A white-flowered thistle is a rarity in itself. This silvery-leaved species, well adapted to sandy soils and harsh lakeshore conditions, has been gravely threatened by
habitat destruction.
Ray Wiggers'
Natural History Newsletter
- July 2006 Edition -
(Unless otherwise indicated, the photos herein were taken by Raymond Wiggers and are
copyrighted by him. They may not reproduced or otherwise used without permission.)
Dear Friends,
I hope the first half of this year has been as full of activity, learning, and interesting people for you as it has been for me. It's a pleasant thing to report that the Natural History Exploration Guild has attracted more appreciative attention, in terms of both event attendance and media coverage, than in any other stretch of its short, two-year history. I've been working at fever pitch to get the word out, and many of you have helped very significantly as well. To all of you who've attended recent courses, tours, and lectures -- and especially to those of you who promoted the Guild to others, my special thanks.
Our event schedule for the remainder of the year is now on view on the Tours, Courses, and Lectures pages of this site; those pages also provide links to the corresponding sections of the Guild's site. Upcoming activities including a fossil dig in La Salle County, Illinois (where last year one member of our group found a magnificent, 300-million-year-old shark's tooth), a Friday-to-Monday exploration of the naturalist's paradise that is downstate Indiana, and a class in prairie-plant identification at the incomparable Goose Lake Prairie, near Morris, Illinois. Incidentally, many of these offerings will be happening very soon -- as early as this weekend -- so if you're interested in any of them, act quickly. And of course I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.
PART I. NONLINEAR SERMONS & SOLILOQUIES
A. On Rare Plants and the Rain's Return
If last year in the upper Midwest was a drought, literally and perhaps also metaphorically for some of us, then the rainy spring and early summer of this year have been its undoing. There are a few signs of lasting damage done by the preceding dryness -- I've seen some great old oaks, which for so many years have stood as miracles of resilience, now dying back in sad decline. But otherwise, so many signs of superabundant expansion: clouds of wildflowers on misted river bluffs, prairie milkweeds and forest basswoods in the heaviest bloom ever, and intermittent streams still running at depth in early July. These are geobotanical boom times, both in terms of nature's outer landscape and the inner ecology of the naturalist's mind.
Perhaps it's coincidental, but I'm also coming across a quite a few remarkably rare plants. They'r rare in the sense that:
- they have been given official "endangered" or 'threatened" status, or
- I've found them in places the botanical authorities haven't recorded them previously, or
-while they may be seen fairly frequently, they're usually not encountered in the large numbers I've seen them lately.
Are these species making their big comeback, or have I finally just been in the right place at the right time? I earnestly hope for the former and highly suspect the latter. But the rain surely must be playing some role.
As a young student I found only one truly redeeming thing in elementary school -- that thing being that long-awaited Friday-afternoon Show-and-Tell period when I could inflict my various enthusiasms on my fellow classmates. Alas, even now I still find myself flipping into that boyish look-what-I've-found mode all too easily. Still, in human society rare plants and animals have a certain patina to them, a certain translatable worth, as though our brains must be hardwired to the supply-and-demand ethic even in ecology. So I trust you'll find the Show-and-Tell format that follows something more than a dry list of one wanderer's special luck.
Rarity Number One: Castelleja sessiflora (Downy Yellow Painted Cup)
Figwort Family = Scrophulariaceae
PART II. REVIEWS IN THE REALM OF NATURAL HISTORY
Books: The Art of Geographical and Polemical Photography
A few years ago, the City of Chicago hosted a remarkable outdoor exhibit of the aerial landscape photos of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. At least two books have been assembled from this breathtaking collection: the large, coffee-table-format Earth from Above, and the smaller but chunkier Earth from Above: 366 Days (Harry Abrams, publisher; ISBN 0810944499). I intend to get the former very soon; I already have the latter, which I've nicknamed Earth Above Lite. It weighs 5.3 pounds and, given its slablike 6.5" x 9.5" x 2" dimensions, somewhat resembles, in shape and density, the great mesa shown on its cover.
366 Days combines Arthus-Bertrand's stunning views of urban and rural settings with ecologically oriented narratives by various commentators. The photos are grouped into chapters named after the months of the year, for reasons that so far completely elude me. (Why, for example, does January contain a beautiful fall-foliage shot of the Quebecois forest?) Nevertheless, the profound visual impact of the images themselves sweep away all such editorial quibbles.
While I wouldn't recommend this book as bedtime reading for the staff of the Heritage Foundation -- such impious chapter subtitles as "Sustainable Development: A Project for Civilization," "Abolishing Poverty," and "Climate Change or Climate Shock?" make this an obvious affront to those who share Dick Cheney's worldview -- less grasping souls and more open minds will find the photos and the factually rich captions both inspiring and alarming. There are few things Americans can do to actually see the rest of the world without leaving their own country; reading this book is one of them. For more on Arthus-Bertrand's impressive body of work, visit his website.
PART III. WIGGERS' WONDERS
(Dedicated to to the Principle That Whatever
Springs to Mind Must Be Worth Something)
PART V. THIS ISSUE'S PARTING QUOTATION
With kind regards,
Ray Wiggers
Essay in Plant Architecture. This photo, taken by Chicago-based Guild member Beth Johnson, provides an artist's-eye-view of the spiraling phyllotaxy (arrangement of leaves along their stem) of this mature Agave americana plant in the Gar-field Park Conservatory. Ms. John-son, whose professional work in-cludes the design of outstanding corporate and personal websites. Newsletter readers interested in learning more about her design services may use this link to learn more about her portfolio and other recent work.
A Celebrity 'Shroom. One great advan-tage of this especially rainy warm season in the Upper Midwest is that mushrooms are springing up everywhere. And yes, that's a good thing, our national pen-chant for fungiphobia notwithstanding. On a recent walk along the crest of a northeastern-Illinois ravine, I saw a re-markably diverse array of chanterelles, boletes, and other fungi -- including a large colony of the world's most recog-nized and reproduced mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. While this species is usually portrayed in its red-capped form, this specimen is the pale-yellow variety, formosa. It isn't as overtly lethal as some of its close relatives, but it definitely is poisonous.
A Case of Litho-Mimicry. Persons looking at this ornamental panel on a building in the Hyde Park section of Chicago might well wonder how pink granite, with its varicolored mineral content, can be carved into such an intricate pattern. In fact, this is a cleverly crafted replica -- molded terra cotta (baked and glazed baked clay) that mimics granite so artfully that even a geologist has to stop to ascertain its true identity. This is probably an example of the Pulsichrome product developed and marketed by the American Terra Cotta Company.
B. Focus on Building Stone: The "Rainbow Granite"
(The First Installment in an Occasional Series)
Planning and running all these events in a competent and appealing way involves a tremendous amount of effort. But the payoff in terms of good company and fresh perspectives gained makes this --so help me -- one of the best things a human being could possibly do with his life.
One last introductory note, especially to my educator friends who are reading this. In the past month I have become a certified Professional Provider for the Illinois State Board of Education. This means that the various training sessions and other learning activities that I provide (including those that are Guild-sponsored) can be the source of continuing-education credit for teachers in Illinois public schools. If you'd like to learn more about the earth-science, life-science, and field-trip enrichment programs I provide, just drop me a line. I'd be delighted to discuss the matter with you.
AN OUTSTANDING FIND: a 300-million-year-old shark's tooth found on last year's La Salle County Fossil Finder's trip. We return to the same fossil-rich site this Saturday 15 July. (Photo taken and graciously provided by Guild member Clifford Watson.)
This easily overlooked cousin of the much showier and more common Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja coccinea) has a ghostly elegance and the symmetrical form of a miniature shrub.
Rarity Number Two: Cirsium pitcheri (Pitcher's Thistle)
Aster Family = Asteraceae
Rarity Number Three: Napaea dioca (Glade Mallow)
Mallow Family = Malvaceae
Recently, when Guild member Kendall Winter and I were botanizing off the beaten track, we experienced one of those increasingly uncommon
what-the-devil-am-I-looking-at moments -- we discovered a wildflower
species neither of us have ever seen before. And this was no shy, ground-hugging species with insignificant flowers. Instead, it was a tall-growing relative of the hibiscus, with clusters of white flowers and
distinctive, digitate, and sawtoothed leaves.
Rarity Number Four: Jeffersonia diphylla (Twinleaf)
Barberry Family = Berberidaceae
It's always a thrill to come across this species, named
for our illustrious third president. But this is the first
time I've discovered hundreds of these strange-leaved plants
in a single locale. This photo shows just one patch of
several that are thriving in this shady woodland close
to the waters of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
How one's conception of the passage of time changes as one gets a bit older! I remember how, when I was a child, a single hour of a somnolent summer's afternoon could seem an eternity. Now, looking back in my fifty-third year, the 1970s strike me as being a fairly recent chapter of my life. My college students can hardly believe I could say such a thing.
It was in the late Seventies, however, that I, newly returned to the Chicago area after four years of Navy duty overseas, had a personal epiphany. One summer's afternoon, after hiking in a suburban forest preserve, I paused for a moment on an expressway overpass. There, looking toward the south, I saw a small slice of the Chicago skyline, including the Sears Tower, in the distance. Directly below me lay a stretch of concrete roadway under heavy repair: lanes blocked off, jackhammers pounding, trucks raising clouds of dust as they moved across the exposed roadbed. Nothing could be farther from the quiet woods and lagoon I'd just left. Yet for some odd reason a Latin phrase popped into my head: Nihil extra naturam! Nothing can possibly exit outside of nature, however outrageously unnatural it may seem. The swarms of workers in their hardhats, the deafening machines they used, the great concrete trench they were rebuilding, were all in their own way as much the products of extended organic evolution as the bird-haunted woodland a few blocks to the east of them. That is not to say that I thought (or now think) that both settings are equally as desirable or redeeming to the human soul. But they, like everything else properly considered, have their connections.
This strange attitude of mine probably has it roots in summer days years previous, when my father took me, a gradeschooler, to his office in the LaSalle-Wacker Building in downtown Chicago. In those glorious times parents still allowed their young to disappear for a while and conduct their own unsupervised explorations. I used my temporary liberation from adultdom well: I'd head for the stairwell and bolt the whole way up to the small observation deck at the old skyscraper's forty-one-story summit. To my child's mind, the cityscape I beheld from that high perch was more than a sprawling vista of river, bridges, offices, warehouses, and city streets. It was a vast living thing -- part mountain range, part forest, part coral reef; the people far below reduced to their true scale. It was same the kind of perspective I'd been given on plane flights and family trips to the Rockies. It made sense to me the way the closer vistas of manicured lawns and carefully spaced street trees of suburbia never did.
Ever since, I have felt that same perverse sense of pervasive nature in the hearts of truly monumental cities -- be they Chicago, Venice, Istanbul, or Manhattan. And my devotion to geology has aided and abetted this feeling. After all, in the stone urban architects use for cladding and veneer of their buildings lie a thousand stories of farflung regions in different spans of geologic time. Thus my enduring fascination with architectural geology, and with building stone specifically.
In picking an architecturally significant rock type to begin this series with, I can think of no better choice than that which is the both the most ancient and the most flamboyant in its appearance. I refer to the Morton Gneiss (pronounced nice), a highly contorted metamorphic rock quarried in the valley of the Minnesota River. I have already mentioned this bedrock locality and its astounding age -- 3.6 billion years -- in my December 2004 Newsletter. What I haven't described is its stone's architectural appeal, which has earned it the trade name of Rainbow Granite. Composed of an undulating and in places almost dizzying swirl of large feldspar crystals and other cream, pink, and black minerals, the Morton Gneiss is also notable for its xenoliths -- large chunks of even older, mafic rocks trapped within it. Most suitable in its structural properties for use as dimension stone, the Morton Gneiss takes a high polish and is admirably resistant to the destructive forces of weathering. Or so I infer from the buildings clad in it, some of which have withstood more than seventy Midwestern winters without noticeable deterioration.
To see this oldest surviving bedrock in the United States, one can make the pilgrimage to its namesake town in southwestern Minnesota, as I have done three times now. Besides exploring the low rounded outcrops there and the debris piles on the flank of the now-inactive quarry, one can see the finished product on the town's welcome signs (see photo directly above) and in the exterior of what must be the one most geologically impressive package-goods store on the entire planet (photo directly below).
The small town of Morton, Minnesota may have been founded just one hundred and twenty-two years ago, but the bedrock revealed in its outcrops and quarries dates back a bit farther -- some 3,600 million years, in fact, to the mysterious first quarter of Earth history. This sign, made of locally quaried stone, displays its exotic qualities, which cannot be diminished even by the god-awful shrubs plugged in beneath it.
It may not harmonize with the brickwork cornice or that unequivocal awning, but who cares? It's the Holiest of Holies, the Morton Gneiss. What other liquor-store exterior takes you back to the early Archean Eon?
But there are also some excellent examples of the Morton Gneiss on outdoor display in downtown Chicago. Chief among these is the magnificent 333 North Michigan Avenue building, designed by Holabird and Root and completed in 1928. This Art Deco skyscraper, which stands on the southern bank of the Chicago River, has a ground-level exterior that features the Morton Gneiss to amazing effect:
In this particular panel, passed by thousands of shoppers and tourists each week, an angular xenolith, surrounded by concentric rings of lighter minerals, appears to be caught in the act of melting, with one of its tips drawn out like a stretched strand of salt-water taffy.
The contradiction with our present mode of development is glaring. We have disrupted all the main biogeochemical cycles in the biosphere. . . . Our obsession with short-term wealth thus leads to long-term disturbance of the system Earth.
-Dominique Bourg, in Earth from Above: 366 Days (see review, above)
A new suburban housing development, seen from the lower slope of the Moyers Landfill Superfund site, Eagleville, Pennsylvania. According to this U.S.E.P.A. briefing sheet: "From 1940 to 1981, [the Moyers site] accepted an unknown quantity of municipal and industrial wastes. In May 1982, the past owner and operator of the landfill was convicted of negligently allowing leachate to discharge to Skippack Creek. Among the pollutants were metals, including lead and arsenic, and a variety of organic chemicals." At the time of my visit to this site in 2004, most if not all of these homes were occupied by families busily pursuing the American Dream.
