Alex Palmer's Natural History Notes and Thoughts

When you think of Chicago, you probably don't think of sand dunes, prairies, or large oak trees.  Yet despite Chicago being the third largest city in the United States and heavily impacted by urban sprawl and industrial blight, there remains thousands of acres of greenspace with wetlands, open woods, sandy beaches...and some rather surprising flora. The pictures below were not shot in Arizona nor in Southwest California, but were in fact taken at the 63rd street beach on a recently restored sand dune near Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois.  They are the eastern prickly pear cactus ( Opuntia humifusa ) . Figure 1:  Eastern prickly pear cactus, a native plant to the Chicago region and the only native cactus to the Great Lakes area.   The genus Opuntia is much more common out west where they have many different species, but in the Great Lakes and Midwest regions, the eastern prickly pear is the only native cactus.  It tends to be a little bit smaller than its western counterp

The Chicago skyline, as seen from Promontory Point Park along Lake Michigan.  September 9, 2014.  Click on image to enlarge.   Besides being common places for young couples to smooch, I believe urban skyline overlooks like the one pictured above are popular for another reason:  their perspective.  When we spend time in a big city, we forget about the world around us.  In fact, the rush of traffic, the shadows of tall high rises, anxious corporate executives blabbing on their cell phones, homeless bums shaking a cup for money, a loose bag of trash spilling out onto the street, sooty puddles filling potholes on the road, and the roar of helicopters overhead provide a perfect storm of congestion and stress that some of us come to believe is the world. Yet when we look at all of this from a distance, we can start to put things in perspective.  All of the chaos of urban life seems to fit between our fingertips as we gaze across a green and blue landscape with the skyline miles away.