10/31/12

State Symbols (Part 1)

State Dance
Illinoyances chose the Square Dance as their state dance. So did the citizens of 22 other states. In fact, due to its popularity, our esteemed legislators in Washington, D.C. have introduced 30 different bills in the past century to make this this official national dance of the United States. For various reasons, the bill never gets passed. If a Republican authors the bill, Democrats claim it demeans women and marginalizes non-white minorities. If the bill comes from a Democrat, Republicans fear it signifies another form of governmental control over our lives. I mean, if the government can tell us what dance to dance, where will it end?

Deirdre
Better question: where did it begin? Square dancing, I mean, not Big Government. Seventeenth century England, of course. Come to think of it, that would answer either question. The early English settlers brought from England the rural dance craze known as the Morris Dance. Everybody was doing it.

Morris Dancers:

Simon Knights
Only, the Morris Dance had specific steps that the dancers had to memorize, which wasn't very democratic, so Americans had one person call out the steps to the dancers. Sound familiar? By the 1800s, the Morris Dance had evolved into a form very similar to the Square Dance we know and love today. But, as the 1800s progressed, the Square Dance fell out of favor with the kiddos. They prefered the Polka and the Waltz, dances which allow you to cozy up next to that special someone without raising any eyebrows. Let's face it. The Square Dance just isn't as sexy as the Polka.

Enter Henry Ford. When he wasn't inventing cars or making rubber out of Goldenrods, he was cultivating an appreciation of America's past. He wanted to preserve New England heritage and at the same time modernize it. He's the man responsible for the edgy and hip modern form of the Square Dance. Popularity swelled until the 1940s when it became a full fledged fad. We're talking on par with the Macarena or the Electric Slide.

Public Domain
The renewed interest in Square Dancing fueled a thirst for other parts of folk culture and led to the Folk Revival of the 1950s. The Folk Revival gave us singers like Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, and yes... Bob Dylan.

State Fossil
The Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium). Coming from Texas, where we have the Chupacabra, I was intrigued at the idea of an Illinois Monster. Then I saw a picture. Francis Tully discovered the first fossil in 1958 in Grundy County (not the Grundy County of John Michael Montgomery fame, it pains me to say: that one's in Tennesee).

Ghedoghedo
Since then, over 100 fossils of this little monster have been found along Mazon Creek, a tributary to the Illinois River that flows through Grundy County. Due to the importance of the Mazon Creek Deposits, the government declared it a National Historic Site.

The area features a large shale deposit. Shale is basically fossilized mud. That's important. If a T-Rex croaks on the savannah, scavengers and bacteria eat everything but the bones. When you go to a museum, you can see its skeletal structure, but you don't know anything about its skin, organs, feathers (yes, they had feathers, but that's a different discussion altogether). Those things that get eaten away are called soft tissues.

If a critter kicks the bucket and sinks into some soft mud, where the scavengers can't sniff it out and the bacteria can't breathe, the soft tissue gets preserved. That's why Mazon Creek is so important: it used to be a giant mudhole. So, we have soft tissue preserved for prehistoric organism that aren't found anywhere else in the world.

At Mazon Creek, scientist have found ancient mosses, ferns, ginkos. They've also found worms, jellyfish, crustaceans, snails, and Tully Monsters.

The Monster itself measured about a foot long, had a weird little proboscis with teeth and wimpy little arm things. The teeth indicate that the monster was a savage killing machine, so I'm sure there were creatures smaller than a foot that were terrified of it.

Apokryltaros
For more information about Mazon Creek:
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/mazon_creek/MazonCreekSite.html

10/18/12

Boulware Tree Review

So, we've seen Boulware. I wanted to devote a short post to some of the trees I found there.

The first, the Shingle Oak (Quercus imbricaria), is the least oaky of all the oaks. It has simple pinnate leaves that are long and oval like a laurel's leaves. The species name imbricaria comes from the Latin word meaning overlapping. Why? Early white settlers used the wood from this tree to make overlapping shingles for the roofs of their houses. We still call it the Shingle Oak today.



I've seen several American Sycamores (Platanus occidentalis) growing in my neighborhood. Don't get it twisted. When Europeans talk about Sycamores, they mean the Scottish Maple (Acer pseudoplatanus). See the Scientific name? It means fake sycamore. Only American Sycamore are real sycamores. If you read the word sycamore in the Bible, the writer meant neither the Sycamore nor the Maple, he meant the fig tree (Ficus carica). When Jesus curses the fig tree (Mark 11:12-14), he's cursing a sykon (the Greek word for fig).


For some reason, we call the American Sycamore by a name derived from the Greek for fig (sykon) and mulberry (morus). It's a complete mess and no one knows how this happened. It has simple palmate leaves very similar to the maple leaf, only with three lobes, and huge.


There's more. We also get the word sycophant from the sykon. Ancient Greek politicians refrained from openly taunting each other in public. Instead, they had mobs of lackeys and brown-nosers to do the taunting for them. Sycophant come from sykon and phaino, meaning "I show." And show the fig they did. Showing the fig was the Greek version of flipping the bird. Make a fist. stick your thumb between two fingers. That's it. Only, it's not exactly like flipping the bird, you see. Sykon was also slang for, well, "lady parts."

The early settlers called the Sycamore by the name Buttonwood. A particularly large one grew at the end of Wall Street back when New York City still had trees. In 1792, a group of wealthy investors signed the Buttonwood Agreement under the tree, forming the New York Stock Exchange.

This next one is fun. The White Willow (Salix alba) has an interesting history. Hippocrates (of Hippocratic Oath fame) used the bark of this tree to ease pain. He got the idea from the Ancient Egyptians. The very reverend Edmund Stone, an English clergyman, discovered in 1763 that if he mixed willow bark with alcohol, the resulting beverage would reduce fever. In the 1820s, two chemists isolated the magic chemical from willow bark, salicylic acid.


You'll find salicylic acid listed as an ingredient in wart, acne, and other skin medications. It's also one of the major components of aspirin. The aspirin molecule is basically a salicylic acid molecule fused with an acetic acid molecule. Everyone knows acetic acid. Cooks call it vinegar.

In fact, over time, aspirin decomposes into salicylic acid and vinegar. Don't believe me? Go take a deep whiff of your aspirin bottle. This also works for ibuprofen since it's almost identical to aspirin chemically.


I assume you noticed the clever trick of naming salicylic acid after the salix tree. But, you may ask, what is this alba? Albus is the Latin word for white. Remember the White Oak, Quercus alba? When we hang white seabirds from our necks, we call them albatrosses. People used to put photographs on the white, blank page of an album. You can make a sandwich with the white meat of an albacore tuna. And we call someone with no skin pigment an albino.

When it gets really old, the White Willow tends to droop. Just like the rest of us. It looks like the true Weeping Willow (Salix babylonica). The willow is a notoriously promiscuous tree and forms hybrids with other any other willow it can find. What we call a Weeping Willow in the US is actually a hybrid between the White Willow and true Weeping Willow. We have some on Boulware:


The Weeping Willow gives us another fun naming story.

Carl Linnaeus invented binomial nomenclature, the practice of using scientific names derived from Latin or Greek to classify living things. We use only the genus and the species and get names like Salix babylonica (and if you're curious, the first one is always capitalized, the second always lowercase, both always italic). Carl liked using Latin and Greek names so much, he changed his Swedish last name Linne to Linnaeus to sound more sciency. What a jerk.

He also made a mess of the Weeping Willow's scientific name. When he came up with Salix babylonica, he took the name from Psalm 137 (specifically verses 1-2):
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
In the Vulgate Latin, the verses use a form of salix, the Latin name for willow. So, in the King James Version (above), you get willow. Here's the problem: when Pope Clement ordered a Latin translation of the Bible, his guys got it wrong. They translated the Hebrew word gharab as willow. Gharab really means poplar. Oops. More recent English translations like NIV and NLT use the word poplar.

http://bible.cc/psalms/137-2.htm

The harp hanging Hebrews of Psalm 137 were actually talking about the Euphrates Poplar (Populus euphratica):

http://www.flowersinisrael.com/Populuseuphratica_page.htm
http://www.inmagine.com/searchterms/euphrates_poplar.html

Parting Shot
This is happy news for some, sad for others. This is probably my last tree post of the season. Maybe forever. I'm running out of trees. I mean, there are some odd elms and a few trees I still haven't identified, but you've seen most of what Illinois has to offer. Also, winter is coming. When the Spring comes around, I have a feeling the Tree Review posts will be replaced with Bird Watching posts.

10/16/12

Mattisfaction

From End to End
Boulware Trail runs from my apartment complex south, between a neighborhood and an office park, then it crosses Devonshire Drive into Mattis Park, where it runs down the east side of Mattis all the way to Windsor Road. Mattis Park is sort of isolated from any nearby neighborhood and I rarely see many people there. Of course, I see the occasional walker, bike rider, and jogger, but never the thronging multitudes that infiltrate Hessel Park every day. I'll give you a little tour of Boulware from the trailhead on Fox Drive behind my apartments to the trailhead near the intersection at Windsor.

Boulware is an exciting trail. Despite its urban location and relatively short distance, it's become one of my favorite trails of all time. I rarely go down Boulware and fail to see something bizarre.


Zombies
I noticed the zombie signs the first time. I've found two of them, black spray paint through a stencil, directly on the sidewalk. I have a theory about what these mean, but I don't have a lot of evidence. I'll tell you and you can decide for yourself.

On any highway leading away from the coast in Texas, you see these blue signs with little white swirly hurricane symbols to mark the officially mandated Hurricane Evacuation Routes. I think that these mark an officially mandated Champaign Zombie Evacuation Route. Boulware links Kirby, which runs just south of the main part of both cities and the UofI campus, to Windsor, which runs along the southern boundary of town before you get into the miles of corn. Boulware, along most of the trail, runs through or near bodies of water. We all know zombies can't swim. In the case of a zombie apocalypse, Boulware would be one of the safest routes out of town. The Windsor trailhead sits on a tiny isthmus between two retention ponds, an easily defensible position, since the zombies could only attack from two sides. This would make the Windsor trailhead a good place for an evacuee congregation area where zombie apocalypse survivors could wait to be loaded onto armored buses for movement to a well defended and isolated area outside of town.

At least, that's just my theory.


Boulware Widlife
The Common Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) is like the honey badger of the reptile world. They range over most of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. These angry little monsters eat anything from fish to small birds and squirrels. They live to bite things. And they make a hissing sound when threatened. That's why, when they needed a particularly nasty villain in the movie Secret of the Ooze, the writers chose Rahzar, a mutated snapping turtle. I can't think of a more savage reptilian killing machine aside from maybe an alligator. An adult can grow up to 2 feet long and weight 80 lbs. This one I found on Boulware was a baby. And dead. Which is the only reason I got this close. But the presence of a dead baby can only mean at least two adults live nearby. As a result, I stopped swimming in the ditch by the trail.


The other day I saw this juvenile hawk. I have no idea what kind of hawk it is, and here's why. There's something like fifty types of hawks that live in North America and the young hawks all have a white speckledly look to them. I have an official National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America. I referenced this work when composing this post. After thumbing through the ten or so pages of North American Hawks, I came to the realization that all hawks look pretty much alike. So we're just going to call this guy a hawk.


He sat on a woodpile in the back yard of some Illinoyance, watching this Eastern Gray Squirrel:


The squirrel either didn't notice or didn't mind that his life hung in the balance, his future impaled on the steely eyes of a bird of prey. In fact, he even ran around just beneath the woodpile. Which provides concrete proof of another theory of mine: squirrels are retarded.


The little fuzzy tailed rodent eventually ran past the wood pile and under the fence to the neighbor's back yard. The hawk hopped down after him. I hurried on at this point. I didn't want Bojangles to see what came next. 

Here are some additional hawk pictures. If you can identify this beast, please do.



Okay, ducks. I think these are Mallards, aka Wild Ducks (Anas platyrhynchos). These are all females, but I have seen the random drake around town. Mallards are classified as dabbling ducks, which means they eat from the surface rather than diving for food.


And Canadian Geese (Branta canadensis). These birds look beautiful and majestic and wondrous to behold when you first move to town. Then you have to deal with them. Everywhere. They mob around the Target parking lot and you have to weave through them to find a parking spot. They crap all over sidewalks. Also, they're constantly flying overhead honking, so you don't know if what you hear is a goose or a moron on a bike with a bike horn. So you're spinning around in circles on the trail, trying to see the geese emerge in a perfect V over the tree line and some idiot nearly crashes into you on a Schwinn. But that's another story altogether. I could devote an entire blog post to how much I hate anyone who rides a bike anywhere ever. But were talking about geese. Here you go:



A Widow Skimmer (Libellula luctuosa). This dragonfly ranges over most of North America. You've probably seen one yourself. The Widow Skimmer has compound eyes with nearly 3 thousand facets on each one, giving it almost 360 degree vision. This vision allows the Widow Skimmer to be another one of our Savage Killers of Boulware. They eat other dragonflies, mosquitos, flies, ants, and (it horrifies me to say) butterflies. This picture shows a male with its black, white, and clear double pair of wings. All flying insects have a double pair of wings. Ones that look like they only have one pair, like flies, actually have a second pair of vestigial wing things that look like little nubs. The female Widow Skimmer, by the way has black and translucent wings and is usually hard to see.


This next picture isn't very good. You're looking at a Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa sp.) gathering nectar from Wild Hyacinth (Camassia scilloides). This may very well be a (genetically identical) sister of the bee that savagely attacked me on my run a few months ago. I was stung very near this flower bed.

Carpenter bees did quite a bit of damage at the old apartment. They would bore into the wooden railings, which probably explains why they all felt on the verge of collapsing. Aine said she could sit on her balcony and watch the little streams of sawdust fall from bee holes. Bees suck. Wild Hyacinth, on the other hand, not to be confused with the forage of manatees, is a wild flower native to the Midwest. It's endangered in Wisconsin and Michigan, but this one looks like it's doing all right. This grows from a bulb. Native Americans would eat the bulb (I read it tastes like a sweet potato only sweeter) or grind it to make flower.


Happy Trails to You
These are random shots along the trail. It's looking a little ragged now, as autumn descends upon us, but during the summer, the trail looks amazing.






This bed, planted in honor of prominent Champaignian who liked gardening and music, greets you as you enter Mattis Park. The keys in front are made from wood and the bed has been shaped to look like a grand piano. You can't really tell in this picture, but take my word for it.


And it's only one of several beds planted throughout Mattis.




 Mattis Lake
Mattis Lake looks like a large pond. Not content to name a park (23 acres, dedicated in 1966, by the way) and a major municipal thoroughfare after the Mattis family, the parks department also gave the Mattis name to this body of water and upgraded its status to lake. Don't let its beauty fool you. This lake provides a home to dragonflies, snapping turtles, ducks, and all manner of ruthless carnivores.






Goldenrods
A Goldrenrod is a real flower. Up to this point I thought Goldenrod was a made up name for Crayons like Periwinkle or Violet.

Hold on. Aine's reading this over my shoulder and she says Periwinkles and Violets are real flowers too. Apparently, everything I thought I knew about the world was a lie.

These weeds grow in every ditch, crack, and low spot up here. You could call them the bluebonnets of Illinois, only Goldrenrods are actual wildflowers that grow in the wild and aren't planted along roadside by the state government.


And Goldrenrods are mostly edible. The leaves alleviate inflammation, so the Native Americans chewed them to relieve sore throat and toothaches. Modern herbalists prescribe Goldenrod extract for kidney infections.


Here's where it gets crazy. In the early nineteen whatevers Henry Ford, tired of paying to ship rubber for tires from South America, asked his good buddy Thomas Edison to find a local source of rubber. The top three finalists, all plants that produce latex, were Milkweed, Honeysuckle, and Goldenrod. Goldenrod won in the end since it grows more quickly and produces slightly more latex. In fact, for finding this, Ford gave Edison a Model T with tires made of Goldenrod rubber. Producing rubber from Goldenrods didn't get underway until World War II, when some rubber was produced for the war effort. After the war, the US government started to look into techniques for producing synthetic rubber like the Germans used and the humble Goldenrod was forgotten.

Things Hanging from Trees
You'll find no shortage of cones in Boulware. 

This first picture shows the unique cone of the Douglas Fir. You remember the Douglas Fir, the Fake Hemlock named after the wrong guy. Well, botanists put the Douglas Fir in its own genus because of the cone. The female cones have what are called bracts (a specialized type of leaf) growing from the scales.
The bracts look like the tail and feet of a mouse (look closely). The Native Americans had a story about how, during a forest fire, mice tried to hide in the cones to escape and have hung there ever since.


See this next picture. I took it because I had no idea what it was. It looked weird and unique. I thought maybe I had found the chrysalis of some type of butterly. No. In reality, what I found was just more proof of the relentless savagery of nature.

This is the cocoon of an Evergreen Bagworm (Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis). In mid-August the caterpillar weaves silken bags from the branches of the tree that often strangle and kill the tree. After a few weeks, the males turn into moths and seek out the females to reproduce. Here's where it gets crazy. The female doesn't turn into a moth. When mature, the female basically looks like a big maggot that can't move or eat or do anything useful. She weaves these little cocoons from the leaves of an evergreen tree leaving a small hole for the male to do his business. After the eggs are fertilized, the female dies. In the spring, the new caterpillars hatch and burst out of the dead body of their mother.


Of course, the insect world is full of horrible stories. The magnificent chrysalis from which a beautiful butterfly emerges? Also gross. The caterpillar doesn't sit inside the chrysalis and slowly grow legs and wings. The caterpillar liquefies. It turns into a green jelly that slowly reassembles as a butterfly. The Evergreen Bagworm also falls prey to parasitism from wasps. Wasps are probably the worst things ever. All wasps lay their eggs in the living bodies of other insects. When the egg hatches, the baby wasp bursts from the body of hapless victim, killing it, and begins to feed.

Here are some more cones: of the Eastern White Pine and the Norway Fir, respectively.


Parting Shot: Nice Skin!
Watch out for snapping turtles.


10/15/12

Solon and Thanks for All the Fish

I've had my eye on this building across from the Champaign Library for weeks. I had to run by the library the other day to return some documentaries, so I walked over and snapped a picture. I took all these pictures late in the day and the house faces east. So that explains the picture quality.


The Harwood/Solon Home sits on the edge of the downtown area, about a mile north of our apartment (as the Turdus flies). Built in 1867, it exemplifies the Italianate architectural style.

We haven't seen an Italianate building before. Here's how you know:
  • Emphatic eaves supported by corbels (corbels are the large vertical pieces, they were invented just to support eaves).

  • Low pitched or flat roof.
  • Imposing cornice (the cornice is the decorative element underneath the eaves, think: crown molding).

  • Round arches.

  • A tower (designed to look like a campanile, or free-standing bell tower, the leaning tower of Pisa is a campanile).
That's not the interesting part. Get this. The house has had only three owners since its construction. Abel Harwood, a prominent landowner, bought the house new. At the time, it sat on the far edge of town and historians think Harwood's prominence and the beauty of the house contributed the the city's growth to the south and west.

Harwood sold the home to Francis and Abbie Solon in 1907. Francis also made his money in land speculation and spent that money on extensive renovations in 1920s. I'm talking an indoor bathroom and electricity. Exciting.

After the deaths of his parents, John Solon took possession of the house. A prominent and successful lawyer in Champaign, locals knew him as the guy who walked on the grass so he wouldn't wear out the soles of his shoes. Unfortunately, this fastidiousness didn't extend to the care of his home. Before his death in 1995, the city evicted him from the house due to its dilapidated state.


John Solon's heirs donated the remains of the house to the Preservation and Conservation Association (PACA) in 2005. Imagine their surprise when they opened the front door and saw that peculiar sort of devastation neglect creates. The new wallpaper pasted up in the 1920s still hung in faded tatters from the walls. With the help of a Heritage Fund Grant, PACA did $125 thousand worth of essential structural repairs, including a new metal roof.

PACA got the Harwood/Solon House added to the National Register in 2007 and put it on the market with the caveat that it needed extensive renovation. The two main floors have 11 foot ceilings. It also has an attic and a basement and the small original bathroom from the 1920s. Original listing price was around $300 thousand.

I found that Re/Max removed the listing this summer, but I couldn't find if it actually sold or who bought it. As you can see from my pictures, they are rebuilding the porch.

Here's a picture of the house from the good old days: