tigertoy

Saturday, I went out to the Out and Back area of Kickapoo, and the frog ponds where the main trail first meets the haul road were simply amazing.  So yesterday, I invited Jeremy, who enjoys nature and wildlife with a special interest in the old fashioned stuff, to come out with me and experience it.  High points of the afternoon included a very tame muskrat, who sat 30 feet from us happily munching until we got tired of watching him and moved on, tons of salamanders (two sorts, presumably different species, many about 8" long with coral pink spots, a few a hair smaller that were plain muddy gray brown), a few interesting bugs (first butterflies of the season!, a couple of little spiders, several kinds of water bugs), a dead crayfish on the path, and OMG FROGS!  I actually saw 3 types of frogs, tiny, medium sized, and large.  I'm pretty sure I could identify 4 different songs and I think there were a couple more, but the prevalent songs were overwhelming enough it was hard to pick out the less common notes.  I recorded a few seconds of audio with my phone, and the recording is better than I would have expected from a phone, but the file is a .3ga, and whatever that is, nothing on this computer recognizes that extension.  If I can figure out how to convert it into a more widely understood format, I will post it and you can hear the Kickapoo frog symphony.

When we got back to the car, we had about an hour left before we needed to drive back to Champaign, so we went up the road to Heron Park.  Highlights there were a pair of Mute Swans who were sleeping very close to the boardwalk, a Bald Eagle who flew down, gliding into the stiff wind so that he was almost perfectly motionless for some seconds, a glorious view through the binoculars, and a fairly close look at the pair of Sandhill Cranes.  Also some Red-Winged Blackbirds (still not quite as many as I expect to set up territories in this prime habitat, 2 or 3 of the eponymous Great Blue Herons flying over, and many ducks (mostly too far away to see well and I don't know my ducks), some coots, and of course Canada Geese.

This early in the year, it is almost certain that winter will be back, but it was definitely spring yesterday (and today too).

I spent about 3 hours walking at Kickapoo today, along the Riverview trail both north and south.  The air temperature is starting to feel more like spring and all but the most stubborn traces of the snow are gone from the land, but the ponds are still almost completely ice covered.  There were lots of noisy geese, but only a very few other birds.  I almost stepped on what I think was a woodcock.  There were 3 mergansers on the river at one point, and I heard a wood duck at another.  I saw one big raptor just briefly, flying away down the river, it might have been an immature eagle.  I know winter isn't really over; there will be more cold and there will probably be more snow before spring really arrives.  But it is really good to be outside.

Seeing the trash that people leave around the park leaves me with dark thoughts about my fellow humans.  I just can't comprehend the lack of consideration for others that it takes to throw trash on the ground.  I feel a special contempt for the guy responsible for the used condom.  Someone who would throw his condom on the ground in a state park really doesn't deserve to have any need for a condom.

I went to the beach this afternoon, my favorite spot at Sportsmen's Lake.  The river is very low, exposing as much of the nice sand as ever.  I took a beach towel and just lay on the sand for a while, and then I walked around.  A couple of hundred yards away was a scene out of a coffee table book.  The river itself was very nice, and no works of man intruded on the view.  About five deer were playing at the edge of the water.  A heron was in the water near them.  They were far enough away that neither deer nor heron noticed me at all.  I didn't bring a camera, so I have to settle for writing about it.

It wasn't a terribly inviting day, but it wasn't raining and it was cold enough that the muddy ground was partly frozen.  I needed to get outside, so I went to Kickapoo.  I parked at the start of the Out and Back, then went in by the Emerald Pond trail and up to my favorite lunch spot.  The wind off the lake was much too brisk to sit in my usual spot, but I found a spot on the lee side of the hill that was fine.  Then I came back along the Out and Back, for a nice total of about 5 miles.

I didn't see any signs of spring in the plants.  There were a few birds around.  A kingfisher, lots of noisy geese, tree sparrows, juncos, crows, a red-bellied woodpecker, a red-tail, and most pleasing to me, some bluebirds.  Along the river on the Emerald Pond trail, beavers have been wreaking havoc.  They've taken down several large trees, blocking the path in one place.  The only furry critter I actually saw was a possum which actually looked rather cute.

I've been pretty much cooped up indoors for a couple of weeks, between the lousy weather and being busy.  I've been getting out for a one-mile walk a couple of times a day but not farther and not anywhere more interesting than around the immediate neighborhood (either mine or my mom's).  It was finally warm today, though not dry, and I went over to Kickapoo.  I went on the beginning of the out and back trail; it was very soggy.  It was slightly drizzling, but it seemed like it was thinking about raining more, and I considered how much it would suck to get really wet when I was an hour away from my car, and I came back, and then walked around on the roads for another 40 minutes.  Just as I got back to my car the mist worked its way up to actual rain, and as I was driving home, it turned into a serious downpour; I came back just in time.

I didn't see much of anything, but I got to breathe some fresh air.  Even though it's still December, when it thaws it feels like the promise of spring.

We had our coldest night yet this season Monday, well into the 20s.  It was a lovely, though chilly, day today, but more than a little bittersweet.  A few hardy flowers were left -- about the same as last week -- but the only representative of order Lepidoptera was an unassuming little brown moth.  No butterflies at all.  A fair number of crickety things were singing.  On the plus side, though, no mosquitoes.

The fall colors are still going strong; the rain this weekend doesn't seem to have stripped the trees.  I'm not sure if this is an unusually good year for fall colors or if I'm just noticing more than usual thanks to having the free time to get outside.

My plan for the day was to follow the Out and Back trail around and see if I could get my mental map straightened out.  I fairly definitely worked out that even though it seems familiar, the horse trail south of the haul road (which connects to the trail I found last week over Emerald Pond) is not actually part of the loop I've walked before.  I can't figure out why I'm so sure that I remember coming up that section of trail to return to the road; the trails just don't go that way.


Striking colors against a beautiful sky near the start of the Out and Back trail.

( click here for the rest of the day )

I headed to Kickapoo today, and I wanted to get to an area I haven't been to lately, around High Pond, or High Lake, depending on which sign you ask.  It's a nice area, a little out of the way, but (I thought) didn't have a whole lot of trails.  I discovered that there are more trails than I realized, allowing a circuit around the whole lake for a decent walk.


The view from the bridge over the Middlefork at the main entrance.

( click to join me on my expedition )

I went to the beach today!


See, I'm wiggling my toes in the sand!

Now let me 'splain.

( the story and more pix )

I packed a lunch and went over to Kickapoo today.  Since it was cloudy and looked rainy, I didn't take a camera.  (What happened to the perfect weekend they forecast on Friday?)  I went up to the overlook, ate lunch, and read a couple of chapters in my book.  Then I went up the bike trail that comes out to the road about there.  (I'm not entirely sure I'm supposed to hike on the bike trails.  But none of the few bikers I met complained to me.  I was careful to yield them the path.)  It's more obviously old strip mine land than the area south of the park -- obvious in the sense that the land forms aren't natural for this part of the country.  It was mined long enough ago that the forest looks quite natural, and it has a lot fewer people wandering through it than the main part of the park.  It was gorgeous.  Maybe it's the novelty, but it seemed more beautiful than the other wooded areas.

One group of bikers insisted on waiting for me at the top of a hill.  They said "we'll wait for you -- unless you're a Democrat, then we'll run you down!"  I didn't mention how I plan to vote in November, but we spent a couple of minutes bitching about the twit now serving as Governor.  For anyone reading this who doesn't follow Illinois politics, I should explain that Governor Blagojevich (a Democrat) has announced that Kickapoo, along with a number of other state parks and historic sites, will be closed in November.  I can only hope that once Blago starts serving his prison sentence, there will still be something left of Illinois.

I think I ended up walking about 9 miles.  I'd like to have a GPS unit optimized for walking, but I wouldn't like one as much as they cost.  I should at least get a functional pedometer to help figure out how much distance I've covered.  The last mile or so I added by exploring the bike trail that starts near the parking area at the start of the Out and Back hiking trail, because I still felt like more walking.  By the time I got back to the car, though, I was glad to see it.  I feel like I'm in much better condition than I was a few weeks ago.

I did the Out and Back trail at Kickapoo again, following the route I'd taken by accident on purpose out to the overlook, which is an excellent place to have a sandwich.  A lovely view, shade, a good place to catch the breeze, and barely any obvious sign of humanity.  (The "lake" itself is a former strip mine hole, but it doesn't look bad.)  There are a couple of telephone poles visible, and a couple of bits of mowed grass in the far distance.  Then I walked to the trail intersection where I thought I'd fallen off the official trail last week, and discovered that it only goes a few hundred feet to the river (which I hadn't even realized I was next to last week) and ends.  I still don't know what happened to the trail markers.  When I finished that loop, I was starting to feel quite tired, even though I had walked less than 5 miles by that time, so I took a bit of a short cut, which got me as expected back to the very unhelpfully marked intersection, and back to my car.  This is the first time in a long time that I've done longish walks on back to back days, but the weather is unseasonably nice, the terrain I was walking over both days is pretty flat, and darn it I thought I was in better shape than this, I shouldn't be so tired!

The butterfly population does seem to finally be picking up; not lots, but there were definitely butterflies around.  Still lots of dragonflies.  But the dominant insect species (and the major problem with enjoying the day) was mosquitoes.  I can't remember when I've been so plagued by mosquitoes, and that's with applying DEET at the start of the trip and applying more at my lunch stop.  Those huge numbers of dragonflies are not doing their jobs, I tell you!