Spring Ephemerals are Up!

Dutchman's Britches (Dicentra cucullaria) is one of my favorite spring flowers! The blooms look like tiny pantaloons (thus the name - which is also spelled Breeches).

This picture was taken April 9, 2010 at Wonder Lake Sedge Meadow - a TLC easement in, you guessed it, Wonder Lake! In addition to the sedge meadow on the 28 acre site, there is also an oak savanna in the upland buffer - that's where the Britches were growing!

This plant is one of the first native flowers to bloom each spring. Typically, we might expect to see them around April 24th, but this year everything is early! VERY early!

Bloodroot, another early Spring flower, has already come and gone in some local woodlands. Normally, it is still around in early May! The bluebells - which can almost always be counted on to brighten Mother's Day - are coming up already, and will probably have already passed by the time Mom's Day comes along a month from today (May 9th!).

Chorus frogs have been calling since late March, and the Spring Peepers (another species of frog) are already busy.

Bluebirds are nesting - I had one report of someone seeing a bluebird egg laid in one of their bluebird boxes on March 31st -- that's early! Very early!!

Even the bad guys like buckthorn and honeysuckle are going strong. In previous years, the earliest I noticed buckthorn in our local woods was April 12th. This year it was clearly greening up on April 1st (a really cruel April Fool's Joke!).

I'm having a hard time not thinking that this is another sign of Global Warming/Climate Change at work. The experts say that we will see more extremes in weather as the Global Warming process accelerates.

It's kind of a big deal when things start sprouting and blooming out of sync from their usual time of year. Insects pollinate flowers, but if the flower blooms before the insects emerge -- or if the insects come and go before their flowers bloom -- the flowers don't get pollinated. No pollination, no flowers in the future.

One oddball year here or there is okay, but if it becomes a trend, it could spell trouble!

Horse Fair Springs Fen update!

That's skunk cabbage poking up through the snow on the first day of Spring (March 20th) at Spring Grove's Horse Fair Spring Fen! The little creek was thick with those early-rising, prehistoric-looking plants that are a sure sign of a natural, high quality wetland.

Kudos to Linda Balek for exploring this forgotten corner of the Village last year and finding this hidden gem! March 20th was the second Volunteer Work Party at the property, and what a Party it was. Just five of us made a big dent in the invasive brush, two with chain saws and three hauling & stacking the cut wood!

Who knew it would snow on that first Spring morning! But a few flakes didn't stop the volunteers, just as they didn't stop the skunk cabbage from poking up after its long winter nap.

The pictures on the right and left show the area before and during clearing -- lots of brush is visible. The picture on the right shows Ted Thornton & Rich Paull wrestling with a box elder that has been cut, but won't fall because its upper branches are hung up by grape vines. Snags like that have can't be left to fall later -- they could hurt someone if they fell unexpectedly.

The final picture is of the same area after the clearing is complete. The dark spot in the middle appears to be a wet area that will probably be thick with skunk cabbage next time we're out there!!

Update from Yonder Prairie

Thanks to site steward Scott Kuykendall for sending along a couple of photos from Sunday's Work Party at Yonder Prairie.

To the left is a Sandhill crane that he noticed at the site while he was taking photos as a baseline to help document the changes that we are going to see over the coming years. He noticed something move, looked up from the camera, and there he was - a male sandhill, probably looking for a mate!

Scott also saw a lot of marsh marigold blooming. These plants are such a happy member of our local wet natural areas. They come and go before most other wetland plants reveal their identities. They are a sure sign that there are more intersting species to be found at the site!

In addition to the singing of chorus frogs, Scott also heard the "descending whinny" of the Sora - a bird also known as the Sora Crake or the Sora Rail. This is a hard bird to spot, but I found a picture on the Net to give folks an idea of what they look like. These birds are found in wet areas, and research indicates that they prefer natural wetlands to restored (recreated) habitat. We'll be sure to keep an eye (and ear) out for them at Yonder to see if they are breeding there!

Burn Baby, Burn!

Ecological Fire Management of natural areas is so cool.

Take a natural area - prairie, wetland or woodland - and every year or two light it on fire. The fire knocks back invasive plants like buckthorn and garlic mustard, giving the deep rooted natives a fighting chance!

The picture makes fire look a little scary, with flames roaring higher than a person, but the truth is that when doing this, TLC is very careful. It is said that a really good ecological burn is slow and boring, and we strive to make sure our burns are the slowest and most boring!

First we make sure there are fire breaks surrounding the area we want to burn - this can be done by raking or mowing vegetation to get rid of stuff that will burn easily. The fire breaks provide a safe place for the crew to move in, and help ensure that the fire will stop at the edges of the site.

Then, starting at the portion of the fire break that is located such that the wind is blowing into our faces, we light a backfire -- this means lighting a fire a foot or so away from the fire break, and letting the wind push the fire to the fire break, resulting in a burned line that effectively expands the fire break. Because we are working against the wind at this point, we don't have to worry about the fire taking off across the site.

Once a really good blackline is burned in, we light the head fire. This is where the wind is at our backs, and the fire roars quickly across the site, dying out when it runs out of fuel at the blackline! Here is a picture of a head fire - you can see the flames leaving a charred landscape in their wake!

All through the burn, we make sure that crew members are positioned at strategic locations to catch any fire that starts up where it isn't supposed to be! Crew members are armed with flappers to smother the fire, rakes to get rid of fuel (grass and leaves), and waterpacks to extinguish the fire if needed.

Historically, fire roared across the landscape regularly, either started by lightning or lit by native people who used it to drive game. The plants that thrived in this landscape are therefore well adapted to fire -- the bur oaks have a thick, corky bark that withstands fire, and the native grasses and flowers have exceptionally deep roots that mean the plants will grow back!

The 2009 Spring burn season is drawing to a close now -- birds are starting to build nests, and grasses are starting to green up. We'd rather not burn down someone's house, not even a sparrow's!

Vernal Pools are Teeming with Life!

That's a crayfish, and last Friday, we saw several tiny, immature crayfish in vernal pools up in Alden Township. They were so tiny that the claws were about the width of a strand of hair! The entire critter was perhaps a quarter of an inch long, looking like some random bug larva, but under a magnifying glass, it became clear that these little guys were teeny-tiny crayfish!

A project to gather information about our local vernal pools has been organized by George Johnson, formerly of Alden Township but now living in Madison Wisconsin. One of the things that George had always hoped to accomplish when he lived in McHenry County, was to raise awareness of the presence and importance of these local temporary, spring ponds.

These seasonally wet areas are uncommon in the Chicago region, in large part because they are places that are filled in by homeowners and developers who do not see the benefits of having a wet, mucky spot in the yard each spring and perhaps into the summer.

The spring ponds are fairly common in Alden Township for a couple of reasons: 1. the area is still sparsely developed, and 2. historically, much of the area was used for livestock grazing instead of row crop farming. This meant that the seasonally wet spots survived, along with a lot of critters that are not often seen in the "suburbs."

Friday April 3rd was the inaugural day of McHenry County vernal pool monitoring. During their pool sampling, volunteers saw a large number of fairy shrimp (ranging in color from pink to red to blue to yellow, and everything in between), a wide variety of midges, scuds, and other tiny aquatic life that plays an important role in the overall food chain.

It was a cold day -- 43 degrees in the sun. The water was cold too -- 45 degrees. Yet, when we gazed into our dipping nets as we pulled them from the pools, tiny little eyes looked back at us! I had no idea there was so much activity on a cold day in cold water!

Unfortunately, there were also lots of mosquito larvae. These are another link in the web of life, providing a food source for dragonflies, frogs, fish, birds and other species that feed on water organisms, but I still don't like them. The skeeter larvae spend most of their time at the surface of the water breathing through a tube in their abdomen, as shown in the picture.

The eggs from which the larvae hatched were probably laid in the damp ground last summer or fall, and remained in an embryonic form until conditions were right for them to develop into larvae. The larval stage lasts a week or two, then turns into a pupa for a couple of days -- just long enough for it to become a fully-formed adult mosquito, ready to start feeding...

Now, don't blame the vernal pool for the mosquito larvae. These guys will develop in any little wet spot, regardless of the habitat. Lawns, bird baths, potholes in the road, etc. If it holds water for even a few days, it can be a source of skeeters!

One of the beautiful things about these vernal pools is that they are literally teeming with life of all shapes and sizes. There are microscopic things being eaten by tiny critters, which in turn are eaten by somewhat larger things, etc, etc. In that chain are tadpoles, young frogs and salamanders that eat mosquito larvae.

My wish is that there will be a large number of frog and salamander babies in all of our local vernal pools to eat those larvae before they become adults!