Fall 2001

Here's what's debuting this season on nature's stage in Chicago Wilderness

by Jack MacRae

SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER

Seedy Business
Unless you want funky tasting burritos, you won’t want to confuse habañeros (the stunningly hot chile peppers) with habeneria (a stunningly beautiful group of fringed orchids). Faithful readers of this magazine know our special region is home to many orchids, although none are found in sizeable numbers. The sad truth is the populations of some local orchids can be counted on your fingers. While their showy blossoms are summer delights, autumn is the time for orchids to disburse their microscopic seeds; a stiff wind will blow tens of thousands of dust-like seeds away from the parent plant. Only on the rarest of conditions will an orchid seed produce a new plant. In addition to the basic (but little understood) requirements of moisture and sunlight, fringed orchid seeds require soil with the appropriate endomycorrhizal fungi that will establish a symbiotic relationship with the embryonic orchid. The fungus will supply the new plant with sugars necessary for growth, effectively replacing photosynthesis during this stage of development.

Wild Rice-a-Roni
Centuries ago during warm, early fall days, local women would maneuver large, ungainly dugout canoes — burned and chipped from cottonwood logs — through our marshes. The ladies might have been collecting wild rice, an emergent grass with nutritious seeds heads. Wild rice may not have been the food staple it was in native villages to the north, but around here it might have been served as a side dish with venison, roast duck, turkey, cranberries, corn, beans, squash, smoked fish, and steamed mussels. Dessert may have been wild plum compote served on hickory nut bread. Dang! A Chicago Wilderness meal of 400 years ago certainly sounds more appetizing, let alone healthier, than the mutton, haggis, and shortbread my ancestors were eating in the west highlands of Scotland.

OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER

Air Offense
Jaegers are hawk-like sea birds. They specialize in mid-air assault and theft of fish that were caught by other bird species. Ornithologists call this behavior kleptoparasitism. Joe Friday would call it strong-arm robbery. Most of the time, jaegers are far away, patrolling the oceans. But during autumn, a few parasitic jaegers (and even less frequently pomarine and long-tailed jaegers) are spotted as they migrate south over Lake Michigan. Inevitably, these wandering jaegers are funneled over points along the north Indiana shoreline, where their swift appearance in the sky scatters the resting gulls and ducks like a fox in the barnyard.

Jaegers — and other notable migrants such as red loons and assorted diving ducks — may be seen during October and November at the parks found along the Indiana lake shore (e.g. Miller Park in Gary), especially on the days immediately following a cold front. Bundle up! The best days for jaeger spotting are also some of the coldest, as the north winds blow uninterrupted down our great lake.

Winter Roommates
It doesn’t sound the least bit cozy, but those chimney-topped tunnels constructed by prairie crayfish might be getting crowded soon. An assortment of animal life use crayfish holes as hibernation sites. The special creatures that join our clawed crustaceans in their dank lairs may include endangered reptiles such as Graham’s crayfish snake (who may eat his hole-mate come spring) and the little Massassauga rattlesnake.

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER

Mouse Details
Other than a few hockey players, meadow jumping mice are our only local mammals with 18 teeth. (Most rodents have 16 teeth, you know.) But while the winter athletic season is just getting started, our little, long tail rodents are done with their jumping for the year and now ready for a long nap through the winter. During November, meadow jumping mice will retire into a deep tunnel that leads below the frost line, where they will curl into a tight ball, and remain cold and motionless until next spring. Not abundant, but found in a variety of natural habitats, meadow jumping mice escape danger by leaping away like bite-sized kangaroos, rather than scurrying, as most mice tend to do.

Hawk Eared
Early winter is a good time for spotting northern harriers as they hunt over our open grasslands and marshes. Soaring low on their long wings, these sleek hawks sweep back and forth, methodically and efficiently covering miles of unbroken prairie. Surprisingly, harriers are not looking for their prey; they are listening for it. Noisy rabbits, voles, and mice are easy targets for the acrobatic harriers, which are able to swoop in swiftly after locating their meal by ear.

Some northern harriers enter our region after spending the summer in the treeless areas of northern Canada. They are prairie predators that roost on the ground, sometimes in small groups. They probably benefit from the removal of the box elder trees from the old, overgrown fence rows that crisscross our natural areas.

Hollywood Owl
I have been inundated with requests from young readers to write about the “guaranteed” sighting of “white owls” throughout the area after November 16. Of course, they are referring to the opening of the new Harry Potter film, in which Harry acquires a pet white owl named Hedwig (played in the film by Ook the Snowy Owl). All right, to be honest, I have received only two requests,
those being from my two boys.

It’s doubtful that Steven Spielberg is aware that the premier date for the film is also the approximate date for people to start seeing snowy owls in our area. Last year around this time, a magnificent immature snowy owl hung out in Lincoln Park, where it was admired by hundreds of park visitors for a few weeks before taking off for parts unknown. (See CW, Winter ‘01 for photographs.)