Documenting Nature Along the Greenway

Grapevine Beetle, submitted
and identified via iNaturalist

Do you ever wonder at the variety and diversity of species found along the Greenway (or other natural spaces around the city)? Did you know that iNaturalist has "Places" that show all the observations submitted within a defined geographic area? You can view by Johnson County, Iowa City, or various Places of Interest within the city. 

There are three such places for the Greenway:  Sycamore Trail, which includes the land around the trail from Grant Wood Elementary to the Lehman Avenue extension; Sycamore Wetlands, which is limited to the city-owned wetland cells; and Sycamore Greenway, which includes both the trail and the city-owned wetlands. You can also visit the Places created for Ralston Creek, Scott Park, Ryerson's Woods, and many other natural spaces in and around town. 

These Points of Interest automatically collect any observations within their boundaries, so if you use iNaturalist to identify a plant or insect along the Greenway, your observation is added to the data! Some places, like Ashton Prairie, even have annual BioBlitz events where volunteers document huge numbers of observations together on a single day.

Although it's not technically a "Point of Interest" I recently visited McCollister Boulevard and noted a wide variety of plants and insects on the short stretch between Sycamore and South Gilbert; those observations were duly uploaded to iNaturalist and added to the observations of others in the same area. You can zoom around and browse each point: blue for birds, mammals, herps, and other non-insects, red for insects and arachnids, pink for fungi, and green for plants. 

It's an easy way to both learn about the things you see along the Greenway and elsewhere, and also contribute data documenting the variety of life that any area supports. 

About the Snout

Have you ever gotten your hands on a nature guide--birds, flowers, butterflies--and seen a species you've coveted the sight of? From the first Golden Guide to Birds I excavated in my grandparents' cool basement library as a child, I would page through and pause to admire the amazing variety of avian features on display: the colorful male American Kestrel, the ridiculously long, curving bills of assorted sandpipers, the bold patterns and slicked hairdo of Wood Ducks. 

Most of all, my young imagination was captivated by the brilliant colors of the Painted Bunting (my tastes back then were...not subtle). The bright colors were nothing like the drab brown sparrows, the plain Mourning Doves that hung around the alleys and gravel lots around the neighborhood. Even our Northern Cardinal, brilliant though he is, could not compete with the cartoonish extravagance of the rainbow bird.

Needless to say, one does not encounter Painted Buntings in the upper midwest, and I have yet to see one in person. But I keep it on a mental list with other "dream" species gleaned from paging through nature guides--though I now have a realistic idea of geographic range and tend to limit my dreams accordingly. 

One such critter, encountered in the pages of a butterfly guide, is the American Snout (Libytheana carinenta)--a curious specimen with (as you might guess) a prominent snoutlike structure projecting from its head, and mottled brown wings with ragged edges that make it look like a dried leaf with the "snout" as its petiole. I am charmed by prominent snoots, be they on greyhound dogs, anteaters, tapirs, elephant shrews, echidnas....a butterfly that not only had a snoot but was named for it was right up my alley.

And conveniently, their range extends over much of the eastern U.S., including Iowa, so there was a good chance I might encounter a Snout (they don't overwinter here, but populations from the southern U.S. will migrate north into our area and beyond in the summer*). Less conveniently...they are not as large and flamboyant as our Monarchs and other butterflies that get all the press, and their sneaky camouflage seemed like it would be a challenge to spot.

American Snouts use hackberry trees as hosts for their larvae, those warty-barked champions of many a caterpillar. In addition to American Snouts, hackberry trees are hosts for Mourning Cloaks, Hackberry Emperors, Tawny Emperors, and the curiously named Question Mark. Not just a tree for butterflies, the hackberry's eponymous fruits are eaten by woodpeckers, robins, pheasants, and several other birds.

But back to the American Snout....

Beyond making note of its distinguishing characteristic and its affinity of hackberry trees, I don't have the slightest idea of how to find a particular butterfly. Other butterflies I've encountered have all followed the same process: hang around flowers, maybe see a butterfly, take a picture and identify the butterfly. So my encounter with an American Snout was left in the hands of fate.

As luck would have it...the Sycamore Greenway delivered. As it always delivers. Not always what I'm looking for when I'm looking for it, but on its own time. 

Warty bark of
hackberry tree

I had left my bicycle parked at the Sycamore Apartments and, going to unlock it, a butterfly fluttered off it and alighted again on the seat. Out of habit I froze and peered carefully, and saw a big long snoot! An unmistakable snoot! I didn't have my camera but carefully, slowly, pulled my phone from my purse and snapped a few shots, inching closer with each one. Eventually it spooked and flew off to a neighboring bicycle, but not before I had my documentation. 

It was just a little scrap of a butterfly, with its mottled brown wings. The forewing occasionally slipped forward, revealing a large orange blotch close to its body, with smaller white spots toward the outside edge. The long, pointy snout was everything I'd hoped for.

That snout is not technically a snoot, or nose, but rather a set of labial palpi, a feature all butterflies and moths have in varying shapes and sizes (few as pronounced as those of the American Snout) which actually seem to function similarly to a snoot: the labial palpi sense carbon dioxide, which may help with detecting nectar and its concentration in flowers for foraging. 

Their caterpillars are small and green, with a thin yellow racing stripe down the side and tiny, pinprick yellow spots. There are usually two broods a year, so even if they don't overwinter in our area there may be caterpillars from the second brood wandering about. Perhaps, having lucked into an American Snout butterfly encounter, I can redouble my efforts to locate a caterpillar. You can be sure I will be inspecting the leaves of the hackberry trees along the trail this summer!

...

Serendipitously, the next day as I was visiting the McCollister weeds I happened upon ANOTHER American Snout, which kindly posed for more photos:

Forgive the quality...this was the only shot I
captured as it quickly fluttered its wings.

*According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, American Snouts migrate to that state starting in May, but the Illinois DNR claims they overwinter. Most resources mention that they overwinter in the southern part of their range, but neglect to mention exactly what constitutes "southern part". 

Monoculture Blues

Yellow Sweet Clover at the Birds in Flight sculpture.

There can be a certain satisfaction in orderly monocultures: swaths of neatly-trimmed turfgrass unbroken by flower or weed, or neat rows of corn or soybeans growing in precise lines. Their efficient lines, however, belie the extremely high maintenance required to suppress nature’s natural diversity.

Iowa agriculture at work

Our row crops require huge amounts of inputs to grow and thrive in what remains of our state’s rich soil, nutrients and pesticides that may be applied in excessive amounts and run off into our waterways with disastrous effects downriver. Our neat yards do the same.

 In contrast, nature promotes diversity. A sun-loving plant may grow tall, providing shade in which a smaller shade-tolerant plant may grow. One plant may thrive in this patch, while nearby slightly different conditions–more wind that sucks moisture from a plant’s leaves quickly, or more sandy soil that drains faster, or perhaps a cooler low-lying spot that stays moist even in the hot days of summer–may be more suited to a different plant.

Disease, fire, or drought may rage through an area, but the diversity of life makes it more likely that some of those many different species and individuals may make it through the disaster than if it were, say, a community of identical elm trees lining suburban streets.

So you would think that nature, left to her own devices, would default to diversity, right? Well, not necessarily. For one thing, we humans have so manipulated the world around us that, having changed the character of what had been rich habitats harboring diverse species, it is now no longer suited to the species that evolved here.

Instead, we have made a world where scrappy generalists–like humans ourselves–are able to take over and crowd out those original inhabitants who, while perfectly suited to the world in which they evolved, are now faced with a very different world. A world where topsoil has been scraped and hauled away, leaving just a heavy clay soil. Or where we stripped the prairie of its original inhabitants, planted crops for decades and left the used up, depleted land to whatever was willing to give it a go.

Humans are actively creating a world where only weeds can live and then feigning shock and outrage upon finding so many.”

― Hope Jahren

Into these waste areas–the gravel lots, the mowed edges, the constructed habitats like the Greenway–come those scrappy generalists: the Birdsfoot Trefoil and Crown Vetch, Yellow and White Sweet Clover, Wild Parsnip and Queen Annes Lace. Reed Canarygrass–Reed Canarygrass everywhere! And even some natives get in on the action, with scrubby willow trees expanding into dense thickets and Meadow Anemone spreading from a small clump to an extensive patch over the course of a few years.

Wild Parsnip along the trail

These plants aren’t content to spring up here and there among others. Nope. Where they grow, they grow, unwilling to share the space with those plants maybe a bit less assertive, or a bit slower to get started in the spring. They may not reach the monocultural proportions of carefully cultivated row crops, and some other species may manage to hang on in their midst, but the presence of these super-survivors crowds out many others that might normally thrive there.

Now that we’ve disturbed the ecological balance that arose with hundreds or thousands of species sharing those slightly different niches, what is to be done? Do we intervene and try to slow or reverse the spread of these “bad actors” along the trail, physically or chemically removing the invaders? The City, for example, has recently invested in renovation of natural areas at TTRA and Whispering Meadows to help curb undesirable plants and restore some of the native plantings that were intended. In other natural areas around the city, prescribed burns help keep woody plants in check.

Volunteers lopping woody brush along the Greenway make a small start–but a glance at the areas where work was done shows little progress yet. There are currently no interventions planned for the Reed Canarygrass or other forbs along the trail (that I know of, at least).

Or do we let nature continue to do its thing, and hope that those aggressive monocultures will eventually be reined in by some other force? After all, there is no stasis in nature. The species that are ascendent in one era are faced with constantly changing conditions; perhaps a newly introduced pest will target some of these nonnatives, or the nutrient runoff fueling some of the excessive growth from surrounding agricultural fields will cease.

As we continue to remodel our world in a way that reduces the diversity and complexity that is allowed to thrive, we must commit to protecting and promoting those species and the habitats that support them, in every corner that we allow to escape development.

Crown Vetch creeping along a slope.