Midewin - 8.15.10, Post 1

This was so very clearly not the world's most thought out trip ever.
The Chicago weather had, theoretically, broken.  We were out of the 90's and into the lower 80's... or so the weatherman said.  So I wanted to get out and shoot.  And I wanted to get out of the city.

I did a little Google roulette and decided to try the Midewin National Tallgrass Preserve.  It's in Willmington, IL, just south of Joliet, an area I was familiar with since I used to live down there about 10 years ago.

Long story short, during World War II, Korea and Vietnam the military had a munitions manufacturing plant in this area.  They made TNT, bombs, shells, the whole nine yards.  In 1970 they shut down the plant.  It took them 25 years to clean the land of the contaminants and in 1995 the land became the property of the National Forest Preserve and it was turned back into a proper Illinois prairie.

It's a very, very large prairie with several different distinct ecosystems - savannah, woodlands, wetlands, etc...  And you need to drive from one to get to another.  It's very, very big.

Anyway...

Problem The First:  My cursory glance of the website did not reveal that the welcome center is not open at all on Sundays.  Guess when I went.  Of course.  But there was this nice little literature holder with a map of the park and some phone numbers.  I see one that says "After Hours" and call it to see if I can still hike even if the welcome center is closed and to see if there's a place to park, since the gate to the main parking lot was locked.  I called and got a machine.  I hung up, figuring that there was no one there.

So as I continue looking over the info I notice that it actually says, "Emergency and After Hours".  Oops.  I've hung up on an emergency number.  I really do know better than that.  So someone called back to make sure everything was okay and I apologized for being stupid and he told me that I could still hike and where I could park.  He was very nice in the face my huge Oops.

Problem The Second: The weatherman lied.  Hugely.  When I got back to my car after my hike it said it was 92 degrees.  I'd gone through all the water and Gatoraid in my bag and eaten all my pickles (I like to pack pickles with my lunch - they add water and salt :) by the time I got back.  Good thing I keep a gallon of drinking water in my car in the summer!  This is not the kind of place where you can just nip over to the nearest 7-11 and grab something.  There's a porta-potty in the parking lot.  That's the only 'convenience' outside of the (closed) welcome center.  In fact, you're so far out that each trailhead has sign in book so people will know you're out there.  In my 8 hours out there, I saw one couple on horseback and one guy on a bike.  That was it for the day.  (On the flip side, I did have a cell phone signal the whole time (except for IN the bunker) so I wasn't too freaked out about being in the great unknowns on my own.

Problem The Third: After having survived almost 38 years without ever getting a tick in my life, I saw the "Tick Area" signs and went, "Okay, note to self, brush off bugs."  And then continued to hike around in my shorts and t-shirt.  Yeah, I was all the way home when I realized I had a tick in the middle of my right calf.  I didn't feel a thing, so it's a very good thing that this little monster was somewhere where it was easily seen.  Anyway, this thing caused huge amounts of drama.  I called the E.R. and said, "I have a tick, I can't get it out."  They had me call my doctor, who of course, wasn't in on 6:30 at night on a Sunday.  So her service called her, she called me and the long and the short of it was I had to go to the E.R. to have it removed.

I hate anything that goes through my skin.  Needles, pins, BUGS!  So this thing had me pretty freaked out.  The nurse was great though and got it out completely painlessly.

But here's the part that sucks.  I'm on antibiotics for two weeks to make sure I don't get Lyme Disease.  I've read enough on Lyme Disease to know that I never, ever want to get it.  But wow, these drugs are no picnic either.  Both the E.R. doc and my doc insist that this one is the best one for the job, but my body really hates it.

So, you know... if you see Tick Area signs, take them very, very seriously.  Wear long sleeves and long pants, tuck your pants into your socks, the whole nine yards.

I have never been so grateful that I wear a bandana over my head almost every time I shoot.  I really don't want to think about one of those little blood-suckers being lost in my hair where I wouldn't be able to see it.

Problem the Fourth: If I did want to go back, it would be further into the fall, when it's cooler and the flora will have changed. Unfortunately, Midewin is also a hunting ground.  In the fall it's apparently deer season (Spring is turkey season - that said I didn't see one turkey or deer all day).  A.) I don't want to see people hunting deer.  I certainly don't want to see them succeed.  B.) I'm sure the park has it sorted, but I'm not entirely sure that I want to be hiking in the general vicinity of people shooting guns.

So!  Anyway, I spent the day out there doing a five mile trip around the Bunker Group 63 Loop.

While the munitions plant is gone, and obviously, so is anything that might blow up, the storage bunkers are still there.  Row after row after row of these things.

Throughout the grounds there are a few open ones.  They have signs on them that they can be used as inclement weather shelters.  I used one as a place to stop and eat lunch. :)  They aren't ridiculously huge, but they are smooth concrete.  The echoes in these things was amazing.  Just unzipping my bag made enough noise to echo for five or six seconds.

 Unless you're a huge insect fan, this place - at least the section I explored - was kind of a wash.  Lots and lots and lots of bugs (I got attacked by a swarm of - wait for it - butterflies!)  But other than the cows used to maintain the prairie (and kept behind barbed-wire away from the hiking paths), I didn't see a mammal all day.  But like I said, there was an insane number of insects.  Here's a little red ant on a Queen Anne's Lace.

[Ant's Anne Lace]

 Here's a bee on a milkweed plant.  I like how you can see, so clearly, the stripes on his abdomen.

[Milkweed Bee]

 The place is butterfly central.  If you want a place to catch 'flutterbies' in their natural environment, this totally is your place.  I this case a female black swallowtail feeds from a bull thistle.

[Floating Female Swallowtail]

 The prairie was pretty dry, so where there were ruts in the road, water tended to collect.  Around these little watering holes would be hundreds of butterflies.  These are Clouded Yellows.  With their wings open, they were maybe two inches tip to tip.  Very tiny.  And there were huge flocks of them all over the prairie.
[Clouded Yellow Butterflys Get Together for a Drink]

 I'm fairly sure this is an Eastern Tailed Blue Butterfly (though I found that name on a Wisconsin butterflies site - but I don't think Butterflies get caught up in the cheddar curtain or anything, so...).

Anyway, what I love about this shot is that not only is the little 1 inch butterfly a beautiful purple, so is his shadow!

[Me and My Purple Shadow]

 The Buckeye Butterflies were very calm and tended to land in the middle of the paths.


[Basking Buckeye]






Okay, that's post one.  More from this hike tomorrow. :)

Chicago Botanic Garden - 7.25.10 (2/2)

Okay, I thought it was odd that I'd only found ten shots from my last CBG trip that were good enough to post. So I went through the folder again. I had *edited* ten, but there were more. So here they are. :)

What made me think of it was these two shots. I knew I had some good rainbow shots and yet, I didn't have a 'rainbow' tag in my 'labels'. So I knew I'd forgotten to post something.

The color saturation here isn't so great, but I've never seen an almost perfectly horizontal rainbow before.

[Horizontal Rainbow]

This one was taken with a *just* slightly faster shutter (1/1000 here, 1/800 above), and a bit longer of a focal length and the color saturation was much better. Obviously I also changed position (the fountain was in the middle of a pond I was walking around), and the different angle helped as well.
[Fountain Rainbow]

So after about two months of searching the internet, I've discovered that this is a female red-winged blackbird. She was being highly cooperative from her perch on a purple coneflower.

[Not So Black Blackbird]

She even shifted to give me a very nice profile.

But there is some seriously weird stuff going on on that Y chromosome to make this bird (female)...
[Female Red Winged Blackbird on Coneflower]

... look like this bird (male of the same species.) (This shot from the North Pond)

I so adore this shot of a GIGANTIC green dragonfly. Not because he's so huge or so still, but because if you look at it closely, the light is coming in just right that you can see the *shadows* of his wing veins on the lilypad.

[Veins in Shadow]

Business end of a yellow-jacket. I spent about forty minutes chasing yellow-jackets around a pond trying to get just the right shot for the book I was working on for my nephew. (More on this later, in its own post, but the short version is, I made my nephew an alphabet animal book using only pictures I took myself. And I needed a good shot for Y. :) [Business end of a Yellow-Jacket]

This ended up being the shot I used. Clear shot of his wings, you can see how his thorax and abdomen are a.) not fuzzy and b.) very disjointed - which is how you know he's a wasp, not a bee. And check out those huge eyes.

[Yellow-Jacket Species Model]

I love these, but I somehow managed to forget to shoot the sign. I think they're a form of violet. Anyone have a clue?

[Perky Purples]

Another one I forgot to get the sign for. Looks like a pink fried egg. :)

[Pink Fried Egg Flower]








Okay, NOW I think that trip is done. :) What do you think?

The Magic Hedge - 7.20.10 (2/2)

Okay, here's the rest of the shots from my last walk in the Hedge...

I actually got in front a very large bee.  Check out the weird bee eyes!  I believe this is a Bull Thistle flower.

[Bee Eyes over Thistle]

Another chicory flower.  I love the way the tips of the stamens are such a bright white while the stalks are dark gray.

[Chicory Reaches Out]

A path near the hedge.

[Road Less Traveled]

A

A buckeye butterfly lands on some prairie grass.

[Buckeye Butterfly Takes a Breather]

This is a milkweed plant.

[Milkweed Stands Tall]

These are milkweed beetles.  Go figure.

[Milkweed Beetles on Namesake Flower]

A red admiral butterfly on a milkweed plant.

[Red Admiral on Milkweed]

I was worried about this bee for a while.  He was so still while I was shooting, I was afraid he was dead.  But not so much.  He crawled around after a few minutes, but his wings did seem pretty badly damaged.  I wonder if this is an 'old' bee?

[Old Bee on Anne's Lace]

The Magic Hedge - 7.20.10 (1/2)

I always love it when I go somewhere I've been before, especially if I've been there multiple times, and I find something new. When I hiked the Hedge last I found several species there that I'd never seen before.

I absolutely cannot Google a species on this bee.  I thought at first it might have been a queen, but that didn't seem to be it.  I can't tell how much of the yellow on the sides is pollen and how much might be actual bee fuzz.  If it's all pollen then it's probably a honking-huge carpenter bee with a TON of pollen on him, but if that's actual bee-fuzz... And these flowers don't have yellow pollen, so...  I'm stymied.  Anyone?
[Wide Angled Bee]

 A new species for me!  American Goldfinch.  I thought these things existed only in pet stores, seriously.  Or possibly somewhere far more tropical, like Brazil.  Chicago is not known for it's exotic and bright birdlife.  Mostly we have dirt-gray pigeons, you know?  Next I work on getting really *good* pictures of these guys.  But I was stoked to find him.  Actually I saw several before I left.

[The Goldfinch's Back]

Bug damage.  The plant this leaf-skeleton was attached to was seemingly healthy, but this leaf was *done in* by some kind of insect.  The resulting structure of veins is pretty interesting.

[Leaf Skeleton]

 Yet another new species!  This is a male downy woodpecker.  I'm a little fascinated by the way he can just stand on the tree and have his body be almost parallel to the ground.

[90 Degree Woodpecker]

 This is a root chicory flower.  They're everywhere in the Hedge now.  Yes, this is the stuff that gets ground up and used as fake-coffee-substitute in hotels and stuff.  Well, probably not the flower part, but this plant.  If you blow this up and look at the center, the pistol and stamen construction is pretty awesome.

[Chicory Blossom]

 Pine cones.  Lots and lots of pine cones.  I keep thinking this is the kind of shot that should be the background for something else or a computer wallpaper or something.

[Pine Cone Canopy]

 A tangle of native wildflowers.  Coneflowers, Queen Anne's Lace and Clover (I think the purple is clover, but if it is, it's really tall clover.)  That's Lake Michigan in the background.

[Prairie Flower Tangle]

 I've loved Queen Ann's Lace since I was a kid and they grew near the retention pond across the street from my house.  First of all, they're tough as nails.  Ever try to pick one?  Second of all, I love the flower-in-a-flower.  The little purple flower inside the big white one.  [Queen Anne's Lace]

 Queen Anne's Lace and Chickory growing together.  Things you learn from Google:  The root of the QAL is a wild carrot.  Who knew?

[Prairie Partners]

These are milkweed flowers.  There will be more about them in the second post from this walk.  But I love the monarch hanging off this one.

[Milkweed Monarch]








Ten pictures makes a post.  I'll post the rest of the shots from this walk next. :)

One to Miss: The Chinatown McStreetFair

Last year Chicago had a new election rule to follow.  They had to print all voting materials in Chinese as well as English and Spanish.  That's a pretty good indication that Chicago has a large, authentic Chinese population.  Most people who come to Chicago have heard of and often plan to visit our Chinatown neighborhood for some authentic Chinese food.  I've eaten there several times myself, and the food is fantastic.

So I really looked forward to getting a taste of Chinese culture at the Neighborhood Fair held in July.

This probably should have been my first hint that it wasn't going to be as traditional as I would have hoped:

It's sponsored by McDonald's.


To be fair, there were some things for sale that most people would regard as 'traditionally Chinese.'

And there are some examples of Chinese-style art:

And Chinese language signage:

 Though both the dragon art and the street signs are there all the time.  They weren't special for the Fair. 

For those not from Chicago, the brown street signs are 'honorary' street names.  They aren't actually used for anything but confusing people.  There was a tragic case of a person with a mental disability trying to call 9-1-1 and report her position, but she only knew the honorary name of her street and couldn't give her 'real address' to the operator, who couldn't locate a 'real street' based on the other name.

But for the most part, what you saw at this street fair was things like this:

 I later discovered that these necklaces had something to do with an anime I've never heard of before (and couldn't tell you if it's Chinese, Japanese, Korean or other).  Personally I just looked at them and went, "That's exactly what we need to be selling to our children in a city with an off-the-charts murder rate."  *sigh*.  Schools are going to have issues with these.

 And then there was a lot of this.  Just *stuff* for sale.  Like a drug store had belched out aisle 12 and 13 into the streets.  A lot of this stuff was probably made in China, but that's probably as "Chinese" as they get.  I mean, really, Q-tips?  Mug holders?  Ziplock bags?

I think these were the only pandas I saw.  Not that expected to see someone walking Sing-Sing on a leash or anything, but I'm not even sure I saw a stuffed animal.  Also, $2 for one cookie?  Ouch.

And the real mind-boggler?  On the center stage... Brazilian Samba Dancers.  Not that they weren't good or anything, but... I thought this was about Chinatown. 

Photographically speaking, I like this one for the stop-motion of the girl's flip.

 Oh, and here's a booth of either Mexican or Guatemalan goods.  Again, not what I'd think to find in Chinatown.

So I'm pretty sure I'll give this one a pass next year (if they have it again).  Maybe I just have a preconceived notion of what one should find in a well-known Chinatown, but this really was a big bust.

Chicago Botanic Garden - 7.25.10

So one of the great things about the Chicago Botanic Garden is that it changes monthly (or so) as new flowers go in and others go out of season.  When I went in the spring it was all about the bulb flowers - daffodils, tulip and the like.  Last month there were a lot more perennials like roses.

I fell in love with the water lilies, also known as lotus flowers.

Here's one with a bee on it. Nope... wait... Google tells me that's a yellow jacket.  A wasp, not a bee at all. [Yellow Jacket on a Lily in the Evening]

Same flower, different lighting.  I took this trip with a friend and we started near the lilies and ended there too.  Over the course of about six hours the lighting changed from full daylight around noon to evening light.  What a difference! And still attracting the yellow jackets.  This one makes me think of a watercolor.   [Water Lily at Midday]

An eastern pondhawk dragonfly on an opening lily. [Dragonfly on Lotus]

 I love the abstract made from isolating a small part of the lotus flower.  The white/pink tips, the shadows...

[Inner Lotus]

 Here's one in context.

[Lotus Unfolds]

I love this one not only because it's purple, but because you can see the yellow through the purple petals at the bottom.

[Purple and Yellow Lotus]

  Check out this bee!  None of my resources seem to be able to tell me what kind he is.  In other shots I got of him I was able to see that he has one yellow band behind his head and two on his lower abdomen.  He's fuzzy from shoulder to stinger.  That tan patch that looks like it's on his back is actually on the top joint of his leg.  Anyone have a clue? [Big Bee in Midflight]

These lilies are about the size of a small dinner plate.  Huge!  They're called Magic Lilies.
[Magic Lilies]

Here's one in isolation.  I love how the pistol and stamen are so prominent in this flower.

[Magic Lily Stretches for the Sky]

The roses were out and gorgeous, but the sun was so intense that day and at that time, that they were really tough to shoot.

[Peach Rosebud Unfolds]






Alright, ten pictures make a post.  Just a quick note to let you all know that my photography is for sale at my etsy site (http://www.etsy.com/shop/WizardAtWork).  If there's a shot you see here on the blog that you'd like a copy of, please let me know and we'll set that up. :)