It loves heavy shade and wet ground, it's relatively unaffected by insects and diseases, and it can even survive a nearby Black Walnut. It's a native perennial known as Jack-in-the Pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, and is found in woodlands throughout most of the eastern half of the United States....
Last weekend, while working with the Kickapoo Krew Master Naturalists, I had the good fortune to be introduced to a beautiful bald cypress (Taxodium distichum). Although it is a conifer, the bald cypress drops its leaves in winter. You can see, in the photo, the lacy bracts (future cones) along its...
This part of the Midwest isn't exactly San Francisco, or even Oklahoma City, where an outbreak of earth tremors is thought to be linked to deep-well injection by the oil industry. But there are fault lines beneath our feet, a University of Illinois geologist said Monday, and seismographic studies...
A Master Naturalist volunteer has added Piatt County to a very short list of places where Shay's Trillium has been observed in Illinois. The plant, Trillium recurvatum shayii, is a form of the common Prairie Trillium. It was spotted in April 2015 between Allerton's Centaur and Sunsinger statues by...
With all the talk about milkweeds, some of you may have planted a few to create habitat for the benefit of the Monarch Butterfly. (It's the one year anniversary of an article on Illinois milkweeds and Monarchs which appeared in the December, 2014 Field Notes.) As a dividend, you may have attracted...
The Douglas Creek project in Meadowbrook Park is about three-quarters finished, and already water is flowing more freely and crayfish, frogs, bluebirds and deer are taking advantage of newly created habitat.
Caitlin Lill, project manager for the Urbana Park District, said the $180,000 renovation...
A pair of Sandhill Cranes nested in Champaign County again in 2015 and hatched two more babies, according to wildlife photographer Brian Stearns, who first spotted the pair in the Middle Fork River Forest Preserve in 2010. Subsequent observations by Stearns, his wife Susan, and others have...
Reviewer and nature photographer Teresa DeWitt ('13) shares a few special finds.
Butterflies by Ronald Ornstein;photography by Thomas Marent. Firefly Publishing, 2015
Butterflies is a stunning photographic study.Thomas Marent has a gift for capturing images on film, and infinite...
I'm looking at myself and the world differently these days, after taking a course on creatures I can see only through a microscope. The view is both awe-inspiring and frightening.
Fears first. University of Illinois researcher Claudia Reich says "perfect storm" conditions exist for awful things to...
ECIMN 2015 Year in Review
Sixty-one master naturalists attended the ECIMN annual meeting on November 7 at Homer Lake; top highlights of this year included:
126 East Central Illinois Master Naturalists reported volunteer hours (8,150) in the first 10 months of 2015 on a pace to...