Prairie Dock Series in the Breeze with Grasses and Shadows

For a blog about sitting in the woods, I tend to spend a lot of time in prairies; and lately, as I’ve mentioned, I have been spending a lot of my free out-and-about time at Wolf Road Prairie.  Again, this is a great place to visit and a window into the landscape of Illinois and the Midwest in general before..well, before.  There’s only a fraction of a percent (1/100th of 1%) of original prairie left in Illinois, and the health and density of biodiversity of this site is quite startling.  It’s almost a little disorienting I find with the great variety of plant species of all shapes and sizes, the colors, and then the constant movement of it all in even the slightest breeze.  This near perpetual motion also poses a challenge to the picture taking.  The density and variety of textures are what I’ve been more attracted to lately than the colors, though the colors are nice too.  As I was flipping through some of these pictures, there were some that I liked more than others, but then I kinda felt that, taken altogether, they portrayed some semblance of this constant shifting of the landscape which has become a significant aspect of my developing relationship with this area.

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RedWing Blackbird at Wolf Road Prairie

I've been visiting Wolf Road Prairie lately, and it's a pretty amazing place.  What was slated to be a housing development in the twenties went undeveloped after the crash and Great Depression and the land has been acquired piece by piece by the county and state to now be considered the best black soil or mesic prairie remnant East of th

I’ve been visiting Wolf Road Prairie lately, and it’s a pretty amazing place. What was slated to be a housing development in the twenties went undeveloped after the crash and Great Depression and the land has been acquired piece by piece over the years by the county and state to now be considered “the largest and best black soil or mesic prairie remnant East of the Mississippi”   Pretty cool.               Wolf Road Prairie