Sycamore Greenway Friends

Saturday, October 3, 2026

A fleeting flutter-by

"Have you ever seen a Mourning Cloak?"

The question pops out, as it always does, when the topic of butterflies comes up. In this case, with a fellow volunteer who mentioned participating in butterfly surveys as we were cutting brush along the trail. (A few years ago, the query would have been about an American Snout, my previous lepidopteran white whale, which was checked off my list a few years ago.)

Alas, the Mourning Cloak proved to be a missing checkmark on the butterfly surveyor's list as well, as we opined on its elusive loveliness: a large butterfly with russet-brown wings edged in creamy white, with a black border spotted with cornflower blue between. It was one of those striking butterflies you admire as you're paging through a field guide, and distinctive enough to know when you see it.

Mere days later, tootling along the trail on a bicycle (at a quite leisurely pace both to easily spot and dismount to photograph anything of interest, as well as to avoid the abundant grasshoppers sunning themselves on the pavement), a large butterfly rose from a puddle of rainwater and bobbed slowly past.

Is it....?

gasp

gasp!

GASP!!!

Was it?! Definite creamy white edges on largeish wings, visible even as it bobbed away behind me. By the time I dismounted and got the camera ready, it was skimming above the leafy treetops, dipping in and out of view just beyond reach of my lens before disappearing entirely. I paced pathetically, retracing my path back to the puddle in case it returned. Eventually giving up, I remounted the bike and resumed my course, whereupon I almost immediately glimpsed the same creamy-white edged wings ahead.

I bit more ready, but still slow, I managed to get a few shots of the wings as it rapidly fluttered out of range and again disappeared into the treetops. As I rode home, I kicked myself for not being able to get a good shot while also questioning what I really saw. Was it a Mourning Cloak? Or could it have been a band-winged grasshopper, many of which have superficially similar dark wings with pale edges.

In addition to being beautiful, Mourning Cloaks have an interesting lifecycle. They are one of only a handful of butterflies (out of more than 100 species in Iowa) that overwinter as adults, tucked away in tree bark and other hidey-holes. They appear early in spring and lay eggs, which hatch and eventually pupate. Those adults emerge in midsummer but only briefly: in the heat of summer they estivate (a kind of hibernation during hot weather) until fall, when they will again emerge, eat, and prepare for their long winter sleep.

Mourning Cloak larvae use willows, cottonwood, hackberry, and other trees as hosts; adults don't normally nectar at flowers but rather dine on tree sap and rotting fruit. They can be found throughout North America, even up into Alaska, and also throughout Europe and parts of Asia.

Back home, able to examine the photos, I'm convinced I finally saw my Mourning Cloak. It's a big like footage of bigfoot: distant and blurry. But definitely a butterfly, with rusty-red wings edged in creamy white!

Sources/Additional Reading

Sunday, August 30, 2026

"I would prefer not to."

I take a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures. I share some of them here, and on social media. For every 100 photos I take, probably 70 are deleted immediately: out of focus, or the bee flew away, or the bird is looking the wrong direction, or it's too shadowy/too bright. Or any variety of terrible.

Some of those problems could be fixed with a bit of Photoshop, no doubt. I considered learning to manipulate my photos a little better, to squeeze a few more usable photos from that 70% of unusables, but I always decided against it. The most I do is maybe lighten or darken a bit using the slider bar in the standard photo viewer, and cropping/rotating as needed.

Why? It wasn't so much reluctance to learn a new skill. It was more that I didn't want to introduce anything between what I experience on the Sycamore Greenway and what I share. If I took a picture of a catbird skulking in a shadow, it should look like it's skulking in a shadow. Once I start making judgment calls about what a photo should look like, it leaves the realm of reality and becomes a piece of art, filtered through my perception of what I saw, or what I think people want to see.

That's all the more reason why I shun using AI, particularly for sharing about the world outside our doors. Even leaving aside its hallucinations and its confident inaccuracies: it obscures authenticity.

Could Claude, or ChatGPT or whatever, make this Bald Eagle a little more crisp? Maybe fix that little wedge of missing feather at the base of its left wing while it was at it?

Sure. But that wouldn't be the eagle that soared over the trail. Or this slightly jumbled scene of a Painted Lady butterfly being displaced by a bumble bee as a second bee approaches...could it replace the semi-closed wings with a more photogenic spread-winged shot, and make the bumble bee a little more obvious?

Probably. But that's no longer reality. It's a fictional dramatization of a story to which I was the only witness.

Coming up with things to say about the Greenway every day can be a challenge, and it's certainly time consuming. But that little "Write with AI" button that appeared below the text box some time ago has never, ever been tempting. Because whatever composes that blurb didn't feel the sun on its back as it hunkered down to inspect a leaf, or hear a distant woodpecker tapping away on a tree in the distance. It didn't wait patiently for that bee to stop buzzing around and land on a flower, and then wait longer until it turned around to face the lens.

You'll never need to wonder if a photo or text on this page was created using AI. It was not. It never will be.

Could AI write better posts—more engaging posts, less lazy posts, maybe even more factual posts—if given a photo and an appropriate prompt? Would it be able to play the algorithm with keywords and phrases to reach more people? Definitely. It draws on all the collected skill and wisdom of writers, artists, and naturalists available.

My work is limited to my experience of the world. But it's mine, and good or bad, that's not something that can be found anywhere else in the world.

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Alfalfa: an agricultural good neighbor

Iowa has over 28 million acres of land devoted to agricultural crops; of those, around 13 million acres are devoted to corn and another 10 million acres to soybeans. Many of the ag fields surrounding the Greenway rotate through these two crops (crop duopoly? dual cropopoly?) year after year.

The fields due north of the wetlands, though, are different. For the past few years they have been planted in alfalfa, a crop that fixes nitrogen in the soil and requires fewer inputs like fertilizer and pesticides than other common crops. Its purple flowers are also beneficial for bees and other pollinators (though pollination does involve bonking the bee on the head); in fact, alfalfa is considered an insectary plant, attracting and harboring a variety of beneficial insects including ladybeetles and parasitic wasps. Green fields of alfalfa may also provide cover and foraging places for a variety of birds.

The fields were cut recently, but will regrow again. As a perennial, alfalfa can be harvested 3 or 4 times each summer, regrowing from the root each time; its deep roots help prevent soil erosion. Once harvested, the alfalfa is dried and baled, ultimately destined to feed cows, horses, and other animals.

The land on which the alfalfa grows is owned by Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City (RSFIC), a local foundation dedicated to empowering and building community solutions and supporting the neighborhoods where we live and work. Though originally intended to be part of an ambitious development project, these 47 acres planted in alfalfa remain one small but important demonstration of how decisionmakers can build care for our natural world into the foundation of every action.