Alex Palmer's Natural History Notes and Thoughts

The next time you visit the Taylor Street Farms, and urban organic community garden in Chicago's Little Italy area of the University Village neighborhood , I want you to do something.  On a nice sunny spring day, I want you to sit somewhere in the middle of the garden, anywhere you'd like, and close your eyes.  As you close your eyes, imagine that you are sitting in this same spot 200 years ago.  You look around and for miles you see nothing but tall grass prairie gradually descending into a marsh fed by the blue waters of Lake Michigan.  Try to tune out the sounds of trucks and honking cars and imagine those sounds being replaced with the trill calls of  thousands of Sandhill Cranes flying overhead as a gentle breeze brushes your ear.  You hear the warm, sweet song of a bright orange Baltimore Oriole singing from the tops of a 500 year-old Bur Oak tree which is surrounded by blooming yellow-lady-slipper orchids.  You are in pre-colonial Chicago....

This blog post consists of my notes from a lecture about Mustelids of Cook County, which was presented by Chris Anchor, wildlife biologist with the Forest Preserves of Cook County.  The presentation took place at Sand Ridge Nature Center in South Holland, Illinois on February 16, 2018 and was presented to an audience that consisted mostly of naturalists and resource management specialists from local Forest Preserves and affiliated non-for-profit organizations.   Mustelids, or weasels, include weasels, otters, and mink, among others.  At one point, skunks were classified as members of the weasel family, but are now considered their own unique group of mammals.  The Forest Preserves of Cook County has been actively tracking and monitoring weasels and other fur bearers for many years now.  Weasels are most often tracked using radio-transmitters.  All native weasels are voracious predators and will often hunt down more than their fa...

Many of us have heard that one of the benefits of protecting forests is for cleaner air.  That's because trees take in carbon dioxide, and through the process of photosynthesis, trees exchange carbon dioxide with oxygen, which we need in our air in order to breath.  Protected natural lands like forest preserves help ensure that we have spaces for trees and flowers to grow so that we can reap the benefits of cleaner, fresher air.  But did you know forests and other ecosystems also help to clean our water?  The various plants that grow in forest preserve woodlands, prairies, wetlands, and other natural areas help to soak up billions of gallons of rainfall every time we have a major rainstorm.  According to the National Audubon Society, inland wetlands alone provide over $1.6 annually in water-quality protection in the United States!  Plants, like all living things, need water.  Without water, plants and other living organisms would dehydrate and loos...

Introduction It's that time of year again!  Cooler temperatures, the low hum of leftover crickets and katydids in the trees, pumpkin spice everything, and that sweet smell of decaying leaves that permeates local parks and yards.  But best of all are the striking fall colors in parks and woodlots across the northeastern United States (figure 1).   Figure 1:  Fall color at sunset at Sand Ridge Nature Center in Illinois, 2016.   Every fall in eastern forests, what was once a garden of green transforms to a gallery of color, ranging from bright yellow to blood red to a variegated orange.  The glory doesn't last long, and soon the trees are barren and browned as dried leaves flutter to the forest floor (or into your gutters or on your car's windshield!).   I've always had a love-hate relationship with fall, and in an earlier blog post I admitted my distaste for nature's summer finale.  But the one thing I will agree on with ...

So you want to date a naturalist.  Or perhaps you are already dating one. Who can blame you?  Naturalists have a dreamy and wondrous sense of the world.  They are always observing what's around them, taking time to look at each flower, each rock, every bird that passes by, often expressing colorful admiration for every butterfly or moth that flutters past.  And more often than not naturalists are an open book, happily telling you about the amazing natural wonders around them, and opening your mind to things you might have never have known.  And naturalists are always eager to get outside, rain or shine, to explore a new trail or to try and catch a new frog species with a child-like sense of enthusiasm and excitement. Yes, we naturalists are dreamy, free-spirited, and curious creatures.  But unless you too are naturalist , you may find some of our behaviors a little bit excessive at times.  Perhaps an 8 mile hike up a steep ravine isn't necessarily ...

In a picture-perfect world, I would only deliver picture-perfect interpretive programs at my site on subjects I am deeply knowledgeable and passionate about.  But as a close colleague of mine bluntly stated to me once, "Sometimes as interpretive naturalists we don't always have the luxury of doing only the programs that we like to do." Most naturalists that I've worked with would consider themselves generalists who know a little bit about everything, from plants, to insects, to local history, to everything in between.  However, there are some topics that are more of a specialty or some than for others.  For example, I know a lot about salamanders, but I would actually consider my coworker more of the "herp specialist" since he has studied herpetology more extensively than myself.  As such, he is often the one to lead our reptile and amphibians programs at my nature center.  In contrast, I am generally considered by others to be more well-versed on  the su...

One aspect of my profession as an interpretive naturalist is that I love is that there are never-ending opportunities to learn new things. And it's often the visitors of the nature center where I work that ask the most interesting questions.  Below is my response to a question a recent visitor asked.  A common sighting on a warm, sunny day in the Chicago region is Painted Turtles ( Chrysemys picta ) basking on a log in a shallow pond or slow-moving stream.  These stoic critters can appear rather lazy as they slouch in the sun, but as cold-blooded reptiles they must fire up their metabolism by absorbing heat from the sun.  An admirer who approaches too close to a basking turtle will witness an otherwise motionless creature plunge into the water and out of sight in a split-second.   But during the spring and fall, Painted Turtles are often encountered in rather unexpected places, such as along a trail, across a grassy field, and unfortunately along ...