Blue Jay Feather

 

An old sketch of a blue jay feather

White Oak Leaves

 

 

 

The fall color is just about peak here and one of my favorite trees, white oak (Quercus alba), is displaying a wide variety of colors right now. Yesterday on a walk with my son I grabbed a variety of white oak leaves representing a wide range of shapes and colors. I cant be sure these all came from the same tree, but they did all come from three or four individuals in a small area.

An Unusual Epiphyte

 

September was a busy month - my wife, son and I moved from Cleveland, Ohio to a small town in Central, IL and attended family weddings in Chicago and New Orleans.  In a three week stretch I went from Cleveland to Cent IL to Chicago to Cleveland to Cent IL to St. Louis to New Orleans to Cent IL so I have had almost no time to sketch or post to my blog.

 

Anyway, while in the New Orleans Garden District I loved seeing the old live oaks (Quercus virginiana) almost all of them were hosting the epiphytes resurrection fern (Polypodium polypodioides) and Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). Normally I would be bothered by a bunch of garbage or non organic junk hanging from such beautiful trees, but the Marti Gras beads hanging from oak limbs along the parade routes did not look out of place at all and were actually attractive. 

 

When I finally got some of my art stuff unpacked this was the first thing that I decided to sketch (colored pencil) and paint (watercolor).  If it looks funny in the middle it is because it is a poor splicing job by me - I need a larger scanner or a better computer program.

 



Summer Notes

Our family is in the process of moving back to the prairie of Illinois so I have been without my scanner and much of my drawing supplies so I have nothing new to share.  However, here are a few pages from my field notebook from past summers spent in the Ohio forest!

 

River Clean Up

When the summer is dry and the rivers reach low levels it becomes all to clear how much garbage pollutes our rivers and streams; even the most pristine stretches of water.  It is a great time of year to cool off in your local stream and pick up some garbage while your at it.  Here is a sketch that I made for a local river clean up a few years back; beer cans and tires....

Deertoe

This is a handsome little freshwater mussel called a deertoe (Truncilla truncata) they range in color from this aqua blue to green to almost red-orange.  This is my first attempt to illustrate one of these beautiful creatures but I am sure it wont be my last.

Perigynia

Anyone who owns a “Flora of …” field guide has surely noticed that the Genus Carex can easily chew-up 50 plus pages of dichotomous key without the help of pictures or line drawings. It is intimidating. Ohio is home to more than 160 different species of sedges easily making it the largest genera in the flora. One of the primary characteristics used to identify sedges to species are the perigynia, an inflated sac containing the achene (seed). Usually a 20X hand lens is needed to observe the characteristics of these structures as most of them are around 3-4mm long. I have only been interested in sedges for a few years, but from my first look through the hand lens I was struck by the beauty of sedges especially when magnified.

Here is a banner of 11 different perigynia all from sedges native to northeast Ohio – can you identify any of them?

Here is a close up look at the staminate (male) spike on top and a pistillate (female) spike below.  This is Carex plantaginea (plantain leaved sedge).  A little more about plantain leaved sedge right here 

First Morel 2012

Yesterday I found my first morel of 2012.  It was a tiny grey morel that measured less than 2cm tall.  Here is a sketch of one of the last morels I saw in 2011 a great big yellow that measured nearly 20cm tall on May 5th.

Morels can be terribly hard to find.  I didn't find this nice yellow until after I got home and took a closer look at my snapshot of this handsome Jack-in-the-pulpit.  Can you find it?

Cerulean Warbler

Cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulean) is a small warbler that often forages and nests high in the forest canopy especially on the edges of canopy gaps.  Some of our tallest trees in the eastern forests are tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) – so here is a sketch of what you might see if you look up to the tree tops in a high quality forest this time of year.

April

Two sketches from last April – this is about the stage we are at right now – still running 2-3 weeks early.  However, the weather has cooled off quite a bit and a lot of the plants have slowed down or stopped in their tracks. 

The buds of the understory beech trees are swelling but not yet popped and the winter wrens are singing. 

Wild ginger (Asarum canadense) is in flower and the foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) is almost flowering.