Plant monitor training! (Less boring than it sounds)

Maybe we do need to come up with a better name for it--"plant monitor training" doesn't really do it justice.  Karen at Audubon-Chicago Region has been coordinating a series of botany outings, in order to cultivate more highly-skilled botanists in the area, so that we potentially have more capable plant monitors in the event of a future natural areas audit, like the Chicago Wilderness and Grassland audits a few years back.  Not plant monitors like the single-species monitors for Plants of Concern; not to knock them, of course (I am one myself), but monitors with a wide range of knowledge.  This is sorely needed, because let's face it:  the skilled botanists are aging, and it's not exactly the cool thing that kids like to do these days. 

Our first outing of the season was at Somme Woods on 7/29, led by Somme stewards Linda Masters and Stephen Packard.  We had originally intended to go to Somme Prairie Grove across the street, but we parked at Somme Woods and encountered so many wicked species, we never made it out.  I rescind all former statements that the woods are boring in July.  Healthy, open, restored woods give you knockouts like these:

 Lobelia cardinalis, which attracted a very mild-mannered ruby-throated hummingbird (just LOOK at those little nectar-baits!)

 Glade mallow (my first reaction:  Why does that maple seedling have white flowers?)

 The very overlook-able marsh bluegrass

 Ranunculus flabellaris, known to some as floating yellow buttercup (or some permutation of those terms), which was found covering the floor of the completely dry Eagle Pond

 Sium suave (water parsnip), not to be confused with its cousins-in-close-proximity cowbane and water hemlock

 The tiny state-threatened gem, marsh speedwell

 Carex squarrosa...there's no mistaking this one.

 Purple Joe-Pye weed...lighter in color than its cousin spotted Joe-Pye, and of course, lacking spots on the stem.

 Floating manna grass--very simple and understated.  Like the honey badger, Glyceria septentrionalis don't give a shit.

 Lactuca floridana, or tall blue lettuce.  Someday I will memorize this name. 

 Carex lupuliformis, with its bizarre knobby little seeds.  Who knows how long I've been seeing this and thinking it was its close relative, Carex lupulina.  Botany is humbling.

 Flat-top aster.  Not many whites are brighter than this.

Aaaaand...forked aster.  Not visibly forked in any perceptible way, but whatever.  It's being proposed as a federally endangered species.  It can be called whatever it wants.

Let's clear those woods, ladies and gentlemen!

Shackled to Cook County (original post 7/28/12)

I had grand dreams last week.  I wanted to go backpacking in Door County.  No particular reason why; just that it is a reasonably short drive and they have a few state parks with backpacking campsites on Lake Michigan (and also because the ball-n-chain's faulty back has put the kibosh on our proposed backpacking trip to Isle Royale).  But because I am a lazy bastard, I put it off too long, and by the time I got around to reserving campsites online, it was too late.  I would have had to get a walk-in site, and I didn't want to drive 6 hours to find they had all been taken.  Anyway, where this is leading is that all of my adventures this week have been confined to Cook County.

The Wednesday Seedpickers met at Somme Prairie Nature Preserve this week.  The flora was less than inspiring this week--thank you, Mr. Drought.  The leadplant was not ready to pick, and as that had been our main target, we wandered around pretty aimlessly until we found some prairie brome and slender wheatgrass, the sexy and trim Agropyron trachycaulum.  No photos, alas.  Order  [I can't believe nobody has called me on this so far] Class Insecta was much more entertaining this week--a red admiral fell in love with me and my chigger-proofed pants:

And a dragonfly sat still long enough for me to snap a few pix (I haven't been foiled enough times to get it through my skull that I need a much longer lens for dragonflies, because my lumbering Amazon giantess-ness always scares them away). I am terrible with dragonflies, and am too lazy to buy a field guide and/or click on all the photo links on the Illinois dragonfly websites.  I could use some help from my loyal readership--recommendations for field guides, or for good websites that show all the photos side by side so I don't have to click on every species?  My best uneducated guess is Halloween pennant:

Then on Friday, I did a solo Botany Bender in the Palos region.  I hit up Spears Woods, Paw Paw Woods, and Palos Fen, the latter two of which are Illinois Nature Preserves, thus bringing my total to 38 (had to add one when I realized that LeRoy Oakes is the same place as Horlock Hill Prairie).  Spears was OK; I finally got my elusive shots of woodland sunflower, at least.  Elusive because it's one of the only species of interest in the woods in July, which is why I never GO to the woods in July...

The prairie areas were pretty standard, and suffering from the drought as everyone else.  The Liatris spicata seems to be taking the drought pretty hard; they all look weird and stunted:

When I see this last one, I hear a descending BEEEEEeeeeewwwwwwwww sound, the sound of something drooping.
 
Then, on to Paw Paw Woods.  The literature is very evasive when it comes to this preserve.  All I could gather was that there is no parking for it, but there are developed trails.  OoooooooK.  After driving all the way around it, one hand on the steering wheel and the other scratching my head, I spied the trailhead--across from the Maple Lake Overlook parking lot (no parking my ass), marked by one of those yellow signs that says "No Bike or Horse Traffic" or something to that effect (which apparently didn't deter the two douchebag mountain bikers I encountered in there, or the dozens before them, judging by the trail condition).  I liked this place--it was stupid to go to the woods in summer from a botany perspective, I'll admit, but at least it was a good hike.  Respectable topography for the Chicago region, and a nice winding loop trail that took me about half an hour at a leisurely pace.  It would be lovely in the spring, and with a guide who knows his/her oaks; according to the writeup, there are chinquapin and shingle oaks, but as there were few juveniles, and a multitude of young sugar maples, I didn't spy any.  My two interesting finds were a patch of Asclepias exaltata, with their enthusiastic seedpods:

Boi-oi-oing!  And patches of spicebush, who have apparently given up all hope this year and aborted their fruits:

This made me unreasonably somber.  Then I headed over to Palos Fen Nature Preserve.  The botany snob in me was not impressed.  I had been lured by the description in the INPC guide, which indicated that queen-of-the-prairie is a resident at this site.  Instead, it was a mess of cattail and reed canary grass, with a few patches of low-quality natives hanging on for dear life--rice cut grass, spotted Joe-Pye, blue vervain, and water pepper.  Maybe I just didn't go far enough in.  Got some good shots though:

I love spotted Joe-Pye's spots...they're so dainty.

  I have a soft spot for blue vervain...understated and very content with itself.

And I could use some help with this handsome little guy:

And that concluded my outing.  One final semi-nature-related observation on the day, from the drive home:  The Des Plaines River/Ship & Sanitary Canal complex near 1st Avenue has smelled like Death (with a capital D) for over a week now.  And I mean, worse than your average Death.  It usually smells bad, but this is a whole new category of bad.  It's not right.  By the hammer of Thor, what are they doing over there lately???

Rogue herons (original post 7/22/12)

There are twenty teams in my Friday night softball league in Lincoln Park.  There are two fields allocated for our use.  Consequently, there are two games starting on the hour, every hour, beginning at 6:00.  This week, we drew the short straw and had the 10:00 pm game.  As we were strolling down Stockton Drive from our parking spot near the zoo, we noticed a squawking commotion.  "Ah, the chickens are having a party," I said.  Although I noticed that one of the footpaths parallel to Stockton was fenced off, I brushed it off as one of the city's neverending city improvement projects ("Building a Better Chicago!" claim the many street signs).  We neared Field #1, and I noticed a bird hanging out in the lawn, pretending to be a lawn ornament.  A bird that most definitely should not be there.  Given the poor lighting (and OK, I'll admit, my weak birding skills), I couldn't tell exactly what it was...roughly the size of a duck, but more slender and graceful, and standing more upright.  It was a brownish color, with lighter spots.  What the hell WAS this? I thought, as I stalked the poor skittish bird through the shadows (and my teammates tried to put as much distance between me and themselves as possible).  An American bittern?  No, too rare.  I tried getting a crappy camera phone shot, but the lighting was too dim, and the bird finally got pissed enough to hop clumsily over the aforementioned fence.  Right over the laminated sign that said "Do Not Disturb--Black-Crowned Night Heron Nesting Area".  Evidently, those cheeky little bastards decided to nest near an urban footpath, and the park district had to obligingly put up a fence to protect them from meddling cityfolk.  The one I saw must have been a juvenile, because it certainly was not the dapper gray poster child for black-crowned night herons.  So cool!  On the way back to the car, it was confirmed that the chicken party was actually the night herons--they were numerous, and very active.  Ohhhhhhh...hence the name!

Sauganash seedpicking (original post 7/18/12)

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.

Underwhelmed by Lockport Prairie (original post 7/16/12)

I joined a walk on Saturday at Lockport Prairie Nature Preserve in Will County, in hopes of seeing the federally endangered Hines emerald dragonfly, and also to check off another IL nature preserve (bringing my grand total to 35).  It was fairly disappointing.  There was an odd mix of people--the guy leading the walk was an extremely knowledgeable consultant who has been doing population studies of the HED since 1995, so I had no complaints there.  There were a few odonatophiles there, who knew their dragons & damsels and had fancy binocs and asked all the right questions.  There were several older folks there with no apparent ecological knowledge, who showed up in shorts and tennis shoes (I should have been tipped off to this when the guy taking my registration info over the phone asked if I needed any special accommodations for the walk [and why did he ask for my birthdate?  Weird.]), and who had a lot of trouble navigating the uneven ground when we ventured off the boardwalk.  I have to admit, I took a wicked delight in imagining them trying to navigate the Carex stricta that grows in knee-high tussock mazes in some preserves.  And then there was me, the dumbass botanist who brought a camera instead of binoculars.  I had dreams of a Hines perching obligingly by the path so I could get shots of its sexy green eyes.  I failed to do my research--they are fliers, not perchers.

Turns out, it didn't really matter anyway--some of the experts claimed to spot the Hines in the air (they are distinguished in flight by their thickened rear ends and the tendency for their abdomens to curve slightly downward--a gestalt not mentioned in the field guides), but the consultant didn't seem too convinced as to the authenticity of these claims.  We saw hordes of green darners, 12-spotted skimmers and black saddlebags, but no emeralds.  It seems that the rivulets coming down from the bluff are mostly dry in this time of drought, and in the areas where they're still wet, the dead cattail canes from last year had gotten flattened by the windstorm on July 1, so all of the good cruising habitat for the dragons was covered up.  I got a couple of sweet dragonfly fridge magnets though, courtesy of the Will Co FPD, so I wasn't too miffed.

Afterwards, I went on a solo hike down the trail cutting through the center of the preserve, parallel to the bluff & river.  I figured that since it's a dolomite prairie, with leafy prairie clover as an alleged inhabitant, there should be some unusual flora.  I figured wrong.  It's not that it was in BAD shape, other than a preponderance of cattail & a couple of phragmites infestations; the prairie was just boring.  A mix of native & pasture grasses, with your typical seed mix forbs--Monarda, Rudbeckia, Pycnanthemum.  I went off-trail to investigate a promising looking area in the marsh level, where the cattails haven't gotten a foothold yet.  Not bad--calamint, Deschampsia, Lysimachia quadriflora, and various low sedges & bulrushes.  Overall, very low diversity.  There must be good pockets hiding somewhere though.

As a nice postscript, I got my first tick of the year, about a day and a half after the excursion.  I found one attached to my noggin last night.  What in the hell had he been doing for 36 hours?  I had washed my hair since the walk, done numerous scalp checks, and put all of my hiking clothes in the hamper.  Maybe he had been hanging out in my car all day, and he hopped back on when I went for a drive.  Maybe I picked him up at Elizabeth's house.  Mysterious little buggers.

A fenny day (original post 7/8/12)

The last Botany Bender on 7/1 took me and my stalwart companions, Elizabeth and Rebecca, up to a couple of Illinois Nature Preserves in McHenry County--Lake-in-the-Hills Fen and Oakwood Hills Fen.  We have decided prairies are scratched from the list of contenders for the time being, since they're so sad and dry right now.  Since fens are spring fed, they're still reasonably damp and not stressed by all the drought, so they're the best places to be right now...especially on blistering hot days, when you can bend down and cool your palms in the icy water.  More than once during the trip, the desire to throw oneself face-first in the shallow streams was mentioned.

We were fortunate to run into a Plants of Concern monitoring group at LITHF, who trusted we were not poachers and showed us around the exposed limestone seep where they were monitoring the Tofieldia glutinosa:

Other bad-ass inhabitants of the fen included the state-endangered tufted bulrush, Scirpus cespitosum...

...and the state-threatened slender bog arrow grass, Triglochin palustris:

The hill prairie yielded one lonely flowering Hill's thistle (state-threatened):

We then headed over to Oakwood Hills Fen about 15 minutes away, an Illinois Nature Preserve that I'd never heard anything about.  It was another pristine alkaline fen with sparkly clear water, perky clumps of tufted hair grass, and an unabashed profusion of Lysimachia quadriflora:

One of its listed inhabitants was the northern bog orchid, Habenaria hyperborea, and we finally found an understated little population of 4 plants perched above the waterline:

One of the red-headed stepchildren of the Habenaria genus, evidently.  And then, as we were leaving, Elizabeth found this dapper little chap enjoying the cool spring in the shade:

Moderate drought (original post 6/28/12)

They say northern IL is in a moderate drought.  It shows, and I daresay it should be upgraded to extreme very soon.  Lawn grass has thrown in the towel; our softball game had time called about every two minutes last night due to violently blowing infield dirt; one of my tomato plants, despite attentive watering, was looking a little weepy today; and the most telling of all--the native plants in our natural areas are getting droopy.  If they can't hack it, like they've hacked it for millennia, something is definitely up.  I am not complaining, on this heralded 'hottest day of the year'.  I feel fantastic.  My joints feel loose, my brain is relaxed, my bones are thawed.  This is payback for all of you cold-weather-lovers, for crowing about fall crispness when I feel all tight and tensed up. 

Yesterday was my first day back with the Wednesday morning Seedpickers this season.  I volunteer with the North Branch folk to collect native seeds during my summer vacation--a great way to give back to the preserves in a non-killing fashion (after all the normal cutting and herbiciding), and a great excuse to get my butt out of bed early on a beautiful day.  We went to Bunker Hill, mainly for sedges--Carex gracillima, sprengellii, davisii, swanii, tenera.  The Cx swanii seems to have taken the drought personally; there were not very many in the areas from which I remembered them previously.  It's one of my favorites, so small and fuzzy and pale green. I don't have my own photo yet, so I'm borrowing one from the University of Michigan herbarium:



Almost cuddly, they are!  Their normally wet prairie is very sparse and rock-hard this summer, so you can't really blame them for lying low.  And yes, I anthropomorphize plants.  Deal with it!