I am taking a vertebrate zoology course this semester. We have to take journals of our field trips. As I also write about these field trips on this blog, it seems easiest to me to combine these accounts into one, and save myself the work of writing two separate accounts of the trip.
Mason County, Illinois
Saturday, September 3, 5:00 AM- 5:00 PM
(Events referenced in this section are 5:00 to 8:00 AM and 1:30 to 3:30 PM)
Temperature: 55-80 degrees Fahrenheit
Weather: Mostly sunny, winds out of northwest
Fall migration and allergy season go hand-in-hand. Thus, I was fighting a sinus infection as I ventured up to Revis Hill Prairie at five in the morning. Revis Hill Prairie is one of the wildest and most remote areas in Central Illinois. As the name implies, it's on a hill, and thus I decided to hike up and watch the sunrise from the top. Despite the dew-slicked grass and steepness of the slope, I climbed up to the top of one of the prairies, the narrow one third from the left on Google Maps.
This Cape May Warbler (Setophaga tigrina), a lifer, came within ten feet of me atop a prairie bush:
Two hundred feet below me, the Sangamon River Valley stretches out to the horizon, doubly beautiful in the dawn light. Fog, brought on by the cool air, faded as the sun came up. About a hundred Common Grackles flew overhead, and many more birds called down in the woods.
I also heard a Red-eyed Vireo, a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Black-capped Chickadee, a Gray Catbird, and a Carolina Wren calling from the nearby woods, just as the sun peaked over the horizon. I can't imagine what I missed by not coming here in spring. The diversity of birds is astonishing.
I stood up on an old, charred stump just as the sun rose over the trees. Hill prairies like this are regularly burned by the state to keep them from being overgrown. Despite this, the woods still creep closer. Illinois, in its present climate, receives too much rain to keep the prairies open. This is natural. In the days before Europeans, Native Americans burned the prairies to keep the plants and animals they needed for foods and medicines. It's odd to think this "wild" place is still artificial.
The sunlight revealed the flowers up here in better light. Revis, in addition to rare insects and birds, also has a number of unusual plants that have dwelled here for hundreds of years.
Rough Blazing Star (Liatris aspera) was one of the brightest plants in the prairies, though a bit washed-out in this photo. Despite being fairly common in Illinois, I've never seen it in the wild.
Nearby, other strange plants bloomed, including Field Goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis) and Rough False Foxglove (Agalinis aspera), which is a curious plant that steals water and nutrients from surrounding plants. I've never seen either of these two plants in the wild before.
On the other hand, I regret the few times I've seen this in the wild before. The Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantica) is one of the largest common spiders in Illinois. They always make me curious and terrified at the same time, simply due to their size and ornate webs. I moved on quickly, but this was the first of three of these spiders I encountered that day.
The last plant I saw at Revis was Stiff Goldenrod (Oligoneuron rigidum). Goldenrods are popularly claimed to give people allergies, but that is in fact Ragweed. Goldenrods, which flower at the same time as Ragweed, are thus given the blame. All of the plants pictured are lifer plants, as usually happens on a visit up here. Well, so far on this morning, I've found at least five lifer birds and four lifer plants, so the day was off to an excellent start.
I slid down the slope (it was wet with dew and steep), and got back in my car. I was to meet my classmates at Chautauqua at 8:30, and, after a few delays, I did. One of those delays was a mysterious small hawk on a telephone pole two miles northeast of Revis. After considerable research, this turned out to be a juvenile Broad-winged Hawk (Buteo platypterus) .
I then spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon at Chautauqua and Emiquon Wildlife Refuges, which will be covered by the post following this one. Basically, I'm dividing this day up by land and water, between mostly birds and... well, more birds. Birds were the focus of the trip. However, I have done a LOT with birds as of late, and I have decided that this will stop when I run out of birds to see. The same goes for plants, reptiles, insects, etc. When I run out of new individuals of each species of all of these to see, I will stop talking about them. (Hint: That'll be never.)
Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve is the most bizarre area of Illinois I have visited. It looks as if central Illinois has been temporarily replaced with land from the western Great Plains. To be fair, many of the plants here are more common further west. This large, barren sand prairie/sand forest hides many strange animals and plants, from the Silvery Bladderpod to the Eastern Velvet Ant.
One of the first unique animals found is this, the Big Sand Tiger Beetle (Cicindela formosa). Tiger beetles are among the most ferocious insects, prowling the sands for smaller insects to devour.
Here, too, sand-loving birds live, such as the uncommon Lark Sparrow, one of which I caught a brief glimpse of as it flew by overhead. Most of the birds in this area passed by unnoticed, as I was hunting for other vertebrates here. The total list of birds is two Turkey Vultures, one Bald Eagle, one Red-tailed Hawk, four Red-headed Woodpeckers, two Eastern Wood Pewees (one calling, one seen catching flies), one Eastern Phoebe, three flyover Blue Jays, five Horned Larks (near the main road), and eight Grasshopper Sparrows. The latter were a cause of contention between I and an online bird database checker, because this is a rare species to see. Grasshopper Sparrows prefer to hide, especially this time of year, and as such are rarely recorded even when fairly abundant. However, I scared up two flocks whilst looking for other animals. This got me flagged on Ebird when I reported it online there, and I actually got emailed about it.
Other than a surprise Veery calling in the woods and the aforementioned Eastern Wood-pewee, no birds were singing. The air was full of nothing but grasshopper noises. There were thousands of grasshoppers, and amazingly, I failed to get a picture of any. It's quite frankly a miracle that I could be so obtuse as to not photograph any of the dozen species I saw. Granted, the plant life, and something else, divested my attention. The round things in the above photo are cactus, wild cactus, Eastern Prickly Pear (Opuntia humifusa). On my last trip, they were in flower, and those brilliant yellow flowers, in late June, are standouts in the dull tan of the sand prairie. Rare this ecosystem may be, but colorful it never seems to be at any season.
This trip, however, nothing stunningly beautiful was in flower, so I contented myself with nonflowering plants, sort of. This preserve has one of the larger fruticose lichen populations in Illinois, one sign of its high quality. These half-fungi, half-algae masses take hundreds of years to build up this large of a population. However, the vertebrates I sought were not among them.
Wandering over to another section of the preserve, I found a piece of tin and flipped it, hoping for snakes or something else. There were about fifty big, strange, orange-legged crickets, and nothing else. As I walked away, I ran into a Yellow Garden Spider and turned around in retreat. Then, I ran into one of the strangest plants in the entire state:
Meet the Dodder (Cuscuta spp.), a parasitic vine that steal nutrients from all plants it touches. The white flowers and orange-tan vines in the photos above and below belong to this species. It often lacks belowground roots, rooting solely into the plants it parasitizes. I rarely encounter these, but as there are more than thirty species in Illinois, most considered agricultural pests, I will find more.
Alright, here's what I searched for most of the trip. Lizards! This preserve has large populations of Six-lined Racerunners (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus), one of Illinois' more interesting and colorful lizards. Under a juniper on the edge of the woods, I finally cornered one and photographed it.
They're called Racerunners for a reason; it took me a half-hour to track one long enough for a few decent photos. They blend in remarkably well, despite their bright coloration. The fastest way to find these shy lizards is to check around small bushes and trees along the edge between forest and prairie. I spotted half a dozen over the course of two hours.
After finding the lizards, I was satisfied, and decided to leave. However, on the way out, I discovered these two strange balls of vegetation, which appeared to be connected to a rosette (circle) of leaves growing beneath them. I have never seen anything like them, so I took a quick photo, only to find a Velvet Ant immediately afterwards and forget about the plants.
It's a pity that the Velvet Ant did not stop running away from me, as these are strange, rare, and colorful bugs. Orange and black, the size and shape of a bumblebee I didn't pick it up for another reason- Velvet Ants are known as Cow-Killers, and they have one of the most painful stings of any insect in Illinois. I'll link a picture, here, so you can see what they look like. Thankfully, they are quite rare, since they only live where they can parasitize ground-dwelling wasps' nests. Frankly, there's a lot of parasites on this sand prairie. I left, as a few of the human ones (deer flies) were getting to me. Evidently, I ran into a large amount of Poison Ivy, as I currently have it all over.
Despite this, the beauty of these sand and hill prairies draws me back. Each of these locations I've visited three times so far this year, and each time, I've discovered something new and completely bizarre. These wild and remote prairies, the last vestiges of ancient peoples and ecosystems, linger on, remaining glorious fields for exploration and discovery.
Ebird Checklists:
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S31406120
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S31405425
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