"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. 

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.

Sources/Additional Reading:

• Alfalfa: The Unsung Hero of Sustainable Crop Rotations
• Alfalfa, Wildlife, and the Environment
• ISU: Acres of Corn and Soybeans Harvested in Iowa
• USDA: Iowa Ag News – Acreage
• Growcycle: Alfalfa: Technical and Cultivation Guide

Where have you been hiding?

It's been several years since I glimpsed Blue-flag Iris in the low-lying basins along the Sycamore Greenway. Their fondness for moist areas means they hang out down where the stormwater lingers, a good distance from the trail, and thickets of willows, dogwoods, and other shrubby growth eventually either crowded them out or hid them from view.

But what's this?! Near the Sycamore Apartments, where a willow thicket had been cleared with the REAP work over the winter, there's a little stand of these pretty irises, their trios of petals and sepals in full bloom as May shifts into June. Have they been here this whole time, hidden by overgrown brush (or just as likely, I was never looking in the right place at the right time to catch their distant purple flowers)? 

The REAP work included overseeding with native seed mix, but most sources indicate that it can take a couple of years for Iris virginica to flower from seed--so it seems likely these have been residents prior to that.

Closer examination of one of the flowers revealed one, then two tiny, long-snooted weevils trundling about. iNaturalist suggests they are an Iris Weevil (Mononychus vulpeculus) which certainly tracks with their location. These weevils feed on the seeds of iris but may also be found on daisies and fleabanes. 

Keep your eyes peeled when you're out on the trail! After the winter ecological restoration work opened up new vistas, who knows what old (or new) flowers--and their insect friends--we might spot?