CliffNotes
Nature’s Doppelgangers: Survival Strategy of the Soundest Sort
“Let’s pretend to be…..” can be the opening to a fascinating adventure, but, and sadly for most of us, is a phrase confined to childhood years. Pretending to be something or someone else is widely held as not-very-adult human behavior. In the natural world, however, pretense proves to be an amazing strategy and one that […]
Bird Feeding Stations
Got Food? As winter winds howl across our bluff lands and storms make the days chill and dreary, a popular landscape brightener can be accomplished by adding a bird feeding station that brings nature closer to you. Backyard bird feeding programs are among the most popular nature-hobbies in the United States today, with about […]
Duck Diversity Needs Varieties of Healthy Habitats
As cooling summer breezes turn to crisp and even chill autumn winds, bird migration reaches full pulse as tens of thousands of individual birds from several hundred species pass down the Mississippi River flyway to take up winter residence here and to the south. Wheeling and turning in aerodynamically energy-saving V-formations, waterfowl descend from the […]
New Lessons from Smokey the Bear: Renewing the Landscape with Fire
The Southwestern wire services and blogs this week have relayed a story about an American icon who may be nearing his end. Smokey Bear is reported to be in terminal decline. Retired to an assisted living facility near Truth or Consequences, NM, he apparently is suffering from a host of maladies. Smokey’s meteoric rise to […]
Bush Honeysuckle is Foreign Enemy # 1 for Bluff Lands’ Health
Bush honeysuckle is foreign enemy number one in our blufflands. It has taken over the understory in many areas of the woods, is destroying our natural habitats, and is transforming forever our natural landscape. While the several types of Asian bush honeysuckles present in the U.S. do have differences which separate them into species, all […]
What’s Underneath? Karst: Rugged and Beautiful
An amazing underworld lies beneath our bluff lands. Our region’s distinctive geologic history literally laid the groundwork for the area’s unique subterranean landscape, a rugged, yet beautiful topography called “karst.” With the birth of the earth, processes began some 4 1/2 billion years ago, to build the globe’s crust and develop continents. Rocks and gravels […]
Native Plants at the Heart of Life
Our bluff lands — currently a riot of lively green color thanks to plentiful spring rains — offer bountiful grazing to copious numbers of herbivores, which, in turn, become food for others. But, while cattle, sheep, even pigs or deer, all of which are largely destined to become our food, are the animals we generally […]
“This Spring is for the (shore) Birds!”
Our very wet, rainy spring — the St. Louis Meteorological office reports that the over 25 inches of rain received so far this year, breaks all records since 1870 and is nearly 10 inches more rainfall than the average — has turned many fields into shallow pools and mud flats. An imaginative viewer can stand […]
Voice of the Turtle Heard in the Land
Turtles seem to have such detached insouciance — an armored implacability, an unsettling hold on life. They are the most ancient line of living reptiles, with fossilized specimens dated from over 250 million years ago. Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, including the once-local Illini peoples, revered turtles, viewing them as representative of Great Turtle, […]
Bluffs Alive with Spring Songs
By late April almost any patch of woods in our bluff lands comes alive with bird song. The early-rising listener can hear night fade to dawn and catch the calls of owls as they head to daytime roosts and perhaps also hear the last songs of whippoorwills fading in the distance. But even while the […]