Weekly commentaries on the environment and appreciating the natural world, by Rob Kanter from the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University of Illinois.
At last year’s plant sale by the conservation group Grand Prairie Friends, nearly 1,400 milkweed seedlings were sold. Why all the milkweed? It’s the only genus of plants on which the caterpillars of monarch butterflies feed and develop. Knowing that monarch populations are in trouble, people here and across the country are doing what they can to create monarch havens in their own back yards.
A variety of birds have been migrating through central Illinois since February. During the late winter and early spring something like 240 species of birds belonging to 39 families pass this way. But for most birders, the highlight of spring is songbird migration, and that becomes most intense over the next few of weeks.
One of the early season highlights of birding in central Illinois is the widespread return in March of a bird called the American woodcock.
People who go looking for beauty in the woodlands of central Illinois tend to get excited about the months of April and May, when showy beauties like Virginia bluebells carpet the woodland floor. But if you wait until April to get out, you may already be a month late for the emergence of the first flower of spring.
The ideal landscape for Canada geese includes a pond with an island in the middle, surrounded by a level monoculture of turf grass that slopes gently to the water’s edge. But such a landscape supports very little other native wildlife. Not that the geese would care much.
In much of Illinois heavy rains in late February and early March trigger an astonishing and ancient natural phenomenon—the annual congregation of amphibians in the waters where they breed.
Most people who can tell the difference between tree species in the summer have difficulty in winter because they’re naked — the trees, that is, not the people. The goal of the winter tree identification hike at Allerton Park goal was to teach participants other cues to tell them apart.
Teaching geology in east central Illinois is complicated - mostly by the fact that nearly all of our rock is covered by 300-foot deep glacial deposits
Rob Kanter recounts the many first experiences with different wildlife he had in 2014
At the Middle Fork River Forest Preserve, Rob Kanter saw a pair of birds he had never before seen - whooping cranes
RSS Link