swallowed whole by monstrous hordes of tall goldenrod, purple loosestrife, and cruel brambles.  It would benefit from repeated catastrophic wildfires.  I saw a few prairie species here and there, and there are still oak trees lined up on the old beach ridges; otherwise, you would not be able to tell where they were.  Anyone wishing to visit this place would do well to wear heavy-duty Carhartts, and NOT lightweight, quick-dry zipoffs as I did, unless you wish to be shredded to bits by the brambles.  As I was.  I staggered out of that place with about as much relief as I did the nature center.  Photographic evidence of this arduous journey:

One of the swales between ridges...chock full of purple loosestrife.  Sigh.

 Coreopsis tripteris, or tall coreopsis, with a nice oak ridge in the background.  Just ignore all the tall goldenrod in the low background.

 Spartina pectinata--prairie cord grass.  I love the striping on the sheath.  (And one nice thing I'll say about loosestrife--it forms a nice Monet-like background!)

 Check it out--I ID'd a dodder!  This one is rope dodder, Cuscuta glomerata.  According to Swink & Wilhelm..."This species can be identified at 10 paces by its distinctive appearance as a section of white rope wound in several spiral turns around the stem of its host."  Ah, yep.  That's it.  This dodder was ALL OVER the place, strangling the crap out of the tall goldenrod (but apparently not enough to control it).  Kick some ass, rope dodder!

Here it is again.  It is the ball python of the plant kingdom.

#3:  Zanders Woods.  Dear, sweet Zanders Woods.  The perfect antidote to the previous sites.  The air is always cool and fresh here, and smells better than any other place I know in the Chicago area.  The INPC gives it the rather unpoetic name of Thornton-Lansing Woods, but I prefer the more common FPDCC name.  It sounds like the strumming of a harp.  I didn't spend too much time here, because time was ticking toward Friday rush hour; just enough to check out the little sand prairie opening off the west side of the access road that is always full of delightful things that the FPDCC hasn't managed to neglect to death yet.  I was a little troubled to see a strange infestation in the prairie...common ragweed.  It covered a good third or so of the prairie, which is a pretty rapid colonization--I don't remember seeing it when I was there last, about two years ago.  That's not something one usually sees in high quality areas; usually it sticks to old-fields and roadsides.  But the place was in pretty good shape, otherwise; it had the wonderful problem of being so nice, it was difficult to find places to step.  Here are some of the denizens managing to tough out the drought:

 Aster simplex, panicled aster.  Showing off its panicle.

 Arenaria lateriflora, grove sandwort.  One day, I will get over my fear of technology and figure out how to adjust the exposure so the whites aren't washed out.
This is NOT Arenaria.  I don't do drugs, so maybe someone spiked my food the day I wrote this.  It is a chickweed of some sort, I believe.

Solidago juncea, early goldenrod.  Fireworks!

#4:  Gensburg-Markham Prairie.  It's pretty much gone into shut-down mode: a sea of green and brown, interrupted by a few isolated splashes of yellow from some warrior-like rosinweed and early goldenrod.  I could almost feel them gloating over their less-deeply-rooted neighbors.  Maybe because of this lack of flowers, the few I did see were absolutely swarmed with insects:

 Bull thistle may be a nasty nonnative, but the bugs ain't picky.  They were trembling with joy over these pom-poms.  A big fuzzy bumbler cavorted with a couple of pairs of milkweed bugs in flagrante delicto.  Speaking of which, aren't those bugs just the horniest bugs out there?  I swear I see them more often stuck together in pairs than I see them alone.

A cicada killer cricket hunter (?) on whorled milkweed.  They were all over those like white on rice.  [Someone long ago told me these were cicada killers.  I just looked it up, and cicada killers are actually those fat wasps with stripy abdomens.  I think these blue guys are from the genus Chlorion, based on a quick internet search.]

 All right, I'm pretty sure this is Ludwigia polycarpa, false loosestrife.  I didn't key it out.  I'm sure certain people who work there would be able to tell me.  There was a whole big wetland area near the north side of the loop that was a monoculture of this stuff.  It was a little spooky, honestly.

 I really need to be more diligent about keying stuff out in the field.  I snapped a photo of this, from the man-made ditch along the north side, fairly certain it was large-flowered water plantain, Alisma triviale.  That's because I'm a cocky know-it-all who in actuality knows jack.  Could it really be Sagittaria rigida, stiff arrowhead?  That's what the key leads me to, but it is a C=10 with no voucher specimen in Cook County.  What would it be doing in that slummy place?  Again, employees of IBP, help me out here.

And the grand finale, a big ol' clump of rosinweed singing its lungs out in the afternoon sun!