Deep Nature: Photographs from Iowa [1 ed.] 1587298244, 9781587298240

Citation preview

deep nature

There are at least 125 terrestrial snail species in Iowa.

ii  d e e p n a t u r e

Photographs from Iowa

Deep Nature Photographs by Linda Scarth and Robert Scarth Essay by John Pearson

university of iowa press, iowa city

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2009 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in China Design by Kristina Kachele Design, llc No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Photographs on pages viii, x, 96, 100, and 102 show dewdrop refraction with coneflowers, rain on maple leaf, lichen on Sioux quartzite, rattlesnake master, and sweet flag. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scarth, Linda, 1941– Deep nature: photographs from Iowa / photographs by Linda Scarth and Robert Scarth; essay by John Pearson. p.   cm.—(A bur oak book) isbn-13: 978-1-58729-824-0 (cloth) isbn-10: 1-58729-824-4 (cloth) 1. Nature photography—Iowa.  2. Natural history—Iowa.  I. Scarth, Robert, 1939–  .  II. Pearson, John (John A.).  III. Title. tr721.s33 2009   2009006983 779'.309777—dc22

A Bur Oak Book

For Jennifer, Daniel, Ethan, Benjamin, and Eliana

Treefrogs can change colors depending on their surroundings.

Every leaf is a miracle.

Walt Whitman

Contents Small Places, Unbounded Spaces by John Pearson

1 The Photographs

19 Find, Celebrate, and Share by Linda Scarth and Robert Scarth

97 Photographers’ Note

101

deep nature

Cotton-grass, which is not a grass but a sedge, lives in a few fens in Iowa.

Small Places, Unbounded Spaces By J o h n P earso n

Sheeder Prairie Prequel Numb with a day of dull driving on Interstate 80, I fumble with the Iowa road map. A graduate student at Southern Illinois University, I left Carbondale this morning—May 30, 1977—and have driven through a seemingly endless succession of cropfields in Illinois and Iowa, with the discouraging breadth of Nebraska yet to come. I am on my way to Wyoming for a summer job as a backcountry ranger in the Absaroka Wilderness bordering Yellowstone Park. Now I am somewhere west of Des Moines and need to find a place to camp, hopefully not far from the highway. I would especially like to find a park with some natural habitat to explore before dark, but jaded from the lack of natural places in this relentlessly agricultural landscape, I have begun to doubt that I will find one. Glancing at the road map one last time during a moment stolen from the bugspecked windshield, my eyes are suddenly arrested by a blue dot hovering in white space only an inch from the thick green line of the interstate. Its pastel label quietly displays a promising name: Sheeder Prairie. Prairie! I know prairie, but only recently. Growing up in the Midwest, my exposure to natural areas has been almost entirely of forest, because it is the only natural vegetation of significant extent left after more than a century of farming and urbanization. In my home state of Michigan, on the outskirts of Detroit, my childhood adventures centered on a patch of woods bordered by suburban backyards and the county landfill (a mysteriously treeless place). Trees filled the pictures I took of natural places that caught my fancy for a 4-H photography project. Becoming a naturalist at a local nature

  1

center, I learned the names of trees and forest wildflowers: oaks, maples, Solomon’s-seal, sweet William. Now in college, I study forest ecology in the hills of southern Illinois, measuring forests with diameter tapes wrapped around the trunks of trees. Then I discovered prairie. Not in midwestern remnants missed by plows and cows in cemeteries, railroad rights-of-way, and tiny postage-stamp preserves, not even in the lectures of my biology professors as they described the demise of prairie under the utilitarian press of agriculture, first by pioneer homesteaders and later by modern industrial farms. My prairie awakening came thousands of miles from home, on the far side of the Great Plains, where I had gone searching for western forest. As a student in a Montana field ecology class last year, I sampled my way through a glorious gradient of desert grasslands, foothill prairies, conifer forests, and alpine meadows. Early in that sequence, prairie arrested my attention: so colorful, diverse, and wonderfully big. Its wild aspect was an intoxicating contrast to the tame suburban habitats of my midwestern homeland. Prairie at last appeared in my increasingly conscious quest for wild and natural places. So now I am in western Iowa, hunting for Exit 76. Finding it, I follow a zigzagging route of rural roads through sparsely populated farmland to Sheeder Prairie State Preserve. In the final mile of my approach, the day-long whine of smooth pavement under my tires is replaced by the clatter of gravel on an unpaved road rising to a hilltop. The sun is low in the sky when I finally climb stiffly out of the car and step through a gate into the prairie. It has been recently burned: short, green grass studded with colorful, blooming forbs abounds where fire passed a month ago, while tall brown clumps of big bluestem and Indiangrass stand somberly in an unburned patch beyond. In the fading light, I find porcupine grass, prairie phlox, and white sagewort . . . plus many more I do not recognize from my experience in the Rocky Mountains. It takes only five minutes to cross the tiny remnant and encounter the fence separating it from freshly tilled cropland. I end my short hike on a quiet hilltop and watch evening slip into night. The sun is setting, the moon is rising; redwings are coming in, fireflies are 2  d e e p n a t u r e

coming out. Lightning flashes silently from a distant thunderhead, illuminating a trio of deer standing like ghosts against the black soil of the neighboring field, watching me. A breeze brushes the dark landscape. Gazing at the quiet scene, I churn with ambivalence for this prairie: love of its ambiance mixed with sadness for its loss. “To be prairie, really good prairie, it must embrace the horizons,” John Madson wrote in “The Running Country,” one of many essays expressing his love for the prairie world. As a postage-stamp preserve of only twenty-five acres, Sheeder Prairie cannot measure up to that horizon-sweeping standard, but not saving it because it is too small to be “good prairie” seems all wrong, too. Despite its tiny size, I sense traces of its original diversity and wildness, a mystique that transcends size. That’s the contradiction I’ve been mulling: this prairie is small, but it still has magic. I know Madson would agree. As I drift back to the gate, I recall someone telling me that Iowa employed an ecologist whose job it was to look after prairie remnants and the other bits of natural land that remained in this highly altered state, “like trying to save the world after it was destroyed,” he had lamented. Habitat loss and fragmentation— ecological culprits plaguing natural areas throughout the country—have been especially rampant in Iowa, whose abundance of gentle, fertile soil has facilitated

The fireweed’s

widespread conversion of natural land to agriculture. “Sounds like an impossible task,”

flowers open first

I murmur as I start my car and resume driving to Wyoming, “I can’t imagine who would be up to it.”

at the bottom of the spike; seedpods form as the blossoms open progressively toward the top.

Fen As we drive over the last hill, it comes into view. There it is! A bright green mound of vegetation gleams softly amid the black soil of the cropfield like an emerald dropped in the dirt. Our excitement spikes even though we have learned to check our expectations, the result of many disappointments with previous visits to seemingly promising places. Time and again, we have visited sites whose dark, irregularly shaped images on aerial photographs normally filled with the rectangular white blanks of cultivated land had

small places, unbounded spaces  3

tantalizingly indicated that something was still there . . . only to find degraded patches overrun with common weeds: ragweed, nettles, parsnip, foxtail. We are hunting for something more significant: lady’s slippers, gentians, cotton-grass, sage willow, grass of Parnassus, and other denizens of the boggy, peaty wetlands known as fens. Quickly gathering our notebooks, maps, soil probe, and pH meter, we prepare to hike away from the car toward what we hope will be a high-quality fen. On this August morning in 1988, botanist Mark Leoschke and I are in the first day of our fen foray into Fayette County, one of several counties included in our third year of a statewide inventory of fen wetlands in Iowa. Our inventory is driven by a desire to protect these special wetlands and is facilitated by county soil maps depicting the locations of Palms muck, an organic soil of highly decomposed peat and a reliable predictor of fens. Several winters ago, we painstakingly scanned county soil maps, recording over a thousand locations of this indicative soil series. Over seven hundred of them were eliminated from further investigation when our inspection of aerial photographs revealed that they had been drained and plowed. We are now in the process of checking the remaining three hundred sites with field visits. As we draw closer to this one, we discern sedges and cattails filling a gentle slope, harbingers of a hanging bog—a fen perched on a hillside. Our pace quickens. Entering the wetland, we experience the oddity of stepping up onto a suddenly wet, soft, sloping surface. We find ourselves in a landscape of knee-high tussock sedges and head-high cattails, but it is the lesser vegetation that immediately attracts our attention. A galaxy of grass of Parnassus flowers seems to float above the ground, which now quakes and shudders beneath our feet as we walk, star-struck at the cast of plant species we are encountering. In all directions, there are tall green spikes of valerian, yellow arches of Riddell’s goldenrod, and hoary splays of sage willow. At the far end of the site, near a spring, Mark finds cotton-grass, its fluffy springtime fruits now reduced to wispy tatters. Collectively, these water-loving, calcium-loving, organic soil–loving species fairly shout “FEN!” A quick probe of the soil confirms its saturated, organic nature, and 44  d e e p n a t u r e

the pH meter’s reading of 6.7 verifies its nutrient-rich status. We have found a fen, a very good one. While Mark carefully collects voucher specimens of the rarest plant species, I wander through the fen to compile a more comprehensive list, coming up with a total of seventy-five species today. (Additions from future inventories by other botanists will eventually double this figure.) During the survey, I enjoy a diversity of architecture: the coarse, arching fronds of sensitive fern and the finely

Bumblebees push

dissected, erect ones of marsh fern; the tall, narrow, vertical leaves of blue-flag iris and

their way between

the short, rotund, horizontal ones of marsh marigold; the open, frilled flowers of fringed gentian, open to all species of flies and bees, and the closed, unfringed ones of bottle

pale gentian petals to harvest the pollen.

gentian, its tightly pinched opening passable only by powerful bumblebees. Even as I examine a bottle gentian flower, it begins to wobble as if possessed, its walls deforming and rebounding as an unseen bumblebee, sated with nectar, struggles to turn its bulky body around inside the narrow throat, a hymenopteran bull in a stamen-studded pollen shop. A moment later, the overlapping tips of the flower rotate apart as the bumblebee pushes through the aperture and flies away, its hairy legs flecked with gentian pollen. Meandering up the gentle slope of the fen, I reach a subtle crest. Looking back to where Mark still crouches, I see I am on the highest point of the fen, the summit of a mound of wet, quaking peat about ten acres in size. Casting my view in all directions, I perceive that the fen is the highest point in nearly the entire landscape; only a subtle rise to the south, in a neighboring cornfield, appears to be slightly higher. Unlike “normal” wetlands—potholes, sloughs, swamps, and streams—that occupy the lowest parts of the landscape where runoff flows, fens arise from groundwater seepage high on the lay of the land. I know this intellectually, but the sight still seems surreal. In addition to being marvelous, my view is also troubling: except for a sliver of untilled ground in a nearby drainageway, the fen is everywhere bordered with cropland and far isolated from the next nearest fen . . . an ark of nature awash and alone in a flood of rowcrop agriculture. Recognizing that its surroundings will never again be unending prairie, small places, unbounded spaces  5

buffering this small, special place with benign land use, and someday reconnecting it to other remnants are our best hopes for ensuring its survival in this hard-working landscape. Finishing our surveys, Mark and I excitedly exchange accounts of our discoveries. It is obviously one of the best fens we have encountered during our inventory. Like the vast majority of the fens we have found, its fate rests in the decisions of the farmer who manages this private land. We want to alert him to the ecological significance of the fen and the importance of saving it, so we decide to drive to the nearby farmstead and meet with him. “What’s his name again?” Mark asks as we climb into the car. We make a practice of contacting all landowners to secure advance permission for our visits, so I page through our notes to find the answer: “Kauten . . . Bill Kauten. He mentioned having a young daughter who might be interested in this sort of thing. I think he said her name was Becky.” Driving away from the field, I catch one last glimpse of the fen before it disappears behind a wall of tall green corn. As we pull into the driveway, it dawns on me that our short trip from the fen to the farmstead symbolizes the long-term progression of our efforts from finding fens to protecting them. Their conservation future will not be assured until we recruit the willing support of farmers and landowners. Where willingness exists, our job will be easy, but where willingness is lacking, our charge will be to educate, convince, and respectfully persuade . . . to cultivate willingness. We have worked hard to find the fens, but our biggest mission of all has just begun.

Prairie Emerging from bur oak woods, I step into yet another prairie opening, the biggest one so far. Big bluestem, Indiangrass, little bluestem, lead plant, and wild rose gently brush my legs as I amble toward a high point where I will try to get my bearings. Walking through a bewildering mosaic of oak forest and tallgrass prairie spread across a dissected landscape of steep hillsides and steeper ravines, distracted by head-high compass plants 6  d e e p n a t u r e

and interrupted by cedar trees that compel me to duck and weave, I have lost track of how many openings I have traversed since I started hiking this morning. Keeping one eye on my pathway, I continue jotting colorful plant names into my notebook as I walk: purple prairie-clover, redroot, blue-eyed grass, green-flowered milkweed. This is my twenty-fifth prairie list since starting the Waterman Creek Prairie Inventory three days ago and the last one needed to complete my sweep of the valley. I have found so many prairie remnants in this complex of rugged glacial valleys along the Little Sioux River in O’Brien County that my note taking has progressed from a dutiful compilation of species to a roll call of familiar friends. Arriving at the high point, I cap the page-filling list with a brief description of the habitat: “a series of small cedar savannas with a large prairie at its south end.” I squeeze the generalization into the narrow line between the species list and today’s date: June 5, 1989. Resuming my inventory, I move slowly across the big prairie opening toward another wooded ravine. But instead of passing through a thickening band of prairie-killing cedars like those rimming the previous openings, I find myself walking through a scattering of stunted bur oaks, their lightly shaded bases lapped with prairie vegetation. As I begin to close my notebook and stow my pen to prepare for another tree-grabbing descent into the upcoming ravine, a small gleam of white in my peripheral vision causes me to freeze. Pricked by a distant memory, my mind has already flashed an image of what I think I saw, but I reject the thought. No, that can’t be, it doesn’t grow here. But when I turn my head and focus on the plant, it contradicts me. Small white lady’s slipper! I stare in amazement at the orchid, half-expecting it to resolve into something more ordinary. When it remains unchanged, I kneel for a closer look, lightly lifting its shining white flower with my forefinger. Its thumb-size “slipper,” suspended gondola-like by an arching stem over a bouquet of pleated leaves, is undeniably that of Cypripedium candidum. Memorized from frequent readings, the conservation profile for the lady’s slipper plays spontaneously in my mind: originally occurring in all ninety-nine counties of Iowa, recently confirmed in only fourteen, now confined to tiny, isolated small places, unbounded spaces  7

remnants of wet prairie. A fresh swirl of contradictions furrows my brow: O’Brien County is not one of the fourteen and this Waterman Creek prairie is not tiny, isolated, or wet. I notice that the flower in my grasp is not alone. Another white moccasin dangles from a neighboring stem in the same leafy clump. Looking up, I spot another clump, and another, and another. Standing up to scan more broadly, I see nearly a dozen clumps, all bursting with flowers, on the hillside below me. I count the number of stems and flowers, finding an especially prolific clump containing 60 stems and 45 flowers. When I tally the whole population of 10 clumps, there are 200 stems supporting a total of 119 flowers. Two-thirds of the flowers are still fresh, but the others have begun to wither. Had I arrived a week earlier, I might well have seen fresh flowers on all 200 stems. As I count, I also note the plant species associated with the orchids. One tree: bur oak. Three shrubs: lead plant, wild rose, and hazelnut. Four grasses: big bluestem, Indiangrass, little bluestem, and Canada bluegrass. Eight forbs:

Small white lady’s

groundplum, stiff goldenrod, prairie coreopsis, purple prairie-clover, smooth aster,

slippers, rarer than

strawberry, rattlesnake-root, and bastard toadflax. The abundance of forbs reminds me

yellow ones, are also

of one more element of the orchid’s habitat profile: a diversity of nectar sources. This is a critical feature because the lady’s slipper itself produces no nectar to attract insect pollinators. Instead, relying on the presence of nectar-producing neighbors to draw insects into the neighborhood, it tricks its pollinators—small sweat bees and miner bees—into entering the pouch of its attractive slipper with empty promises of a nectar reward. Once inside the pouch, the gullible bee follows colored lines that normally lead to nectaries, but after squeezing through a one-way gauntlet of stigmas and anthers in the lady’s slipper, it encounters nothing but an exit hole in the heel. The bee has no choice but simply to fly away, charged with a fresh coating of pollen. Finishing my observations, I climb to the crest of the hill to begin my hike back to the car. Traversing the edge of a high, level upland—an easy route compared to my 8  d e e p n a t u r e

called whippoorwill shoes.

incoming trek across ravine-studded slopes—I reach an overlook with a commanding view of the land I have spent four days surveying. This morning’s inventory slips like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into my comprehension of the scene. Far to the south, I see the long, high ridge of prairie over the Little Sioux River where prairie bush clover grows. My eye follows a tributary northwestward to Dog Creek Park, where prairie moonwort thrives. In the middle ground, a curving, flat-topped hill juts like a scimitar into the Waterman Creek valley, its sandy summit home to needle-and-thread, a Great Plains grass reaching its easternmost outpost. Closer at hand, I recognize the jumble of treeless hills in the McCormack Wildlife Area where shortgrass prairie resides on a high ridge, its community of ankle-high grasses—Junegrass, satingrass, hairy grama, and blue grama—interspersed with equally short pasqueflowers and gayfeathers. Peering to the north, I discern the grazed, rolling hills above Wittrock State Preserve; although dominated by bluegrass and dotted with musk thistle, they are still rich with prairie forbs. Awed by the vista, I linger on the point, idly stroking the leaves of silky aster between my fingers as I gaze at a precious Iowa landscape. Rousing from my reverie, I recall a favorite passage from On the Loose, a rhapsodic tribute to rambling in wild places by Terry and Renny Russell: “One of the best-paying professions is getting ahold of pieces of country in your mind, learning their smell and their moods, sorting out the pieces of a view, [finding] what grows there and there and why, how many steps that hill will take, where this creek winds, and where it meets the other one below. . . . This is the best kind of ownership, and the most permanent.” As I descend the hill toward my parked car, I realize that my professional experience prompts me to take one exception to this long-held personal perspective. Intimately knowing wild places is unquestionably rewarding, but it is not permanent ownership. True permanence of the wild places we cherish requires active stewardship to ensure their persistence. Prairies, in particular, need to be more than merely known, owned, or even loved to prevent cedar trees from invading, leafy spurge from spreading, or cattle from overgrazing. Prairies need ownership of their stewardship by knowledgeable small places, unbounded spaces  9

and loving managers. In my days here at Waterman Creek, I have come to know—and “own”—its prairies well. I wonder if we can assure their stewardship?

Forest, Glade, and Cliff Catching the current, my kayak glides away from a pool of quiet water boxed by high concrete walls into the big-sky environment of the Mississippi River. Glancing back as I drift downstream, I glimpse my car parked at the top of the boat ramp next to Lock and Dam #10. The big locks are empty at the moment, so I needn’t worry about barges right now. The Guttenberg riverfront scrolls past my right shoulder, its neatly manicured lawns—freshly mown for the 2007 Memorial Day weekend—contrasting sharply with the scruffy wooded shoreline I see coming up beyond the city limits. Arriving at the far edge of town, I feel a flutter of excitement in committing to my afternoon adventure: a round-trip excursion via paddling and hiking to Turkey River Mounds State Preserve, a spectacular knife-edge ridge at the confluence of the Turkey and Mississippi rivers. Containing a complex of thousand-year-old Indian mounds and a diversity of forest, glade, and cliff communities, it is one of the few state preserves that I have yet to thoroughly explore after twenty years of work with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. My plan is to paddle five miles downstream to a backwater slough that brushes the big bluff in the preserve; from there, I intend to hike along the edge of the floodplain to a steep slope that is the only climbable break in the mile-long rampart of dolomite cliffs. Gaining access to the narrow, rocky ridge at a low saddle, I hope to find a way to the peak of a prominent pinnacle. If I reach that, I will have traversed a complete gradient of wet to dry habitats and surveyed their natural communities. Whether or not I reach the top, I will need to descend, return to my kayak, and paddle back upstream to Guttenberg. There is a far easier way to reach the preserve and see its rugged upland forest—a Grade-B road leads nearly to the foot of the break in the bluff I will climb—but I want to see the bottomland forest as well. 10  d e e p n a t u r e

Rounding the first bend, I am struck by how quickly the Mississippi sheds any outward signs of civilization. The river valley here is two miles wide, bracketed by high wooded bluffs and filled with a watery mosaic of islands and sloughs sliced by the deepwater course of the main channel. Guttenberg vanishes behind a thick green veil of bottomland forest. I become a speck in the panorama of river, bottomland forest, and cirrus-streaked blue sky. I know this is partly an illusion: highways and railroads hide just beyond the edge of the floodplain, wing dams lurk just below the waterline, and lines of buoys blaze a dredged navigation channel. But even a veneer of wildness in a state enthralled with tameness brings nature close at hand . . . and this is no mere veneer. I bypass the narrow entrance to the slough bordering Goetz Island to stay on the swifter main channel for my downstream journey; I will choose its quiet backwater route when I paddle back upstream this evening. Sweeping into a second bend, I spot the lower end of the slough debouching into the river and memorize the pose of a cottonwood snag marking its mouth. The river now

The eastern wood-pewee arrives in late spring to nest in woodlands.

swings close to the bluffline leading into the preserve; I follow its steep shoreline when the channel splits around another island and enter a narrow, tree-lined slough. Without the tug of the main river current, my kayak slows to a paddle-pushed pace. Silver maples fill the floodplain forest to my left. Amid a throng of young trees, massive trunks of old-growth individuals rise into the canopy, their upswept branches forming ideal nesting sites for red-shouldered hawks. Hungering for unobstructed sunlight, many trees lean out over the slough for a better view of the sky. Becoming overextended, several have toppled into the water, their formerly sky-questing boles now serving as basking logs for turtles that lunge from warm perches at my approach. To my right, a steep, forested bluff—the Turkey River Mounds ridge that I intend to surmount—looms over the floodplain and blots out the western sky. In 1673, emerging onto the Mississippi in a canoe, explorer Jacques Marquette exultantly called the high, rugged bluffs flanking the river in Iowa and Wisconsin “the mountains of the Mississippi.” That lyrical description seems less of an exaggeration to me now that I see s m a l l p l a c e s , u n b o u n d e d s p a c e s   11

them as he did: towering over a small, paddled boat in a wild, natural place. Reaching the end of the slough at a low, marshy shore, I climb out of the cockpit, step onto a sedgedraped mudflat, and drag the kayak onto a slightly elevated bank. Sitting on its deck to exchange water shoes for hiking boots, I recognize the pale, pointed leaves of cardinal flowers all around me; although not yet blooming, their startlingly red flowers will grace the slough later this summer. I scramble up a brushy slope onto the upland at the base of the long ridge, emerging onto the coarse ballast of a railroad. The gleaming tracks are eerily empty now, but this is a heavily used line, so I must stay alert for the huge shipping trains that hurtle through here. I quickly cross over the tracks onto the public land beneath the bluff and hike south toward the gap in the ridge. Spotting the low saddle, I sidestep up a hill that steepens as I climb, clutching tree trunks and roots to pull myself along. I labor upward beneath the interlocking crowns of big sugar maples, basswoods, and red oaks, stepping over beds of bluebells and wild ginger, brushing through patches of maidenhair fern, and clambering over rock outcrops and talus

The brilliant crimson

festooned with walking fern and yellow jewelweed. Pausing to catch my breath as I near

blooms of cardinal flower

the crest, I recline in the lap of a big red oak, its massive trunk adorned with grainy,

can be seen in open

green crusts of dust lichen and surrounded by a riot of spring wildflowers: bloodroot,

woodlands throughout

hepatica, May apple, nodding trillium, sweet William, and squirrel corn. Lifting my leaden feet, I stagger up the final yards onto the saddle of the ridge. I disregard my hard-gained summit as I lean forward and plant my hands on my knees, momentarily exhausted. Awareness of my new surroundings builds slowly as my body recovers from fatigue. Facing downward, my first view is of the forest floor, where something is different: bedrock abounds, thinly covered with mats of eastern red cedar needles, lightly littered with coarsely toothed leaves of chinquapin oak, and dotted with curly tufts of poverty oatgrass. Looking up, I find myself on a narrow crest that falls steeply away before and behind me while rising gently to my right and left. Thick, gnarled, stunted trunks of 12  d e e p n a t u r e

the state.

old-growth cedars grasp the rocky soil with coarse fingers of exposed, woody roots. Thickets of cedar saplings, offspring from the old-growth trees, fill the narrow ridge with a tangle of dark evergreen boughs. Alligator-barked chinquapin oaks protrude above the cedar canopy to spread their foliage in full sunlight, while short wiry swards of ebony sedge, tolerant of cedar-sapped dimness, glow greenly beneath. Peering outward from the ridge, I sense that I am high on the landscape, but I catch only glimpses of faraway hills and valleys through small shifting windows of windblown branches. Eager to reach an open view, I strike north, intent on reaching the pinnacle that I know must be close. I try pushing through the cedar thicket but quickly become entangled. Backing out, I try again, this time carefully twisting and crawling through the maze of criss-crossed branches, finally emerging into an open glade. I am amazed at the spectacle of a long, narrow platform of bedrock filled with native prairie bordered by stunted oaks and cedars. At the far end of the ridge, a high, rugged mesa of dolomite rears abruptly above the rocky spine—the pinnacle. Stepping into the glade, I walk slowly in wonder. What first appeared to be a predominance of prairie resolves more closely into an irregular checkerboard of smaller communities sorted by subtle differences in soil depth: prairie on the deepest pockets, bizarre cryptobiotic crusts (a tiny cornucopia of algae, cyanobacteria, and soil lichens) on the thinnest veneers, sparse lichens and mosses on barren rock. Familiar grasses and forbs fill the prairie patches: little bluestem and sideoats grama mixed with hoary puccoon, golden alexanders, prairie phlox, and prairie blue-eyed grass. Their tall, leafy forms are plainly visible to my unaided eye, but the tiny denizens of the other communities require much closer examination. Crouching next to a dolomite ledge, I peer through my hand lens at minute life-forms coloring the pitted rock surface: yellow-and-orange warts of sulfur firedot lichen, finely chiseled crusts of brown cobblestone lichen, black-dotted flakes of gray leather lichen, and coarse black clumps of Orthotrichum moss. Trapped in a perpetually droughtstricken habitat, this moss spends most of its time wrapped in bryological fetal position, s m a l l p l a c e s , u n b o u n d e d s p a c e s   13

its dark-bottomed leaves pulled protectively together as it endures intense heat and thirst. When wetted by passing rain, it explodes into photosynthetic action, instantly unfolding its artichoked leaves to reveal their green solar panels. I cannot resist the temptation: unscrewing the cap of my water bottle, I pour a dollop onto the clump. Watched through my lens, it immediately swells and twists to life like an awakened tarantula, quickly transforming from a dense black ball into a bright green bouquet of glistening leaves. But soon disappointed with the brevity of my rain, it slowly recurls and returns to dormant black limbo. Resuming my hike, I come to the end of the ridge at the pinnacle like Dorothy approaching Oz. Appraising its austere face, I now blench at the challenge of climbing to its summit. I am alone on this remote ridge, it is a long fall to the bottom of the bluff, just one slip . . . I have nearly concluded to back away when I discover a series of ledges on the lower half of the face; following their step-like course upward with my eye, I spot a set of ladder-like fissures just below the lip of the pinnacle. I feel a pulse of optimism: that just might work. I walk to the base of the ledges and step over the first riser. I study the line once more and decide to proceed, but I impose a rule on myself: go only as far as you can safely retreat. I step onto the next ledge, and the next, and the next. Reaching the upper wall, I cautiously start to climb. Pausing to reassess after each pitch, I am satisfied that I can still descend if necessary, so search for new footholds. Just a few more feet . . . With a final push, I slither over the final lip and crawl giddily onto its flat summit. Slowly standing up, I find myself at the center of a universe of sky, land, and unbounded space. I look up into a giant blue dome of sky unobstructed by trees, bluffs, or buildings. Below me, an enormous, multicolored tapestry of rivers, hills, forests, prairies, cliffs, and glades sweeps to all horizons. Looking east, I see the wide blue ribbon of the Mississippi curving beneath bluffland forests and hill prairies in Wisconsin. Southward, the Turkey River empties into the Mississippi in an extensive complex of bottomland sloughs. Westward, broad alluvial bottoms in Iowa extend to the foot of high wooded hills; the cropfields filling this valley are one of the few obvious signs of 14  d e e p n a t u r e

civilization. Finally, to the north I see the widening extension of the ridge on which I now stand rising gently to a distant upland; I know the Indian mounds are there, but now I know why. Soon enough I will descend the pinnacle, cross the glade, clamber through cedars, descend the ridge, find my kayak, and paddle up sloughs and the big river back to town, but for now I linger on the summit. I often hear it said—I once said it myself—that there are no natural landscapes left in Iowa. A poor view to hold, for two reasons. First, it is wrong: the Mississippi vista before me belies the claim. (And there are others: the prairie-studded hills of Waterman Creek Valley, the Little Sioux River corridor between Cayler Prairie and Freda Haffner Kettlehole, and of course the Loess Hills.) Second, it is sad: a tragically self-fulfilling statement in which Iowa’s remaining natural landscapes slowly vanish under ongoing waves of development and encroachment because they lack recognition of their very existence. Responding to his mistakenly published obituary, Mark Twain once famously declared, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” So it is, I hope, for Iowa’s natural landscapes.

Sheeder Prairie Sequel I return to Sheeder Prairie on a freakishly sultry springtime day. Hot, steamy air from the Gulf of Mexico lolls thickly across the landscape, atmospheric peanut butter smeared by the dull knife of a southern warm front. White, wet haze floods the air, drowning vistas with milky gauze, stifling the escape of perspiration from wretched skin, smothering me like a hapless wrestler pinned under a hot, sweaty opponent. Tornado weather, needing only the touch of a cold front to ignite a thousand-mile arc of midwestern storms, a front that is already moving my way. My weather radio has been panic-stricken, wailing new warnings every few minutes since I turned it on upon leaving the Whiterock Conservancy Bioblitz at noon. It calls out a sequence of county names coming increasingly closer under storm alerts, like a row of giant dominoes tumbling in my direction: Harrison, Shelby, Audubon, and now Guthrie . . . where s m a l l p l a c e s , u n b o u n d e d s p a c e s   15

Sheeder Prairie is. Peering to the northwest, I cannot yet see the squall line, but I know I must make this a short visit. Today—May 25, 2008—marks thirty-one years, nearly to the day, since my first visit here. Then an out-of-state graduate student never expecting to see Sheeder Prairie again, I had driven onward to Wyoming, where I ultimately earned a doctorate in botany before starting my career as an ecologist in South Dakota. Moving to Iowa, I joined the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in 1985 and have returned to Sheeder Prairie many times for many purposes: prairie inventory, rare plant census, interpretive field trips, prescribed burns, and prairie-rescue workdays. My purpose today is more mundane: removing dilapidated stakes abandoned by a long-completed research project that are now merely nuisances to managers. From the gate, I spot the hilltop where I watched the approach of a more benign storm on that evening three decades ago. My meandering search for the widely scattered stakes will take me near there. I start down the hill and cross the first swale, passing blooming wood betony, wood sorrel, hoary puccoon, and strawberry, hubs of bumblebee activity. Finding several orphaned research stakes, I pull them from the ground. While I hunt for more stakes, I watch closely for subtle signs of our prairie management. I spot low stubs of shrubs and trees, tucked among grasses and thatch, whose stems were painstakingly cut and judiciously dabbed with sprout-suppressing herbicide to reclaim open prairie from brush. I step across a burn boundary dividing the prairie into segments; burned in rotation, there is always a patchwork of different-aged stands for insects and birds to find their preferred habitat. Satisfyingly, I find no trace at all of the harvesting crew that swept through here last fall, gathering ecotypically sound native seeds to propagate for plantings in realistic prairie reconstructions. Reaching the hilltop, I look out over the prairie, comparing the scene to the sketchy notes I wrote thirty years ago. Species are easy. Red-winged blackbirds—check. Porcu­ pine grass, prairie phlox, white sagewort—check, check, check. Fireflies—too early in the day, but probably check. Deer—none in sight, but their general superabundance 16  d e e p n a t u r e

earns a triple check. One more element gets an easy check: thunderstorm—not yet here but due to arrive soon. Then the questions get harder: ambivalence, sadness, saving the world. Setting aside ambivalence and sadness, I focus on saving the world. The world is a big place, with an overwhelming number of places that need to be saved, but at least three I know well have been saved here in Iowa: Becky’s Fen, the Waterman Creek prairie complex, and Turkey River Mounds. In 1988, when Mark and I drove to the Kauten farmstead in Fayette County to alert the owner about the fen we had found, we learned that Mr. Kauten was intent on converting it to cropland. He had tried mightily to drain it in the years preceding our visit but to date had been foiled by the exceptionally deep peat, once miring two tractors in its quaking muck. At great expense, he had installed a network of drainage tiles, but the shifting peat disrupted them. Despite an application of herbicide, the vegetation rebounded. By the time Mark and I contacted him, he was contemplating using dynamite to blast holes for ponds. Although initially unenthusiastic about relinquishing his long-held goal of someday farming the site, Bill was eventually persuaded by his daughter Rebecca—then in middle

Long-distance migrants, dickcissels arrive in

school—to adopt the fen as a family wildflower sanctuary, ultimately protecting it with

Iowa in early May and

a conservation easement in 1995 and naming it Becky’s Fen. Cropland bordering the fen

immediately set up

has been retired to become a buffer, and an adjacent property containing part of the

territories.

fen has been preserved by neighbors as the Gray-Hart Memorial Preserve. This fen has become iconic among naturalists throughout Iowa and the Midwest as an example of an outstanding natural area saved through voluntary landowner action. In 1990, shortly after the Waterman Creek Prairie Inventory was completed, the Resource Enhancement And Protection (REAP) Congress urged the Department of Natural Resources to find and protect a large prairie area. After evaluating several options, the Waterman Creek area was chosen for its abundance of high-quality prairie. The initiative became controversial when many farmers in the valley objected to DNR acquisition of large tracts of land. A creative solution combined a moderate amount s m a l l p l a c e s , u n b o u n d e d s p a c e s   17

of public acquisition with Landowner Incentive Program (LIP) funding for assistance to landowners interested in managing their prairies with brush control, prescribed burning, and conservation grazing. The original controversy faded away, replaced with a cooperative effort between landowners and DNR biologists that has saved many prairie tracts. Supported by the State Preserves Advisory Board, botanist Bill Watson has worked in recent years to inventory the flora of Turkey River Mounds and to restore its hill prairies by removing invading cedars and by conducting controlled burns with the assistance of DNR managers from Pikes Peak State Park. This marked the beginning of a shift by the Preserves Board to support management activities in addition to its traditional emphasis on descriptive studies. Initiatives to manage hill prairies have spread to several other preserves as a result of this example. The hill prairies are in better shape now than they have been for many years. And, of course, Sheeder Prairie. Though more needs to be done, efforts by DNR biologists and volunteer citizens have reversed woody encroachment over much of the prairie and provided an abundance of seeds for new Sheeder Prairies across central Iowa. I am satisfied with what I see. But what of ambivalence and sadness? No time for them, I conclude as thunder finally rolls in the distance, I am too busy saving the only world I know and love. Besides, there’s a storm coming. I need to move on. Hiking back to the gate, I start my car and drive deeper into Iowa.

18  d e e p n a t u r e

the photographs

Hoverfly on fringed gentian at Becky’s Fen.

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22

Land snail on autumn leaves.

Polyphemus moth wing.

23

24

Blue-flag iris petal unfurling.

Dew-covered blue-flag iris petal.

25

26

Red-breasted nuthatch.

Prairie warbler.

27

28

Dwarf larkspur.

Virginia bluebells buds.

29

30

American bittersweet.

Northern flicker.

31

32

American copper chased by bee on prickly pear bloom.

Pasqueflowers.

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34

Jack-o’-lanterns.

Green metallic bee on butterfly milkweed.

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36

Female red-winged blackbird.

Tree swallow.

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38

Blue cohosh buds.

Prairie trillium.

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40

Candy-striped leafhopper.

Big bluestem inflorescence.

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42

Cotton-grass in fen.

Showy orchis.

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44

Crab spider on purple coneflower bud.

Wild ginger.

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46

Pale gentian. The darkness at the base of the right-hand bloom is a bee at work inside.

Green blow fly on coneflower bud.

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48

Dickcissel.

Squirrel corn.

49

50

Fireweed.

May apple.

51

52

Great spangled fritillary on coneflower.

Hoverfly on marsh marigold.

53

54

Wild rose, Iowa’s state flower, with hoverfly.

American goldfinch, Iowa’s state bird.

55

56

Cardinal flower.

Zebra spider.

57

58

Fly agaric.

Green-flowered milkweed.

59

60

Northern monkshood with bumblebee.

Differential grasshopper.

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62

Hepatica.

Eastern tailed-blue.

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64

Bee on lead plant.

Yucca.

65

66

Shooting star.

Plains gayfeather.

67

68

Lichen on locust branch.

White-throated sparrow.

69

70

Sugar maple leaf.

Buckeye on New England aster.

71

72

Tenpetal blazingstar.

Eastern prairie fringed orchid.

73

74

Michigan lily.

Male ornate box turtle in sand prairie.

75

76

Eastern wood-pewee.

Monarch caterpillar, chrysalis, emerging adult, and adult.

77

78

Coral woodcrust.

Painted lady.

79

80

Prairie smoke.

Purple prairie clover.

81

82

Twelve-spotted skimmer.

Red admiral on nodding plumeless thistle.

83

84

Ohio spiderwort.

These nine violets are a sample of the colors found across the many habitat types in Iowa. The lavender bird’s foot violet (center) is easy to identify by its thinly divided leaves.

85

86

Northern pearly-eye.

Showy lady’s slipper.

87

88

Skunk cabbage spathes surrounding the spadix.

Spotted lady beetles on dandelions.

89

90

False hellebore in southern Iowa.

Prairie blue-eyed grass, white form.

91

92

Gray treefrog on bluntleaf milkweed in sand prairie.

Yellow and small white lady’s slippers.

93

94

Blazing star.

Dewdrop refraction with coneflowers.

95

Find, Celebrate, and Share By l i nda sc arth an d ro b ert sc arth

“If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.” Years after Vincent van Gogh said that, the father of Australian bushwalking, Paddy Pallin, said, “The best place is here and the best time is now.” With these two statements to guide our applied imaginations, we photograph the beauty of the place where we now live: Iowa. Our mission is to produce works with grace and emotional resonance. Pleasure for the viewer, as well as for ourselves, is paramount. We believe that photographs of natural subjects, especially the smaller ones, can be both abstract and representational. We work to present and represent nature in several ways. The shapes, colors, and details of each subject are in themselves beautiful. Each photograph displays some special characteristic, often abstracted to focus attention on particular patterns, spaces, and colors. Encapsulating the essence of each is what we strive for. We hope that this essence inspires concern for protecting the habitats where we captured these images. Iowa is the subject of this collection as much as are the small creatures and native plants themselves. Iowa. The word engenders thoughts of rolling fields of corn and beans overlain with the now largely imagined expanse of tallgrass prairie of almost two hundred years ago. This prairie was incised with wooded river valleys, painted with wetlands dating from the ice age, and embroidered with savannahs—oak openings that filled the niche between prairie and woodland. Although only fragments remain of the vast complex of native grasses, wildflowers, trees, fungi, lichens, and soils fanned by wind and tempered by heat and cold, one can still find surviving gems of nature. It is in

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those intimate spots among the grasses, under the trees, and in the waters that we find hope, pleasure, and the subjects of our photography. The larger landscape can by turns inspire or overwhelm us. It is the getting down and finding the charming details that comprise the ecosystems of present-day Iowa that we find so fascinating and enriching; photographing them is one of those experiences where the infinite is found in the intimate. Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is our source of artistic inspiration, interpretation, and presentation. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees . . . then everything will become easier for you.” Humans can only reflect what nature has been doing forever. The loveliness and innate dignity we find and photograph form part of the tapestry of biology, ecology, and abstract beauty that is nature. We value these images for their beauty and for their contributions to healthy ecosystems. The individual species, no matter how often overlooked, are necessary to create a life-sustaining and emotionally satisfying natural world. We value being part of a community that appreciates this fragile yet robust natural world. Iowa is often criticized for being a highly altered state with little of its original ecosystems surviving after settlement and development. Because of these huge losses, our state’s remnants are even more deserving of respect. Iowa’s remaining species have been robust enough to last this long. They will continue to exist if we care enough to look and respond and create an environment that will sustain them. Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac, “What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.” We ask, What else was there beyond compass plants and bison, and does it still exist in tiny pockets? A primeval prairie, woodland, or wetland cannot be reproduced, but many of the life forms that made them can still be found and celebrated. The need to find, celebrate, and share these species is why we

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created this book. Not only is every leaf a miracle of nature, so is each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism that makes up the evolving web of life. We offer this tiny sampling of some of our state’s smaller creatures and plants to entice viewers to look more closely at Iowa and its treasures. Many of these are necessary for a healthy environment for us as well as for them. Nature speaks in many languages and is understood in many ways. The way we work to understand and express is that of beauty. We hope that our art enchants rather than shocks, enlightens rather than confounds, and provides a positive emotional response to the beauty of Iowa.

f i n d , c e l e b r a t e , a n d s h a r e   99

Photographers’ Note Our heartfelt thanks to all who made us welcome in Iowa, allowed us to visit the special places that shelter many of our subjects, and believed we had a story to tell in the images contained here. A special thank-you to John Pearson for his essay on the Iowa landscapes that speak to him. And to Holly Carver, who saw our work and said, “We will have to talk sometime.” Several months later she called, and we began the conversation that became this book. While painters are rarely asked what brushes they use or sculptors which chisels, photographers are often asked about their tools. Most of these images were digital captures with macro lenses on DSLR cameras, although some are scans of 35mm slides. The birds were taken with long telephoto lenses. We either created or selected images that would adapt themselves to the square format of this book. Our digital captures are in RAW format, and we developed the images in our digital darkroom. To learn more about the images in this book, visit our website at www .scarthphoto.com. Thumbnails of photographs and information about the species are available on the link for this book.

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Other Bur Oak Books of Interest The Butterflies of Iowa By Dennis W. Schlicht, John C. Downey, and Jeffrey Nekola A Country So Full of Game: The Story of Wildlife in Iowa By James J. Dinsmore The Elemental Prairie: Sixty Tallgrass Plants By George Olson and John Madson The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa By Cornelia F. Mutel Enchanted by Prairie By Bill Witt and Osha Gray Davidson Fifty Common Birds of the Upper Midwest By Dana Gardner and Nancy Overcott Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest By Dana Gardner and Nancy Overcott

Fragile Giants: A Natural History of the Loess Hills By Cornelia F. Mutel An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants By Paul Christiansen and Mark Müller Iowa Birdlife By Gladys Black The Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas By Laura Spess Jackson, Carol A. Thompson, and James J. Dinsmore The Iowa Nature Calendar By Jean C. Prior and James Sandrock Landforms of Iowa By Jean C. Prior Orchids in Your Pocket: A Guide to the Native Orchids of Iowa By Bill Witt A Practical Guide to Prairie Reconstruction By Carl Kurtz Prairie: A North American Guide By Suzanne Winckler

Prairie in Your Pocket: A Guide to Plants of the Tallgrass Prairie By Mark Müller Restoring the Tallgrass Prairie: An Illustrated Manual for Iowa and the Upper Midwest By Shirley Shirley A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet By Claudia McGehee The Vascular Plants of Iowa: An Annotated Checklist and Natural History By Lawrence J. Eilers and Dean M. Roosa Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie By John Madson Wildflowers and Other Plants of Iowa Wetlands By Sylvan T. Runkel and Dean M. Roosa Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition By Sylvan T. Runkel and Dean M. Roosa A Woodland Counting Book By Claudia McGehee