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.