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.

The inevitable

Every quarter since I began teaching, I have taken the kids out for restoration workdays in the forest preserves in order to get them some extra credit.  That makes 16 workdays, and that doesn't even include workdays for my club or for other random service learning events.  Perhaps 25 total.  Today, the 17th quarter workday of my teaching career, was the first absolute, undeniable rainout of a workday.  We've worked merrily through drizzle and 15 degree lows, snowflakes and blistering heat, but today the heavens unleashed upon us the most unholy downpour, after one hopeful hour in the field at Sundown Meadow.  We were soaked, and temperatures were in the 50s, so I reluctantly had to call it.  Luckily, I have a great batch of kids again this year (breaking the every-other-year bad batch curse, as last year's were great too), and they were in high spirits after being indulged with lots of processed sugar and simple carbs.  Eh, it had to happen eventually.

This just means that the weather will be perfectly obliging next Saturday for our hiking trip to Illinois Beach.  Right now, the forecast says 55 degrees and 0% of rain.  Let's cross our fingers that it holds.

Glacial relicts

One of the badges I wear as an outdoorswoman is that of Plants of Concern monitor for the Chicago Botanic Garden.  We do annual studies of rare plants in the region to determine whether populations are declining or in trouble.  I've been monitoring the Carex bromoides (brome hummock sedge) at Spicebush Woods for a few years, and agreed to start monitoring the Juniperus communis (the poorly named common juniper) at Harms Woods this year.  I only agreed to this because since it's a conifer, it could be monitored pretty much any time of the year, unlike C. bromoides, which is in flower right smack dab in the middle of one of my busiest times of year--May, the season of AP field trips and end-of-school-year madness.  I meant to get to it during my Summer of Nothing, but too much of the nothing got in the way.  So here we are, monitoring it on a chilly October day.  Despite the lovely sunshine, it was breezy and uncomfortable, as I was dealing a throbbing sinus infection and did not have the foresight to bring a pair of gloves with me.  Juniper is tangly and prickly, and it scratched the hell out of my hands until I found an old pair of dirty socks in the trunk of my car to wear as clumsy mittens.  The things I do for my friends in Kingdom Plantae...

Juniperus communis is a 10, according to Swink & Wilhelm.  It's a creeping juniper shrub that is normally found on dunes around Lake Michigan, and is rare because that habitat has pretty much been urbanized.  Harms Woods, for those in the know, is not a dune landscape near Lake Michigan.  It's a flatwoods along the North Branch of the Chicago River, quite a ways west of the lake.  So what in the dickens is this plant doing there?  The colony I monitor is on a sandy bluff (if you can call the low banks of the Chicago River "bluffs" without laughing) over the river, and is most likely a boreal relict from the days of the last glacial retreat.  It's hanging on in this unlikely spot along with some other rare pals from the olden days, now considered to be northern and/or dune specialties--Aster macrophyllus (big-leaved aster) and Maianthemum canadense (Canada mayflower).  For whatever reason, this spot has remained cool and shady enough to allow these fossils to hang in there.

 The tiny juniper colony.  Rebecca is counting stems, which is probably an exercise in futility.  I am 99% sure that it is all one ancient plant, connected underground.

 Up close, with its snazzy little pinstripes.  We midwesterners don't get a lot of conifers, so we find them fascinating.

 What is wrong with me?  I stupidly decided not to bring Swink into the field with me, because I figured I would know all the associate species.  Well, pride goeth before the fall. Damn you, closely-related viburnums!  This is V. recognitum or V. rafinesquianum (one of my top-five Latin names!)...it comes down to petiole length.  Does that petiole look shorter or longer than 1.2 cm?  I'm leaning towards longer, which would make it the non-native recognitum.  Bollocks.

 A horizontal Aster macrophyllus, leaning out from the riverbank.

The trail on the hike out.  Looks like a friggin' Thomas Kinkade painting!