Winter jaunts

Ahh, winter break.  I've managed to take some time off from lounging on the couch (in an attempt to ignore this mysterious headache that's been torturing me for days by watching old movies on cable) and get my caboose out the door.  The fresh air has helped a little.  Then I go back inside and hunker miserably under a down throw and whimper a little.  Most of the time, I feel I would be a scrappy, survivalist fighter when the inevitable zombie apocalypse or devastating plague arrives.  In this current funk, I'm pretty sure I'd get my sissy, myopic ass beaten to a pulp and the brains sucked out of my skull.

 The first trip was the day after school got out--my field trip to the North Branch solstice bonfire.  Sixteen of my best and brightest came out on a Saturday morning on winter break, without receiving any reward of extra credit or service-learning hours, to hang out with their teacher in the woods on a cold day.  Kids these days--they're not all lazy bums.  We hiked around Somme Prairie Grove for a couple of hours, then headed over to Somme Woods for the bonfire.  It's delightfully pagan, what with the bagpiper and drummer and flutes and all.

 

I also shot some videos, with the club's little flip-cam purchased with Climate Cycle funds.  I am not an accomplished cinematographer, as evidenced by the vomit-inducing video I captured of the bagpipe procession from the parking lot to the woodpile.  Not a good idea to videotape while walking a rugged woodland path, it turns out.  Instead, I will treat you with a short clip of the bonfire in full flame:

Next trip:  Christmas Bird Count at Gensburg-Markham Prairie (not on actual Christmas, but 12/29).  I have always wanted to do a CBC, but never quite got around to it, due to sheer laziness and lack of confidence in my birding skills.  This year, despite the snow showers, I decided to sack up and go, figuring I could just keep notes for the experienced birders and absorb some expertise from them, like a leech.  The bird show was, well, underwhelming.  I was easily able to ID the few species we saw, and actually was the first one in the group to pin down the ID of a flock of sparrows...American tree sparrows.  Other than that, there were a couple of flocks of Canada geese flying overhead, a pair of red-tails, a few crows, and a ring-billed gull.  Yawn.  The joint was eerily silent in the snow, except for the distant roar of traffic from I-294.  Beautiful lighting for photos, however.  It was a damned shame my fingers were so cold and I brought my small camera whose settings I still haven't bothered to figure out.  Despite this, I got some good shots of cream false indigo in its subtle winter colors, and a neat shot of the burned vs. unburned side of the firebreak:

Last outing:  workday at Bunker Hill yesterday, 12/30.  This was my and Rebecca's first stint as apprentice stewards.  It went acceptably well.  There was some grumbling, bumbling, and passive-aggressive jabs from the volunteers at the outstart, since we did not plan to burn brush piles and it was rather nippy at 9am.  The reason for this is that Bunker Hill is in the confrontational zone, where the anti-restorationists have their last meager foothold.  The special rule for this zone is that any brush piles have to be out cold--not just flame-free, glowing embers as at the other sites, but cold enough to sit on--before you leave.  This means either sticking around until sunset to let the coals burn out, or putting the fire out with snow or river water (which is undesirable in that it leaves permanent piles of charcoal that will stick around for decades, as opposed to piles of fluffy ash that dissipate in the wind).  I didn't want to leave a legacy of charcoal at my new site, so we opted instead to drag all the brush to the bike path and leave it for the district to put in the chipper.  This warmed everyone up pretty quickly, so things were friendlier after the first half hour.  We only had visits from 3 of the antis, who stood out on the bike path and accosted walkers and joggers with their misinformation campaign, but kept rather quiet relative to the noisy, offensive protests of their heyday.  Since I was busy keeping the show running, I just got a couple of post-mayhem shots...the little oak grove we cleared the buckthorn and ash saplings out of, and one of the impressive piles of brush waiting to be chipped:

May the new year bring more and better opportunities for nature-gazing...including my upcoming Lincoln's bday trip to Florida, spring break to see the sandhills in Nebraska and backpack in national parks farther west, and--dare I jinx myself?--possibly Thailand and/or Central America this summer?  I wipe my hands of you, 2012, and good riddance!

Pop quiz--Bark!

I've been saving this entry up for a slump, to break the monotony of a long period of not being able to get outdoors.  Well, I did actually get out last Saturday, for our annual post-Thanksgiving workday, but I was too busy with the merry slaughter of buckthorn with my mighty chainsaw to take any photos or deeply contemplate the beauty of nature.  How I love thee, dear chainsaw (even though, after long stretches of time without you, you make my core muscles scream like I've been hit by a freight train)!  It was a great workday, with a small group of turkey-fattened troopers, ending with roasted apples and potatoes over the coals of a raging brush pile.  I learned an important lesson that day, as well--avoid coring an apple with a paring knife while said apple is held in your other hand.  I sliced all the way through the first layer of skin of my left hand, all the way down to the meat.  It looks like I have one half of a pair of stigmata.  The skin has healed nicely, but I have some nerve damage; I have pain shooting up my ring finger every time I brush the wound ever so slightly.  I am a fool.

Back on track--during my epic cage match trip in October, I took a bunch of photos of tree bark.  Since the winter was coming round (and by this point, is already here), I was testing my skills at identifying trees solely by their bark.  This is a handy skill to have.  This became even more apparent on the AP field trips (also back in October), when my kids were struggling mightily with tree ID.  Even when they could reach the branches and see the leaves and their arrangement up close, they still had trouble distinguishing them by drawings.  When the leaves were out of reach, they were hopeless.  I finally started showing them the tricks of tree bark...the burnt potato chip trick, the ski slopes trick, etc.  This was infinitely more successful.  So here is a representative sample of northern Illinois trees...can YOU identify them by their bark? (Answers at bottom)

 1a.  Sapling with smoothish, nondescript bark.  This one always stumps me.  It doesn't look like anything.

 1b.  Same species, older tree.  The bark gets a little rougher, but still not any interesting pattern.  Those yellow-bellied sapsucker holes, on the other hand...very telling.

 2.  Long, peely strips of bark are a dead giveaway for this one.

3a.  Anyone paying attention to earlier entries will get this one.  This one mystified me, because the leaves were so far overhead, until I saw some saplings nearby...

 3b.  A-ha.  This one has the characteristic warty bark I'm used to seeing in smaller trees lining city streets.  They just don't get that big in captivity.

 4.  Diamond-shaped bark pattern, if you have an active imagination

 5.  Oooo.  This tree is unusual around here.  Perhaps reminiscent of its cousin, #4?

 6.  Rough and stringy-looking bark, with a hint of orange color.  Okay, so maybe this is not so representative of northern Illinois trees.

 7.  Striiiiiiated, like cat scratches.  (That would be a hint as to its scientific name, and how I first learned to remember it)

 8.  Burnt potato chips!

 9.  A harmless fungus makes the lower bark of this tree fall off in patches, or so they say.

 10.  Thick, corky bark helps protect this species from prairie fires.  (The National Arbor Day sent me a survey about trees in the mail today, in a thinly veiled attempt to get me to make a donation.  They asked whether I thought the white oak was an appropriate choice for the state tree of Illinois [no, I don't].  Had they given me space to write a rebuke, I would have said that THIS tree should be our state tree, and those airhead elementary schoolchildren should never have been allowed to make such an important decision.  But they didn't, so I didn't send in the survey. [Northern cardinal, state bird?  Bluegill, state fish?  What are these kids smoking?])

 11.  Near the top of the trunk, this tree has long, smooth, lighter-colored strips of bark running down its length, reminiscent of ski slopes.

 12.  Smooth, straight trunks with thin, indented cracks.  Often multi-trunked.  

 13.  A rough patchwork of multi-colored bricks--grays, creams, reds, black, and usually with a smattering of moss or lichen to green it up.

****************************************************************************

The answers! They're in alphabetical order by scientific name, because that's how my computer arranged them.  Hope that didn't make it too easy!

1.  Sugar maple (Acer saccharum)
2.  Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata)
3.  Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis)
4.  Green ash (Fraxinus pensylvanicus)
5.  Blue ash (Fraxinus quadrangulata)
6.  Osage orange (Maclura pomifera)
7.  Ironwood (Ostrya virginiana)
8.  Black cherry (Prunus serotina)
9.  White oak (Quercus alba)
10.  Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa)
11.  Red oak (Quercus rubra)
12.  American basswood (Tilia americana)
13.  American elm (Ulmus americana)

Partial burn

I was so excited...finally, a prescribed burn taking place on a non-school-day!  Saturday was a bizarrely warm and stunning November day, and I was invited to join the burn crew at Gensburg-Markham Prairie.  It should have been quick and straightforward--a rectangular burn unit, simple ring fire, steady southwesterly winds.  Usually burn season takes place in the chilly part of the year, so that you are shivering in your Nomex jumpsuits before the fire gets going, but that day we were all comfortable in a single layer.  Here is my "Before" shot, taken from the northeast corner, with the intention to take an "After" shot from the same location.  It did not happen that way.  Looked like a lovely day, no?

 

This is the beginning of the back fire, lit at the same northeast corner.  For the uninitiated, you let the fire fight back slowly against the wind, keeping the mowed fire break hosed down along the downwind side, to keep the fire from burning out of your control.


 

My half of the crew crept slowly along the eastern edge of the burn unit...a surprisingly painstaking process.  The fire desperately wants to swallow up the fire-loving bluejoint grass, but the opposing wind keeps it in check.

 

 The fire inches its way inward, widening the fuel-less safe zone.  Interesting skies we have there to the west.

 

A close-up of the flames.  They're mesmerizing.  Occasionally the wind would die down, allowing the fire to roar up and consume the grassy fuel.  

 

Huge water tanks, backpack sprayers, and flappers stand ready to smite any stray embers.

 

The skies become increasingly ominous as the blackened strip widens.

 

The first raindrops from the thunderstorm (unpredicted by any of the forecasts) started to fall when we were almost ready to make the turn to the south end of the unit, where we would have set the head fire that would race northward with the wind, gobbling up the grasses until it met up with the blackened strip, extinguishing itself for lack of fuel.  The grass became too wet to burn, the flames petering out as soon as the drip torch dripped them out.  We had to put the kibosh on the burn, doubling back to snuff out the dying flames.  The line of thunderstorms hit us right after that:

 

Such a bummer!  I've dealt with snowflakes during a burn, but being rained out is a new thing.  I'm not usually too quick to blame global climate change for weird weather...one day of weird weather goes down as an anomaly in my book.  It drives me nuts when a cold snap brings out the global warming deniers, or a heat wave sends everyone into a frenzy.  But there's been an awful lot of weird stuff lately, perhaps too much to be considered anomalies.

But never fear...even though we had to abort our mission, the prairie will get burned eventually.  All they need is a few days to dry out, a clear day, and another southwesterly wind.  The hard part has already been done--all they need to do is set the head fire screaming across the prairie.

[Side note:  It has been brought to my attention that perhaps people are commenting on these entries; as far as I can see, there are none.  So forgive me if I do not reply--technical errors may be occurring.]

Fall field trip

Ahhh, mid-to-late October...that time of year when I piss off all the other teachers at school by taking out 60 of the smartest kids for a couple of days for the AP fall field trip.  Purpose:  to do some restoration volunteer work (in order to get our buses paid for by the FPDCC), and to do a field study.  This IS environmental science, after all...and we so rarely get to be out IN it.  Mother Nature must have been pretty sheepish about crashing our workday a couple of weekends ago--she blessed our trips last week with some pretty badass Indian summer weather.  Tuesday was a little drizzly, but it was so warm we didn't mind.  Wednesday was sunny, hazy, and pushing 80 degrees--fine short-sleeve weather, if you don't mind a few buckthorn scratches. 

Here are some highlights.  They're all long-distance shots, because of the ethical gray area of posting identifiable pics of minors on the web, but I assure you that they were mostly grinning ear-to-ear.  There were a few whiners, of course, but you can't win them all. 

 Winding through the prairie at Ted Stone

 

 Murdering buckthorn!

 Doing a point-quarter survey of the woodland

 Measuring DBH

 Playing in the oaks & hickories

 Spreading bottlebrush grass seeds with site steward George

 Filing out past one of our many small brush piles...no burning was allowed, strangely, despite the damp and low wind.  What's up, FPDCC?  Stealth control of obesity through prevention of s'mores consumption?

 The woodland, looking ethereal in the afternoon

More point-quarter surveying

For the most part, a hell of a time was had by all.  This is probably the only reason I'm still surviving in this job, and why I'll probably feel too guilty to ever quit.

Cage match: Salt Creek Woods vs. O'Hara Woods

Last night, I was angry at the world.  I had had a terrible day at work, and I had been forced to cancel my eagerly anticipated field trip to Illinois Beach for today due to lack of interest.  I carried my heavy workload home from the train, snarling at the raw, spitting rain.  I poured myself a few fingers of Woodford Reserve and sat down at my computer to start filling out job applications for other schools.  After mellowing a bit, I decided that my Saturday didn't have to be a total wash, and planned a solo hiking trip in lieu of Illinois Beach.  Since I had to swing down to school on the southwest side anyway to intercept any students who didn't get the cancellation message, I picked out a couple of new (to me) nature preserves in that direction, in order to bring my lifetime Illinois Nature Preserve tally up to 41:  Salt Creek Woods in the Western Springs area, and O'Hara Woods in Romeoville.  

Let's start with Salt Creek.  I'm starting to think that the directions given in the INPC guide are intentionally vague and misleading, to keep out the riff-raff.  The description says there are trails and parking, so I was expecting a nicely-labeled turnoff and parking lot/trailhead.  Of course there weren't any such things--this is the INPC we're talking about!  This ended with me completely passing the site and having to drive west on 31st Street for about a mile before I could turn around.  The parking to which they refer, I assume, is the Bemis Woods North parking lot across Wolf Road from the nature preserve.  The lot itself is situated about a hundred yards from any trails, so I had to walk along the shoulder of Wolf Road for awhile to reach the Salt Creek Bike Trail, a harrowing experience due to the heavy car traffic.  Here is the first scene I beheld:

Ahem.  Looks like they haven't gotten around to clearing the buckthorn from the south side of the trail.   It got better, though, and I have to admit that even though I dislike hiking on bike trails because insane bikers have a tendency to tear around corners and yell at you like it's your fault when they almost run you over, it's a very nice bike trail.  See?

 

The red oaks were at the peak of their color and showing off in the sunshine.

 

After a while, I turned off the bike trail and went on a dirt path through an open woodland area, which was sadly overgrown with a lot of nasty stuff--tall goldenrod, brambles, bidens, and honeysuckle.  Not the kind of woods you can easily stroll through.  It eventually opened up into a prairie grove speckled with scarlet oaks and hawthorns.  

 

The site description doesn't say so, but the frequency of these wicked-looking hawthorns suggests this area was grazed, once upon a time.  For the non-ecologists in the audience (if there are any), cows would eat pretty much everything in their pastures except the hawthorns, for obvious reasons:

 

At the end of the prairie grove, there was this forbidding-looking line of black locust trees, like a horrible army poised to invade.  This is sort of how I imagine the Ents of Fangorn looked as they stationed themselves outside of Helm's Deep to swallow up the retreating Uruk-Hai.  (I'm hoping this audience is more appreciative of geeky references than my students, who just look embarrassed for me when I say something about LOTR or Harry Potter.) 

Overall, not a terrible place.  It has its issues, obviously.  I need to remind myself to be a little more forgiving of the forest preserve districts, the DNR, and the nature preserve commission--they're not intentionally mismanaging or letting these places go (I hope); it's just a crippling lack of funding.

Onward to O'Hara Woods.  I had trouble finding this one, because the topo map in the INPC guide must be about 3 decades old.  Romeoville Road is now called Romeo Road, so I drove several miles south of it before I realized my mistake.  Also, it did not show all of the suburban housing developments that have sprung up in the meantime.  You're supposed to turn north on an unnamed road from Romeo Road, and the topo map shows one single building at that intersection.  Presently, that road is called Arsenal Road and is situated amongst a complex of village administrative buildings.  And no, I will not change my stubborn ways and start using GPS.  Not now, not ever.  Getting lost is kind of fun.

Here is the sign at the entrance of the preserve.  I couldn't read it in its entirety, because of the hideous, inexcusable apostrophical error near the bottom that jumped out at me:

 

Come on, people.  You spend all this money on a sign, and you can't proofread it?  His, hers, ours, theirs, ITS.  No apostrophe.  The panda says NO.  

Anyway, I got over it, because soon afterward my breath was taken away by the technicolor sugar maple display down the path.  I tend to be prejudiced against sugar maples because they don't belong in a lot of our woodlands, but according to the literature this spot was just the right place for them--a ravine protected from wildfires.  So it was nice to be able to enjoy their fall color for a change:

The place looked like it was on fire, or unnaturally lit from within.  Gorgeous.  At about this time, I started comparing this site with the previous one, and pitting their various attributes against each other, cage-match style.  The results will be posted at the end.  And then, three roads diverged in the wood and I...I took the one on the left.  Sorry, not as poetic as Frost.  At any rate, none of them appeared to be any less-traveled than the others:

There was a remarkable absence of invasive species here.  The dense maple canopy must keep everything else out; the understory is pretty clear and the ground bare.  According to the site description, they have a respectable spring flora show, including squirrel corn and blue-eyed Mary, neither of which I've seen in person.  I'll have to come back in 6 months.  The only invasive species I could see was green ash, whose saplings were still bright green against the golden backdrop...but wait.  Those leaflets looked suspiciously rounded for green ash:

Upon closer inspection, bingo!  Square twigs = blue ash.  Isn't it charming?

I can deal with a preponderance of blue ash saplings.  I fear for them when the emerald ash borers get here.  

A bit farther down the trail, a glacial erratic.  I'm intrigued by these pieces of geologic history:

The trail then opened up onto a depressing little oldfield, covered entirely in fescue and tall goldenrod and sloping down to a retention pond and subdivision.  I assume this was once one of the crop fields that the site description says surrounded the preserve, back when it was written:

The trail skirted the field and sloped down into a bottomland forest.  A nice boardwalk had been constructed over some swampy creeks, and several unwanted trees had been marked with the orange paint spot of doom.  This place is definitely more loved by its managers than Salt Creek.  The canopy was dominated by some of the hugest hackberries I've ever seen; I didn't recognize the bark at first, because the trunks were so huge, the bark's characteristic warts seemed to have been stretched out into flat plates:

It's nice to see a tree, normally a streetside planting, in its rightful habitat.  Moving on, I noticed a row of Osage oranges at the border between the woods and the soybean field on the other side.  The squirrels have been going bonkers over these things:

I saw one ecstatically chubby gray squirrel in the vicinity, who was paradoxically too fast for me to snap a picture.  You'll have to take my word for it when I say the dude had rolls.  Big, glorious, rippling fat rolls.  Around the same time, I looked up and had my breath taken away for the second time at that site--a flock of hawks soaring on the thermals above:

There had to be a few dozen of them...I thought at first they had to be vultures, with those numbers, but no--they were light-colored beneath.  I've never seen more than about three of these at the same time.  It looked like a party up there.  Amazing.  

While heading off-trail to take a bathroom break behind some fallen trees, I came upon an area littered with plastic sheeting and tarps, partially hidden under the maple leaves.  I had one of those this-is-going-to-be-the-day-I-find-a-dead-body-in-the-woods moments.  The site was certainly was isolated enough for that; I didn't see another human being the whole time I was there.  I didn't end up finding one, but only because I didn't stick around to poke about in the leaf litter.  It's going to happen, one of these times.  It's just a matter of time.

I took another trail back, through a picturesque rolling ravine area.  This place did not suck:

So, since I'm a science teacher and I like neatly organized data, here are the results of my cage match, the winner of each match-up highlighted in green...

	Salt Creek Woods	O’Hara Woods
Dominant canopy trees	White & red oak, shagbark hickory	Sugar maples, hackberry
Understory	Dense thicket of tall goldenrod, bidens, honeysuckle, & brambles	Blue ash saplings, bare ground
Human sightings	Dozens of bicyclists, joggers	None
Prairie opening	Low-quality native forbs & grasses; scarlet and white oaks, hawthorn	Fescue and tall goldenrod, overlooking a retention pond and ticky-tacky houses
Bizarre line of non-native trees	Black locust	Osage orange
Mammalian fauna	None (other than humans)	Obese gray squirrel, ground squirrel
Avian fauna	White-throated sparrows	Huge flock of raptors
Fall color	Muted oranges, browns and reds	Shocking yellow
Trails	Paved bike trail and dirt/grass path	Unobtrusive crushed gravel trails, boardwalk in squishy area
Isolation factor	At intersection of major roads	Set back from a side road
Management	Buckthorn jungle problems, needs burning	Numerous trees marked for death with orange paint
Likelihood of finding a dead body	Very low (have to cross Wolf Rd from parking lot)	High
Potential for spring flora	Low	Super high
Total points	3	10

And O'Hara Woods is the hands-down winner of today's cage match!  I think I should set up all of my future trips with this framework in mind.  I'll take suggestions for opponents.