Category: Wild Flowers

Variety

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The Dune Ridge to Beverly Shores to Beverly Dr loop is one of my favorite trails in the Indiana Dunes National Park. It encompasses multiple ecosystems and has a lot of variety and really shines late summer/early autumn.

Trumpet Cup Lichen and a variety of Mosses are abundant along the forested Dune Ridge trail.
Fungi have no trouble pushing up through the soft sandy soil.
The lower portion of the Beverly Shores trail system is almost choked off by foliage this time of year. It is a good idea to pause and check for ticks after traversing this section of trail.
This is, I believe, a type of Butterfly known as a Skipper.
Here we have a fly and a very lethargic Bumblebee. Bumblebees are normally very active, almost to the point of appearing to be hyperactive. This one however was barely moving at all, and seemed to be just hanging on to the petal of the flower. It may have been the slightly cooler temperature on this day, but a Bumblebee’s lifespan is not particularly long so this one may simply have been nearing its end.
This is an Arrow Spider. The first time I saw one of these I was captivated by the shape of the abdomen and the colors. While it looks exotic, it is actually a fairly common type of Orb Weaver.
A portion of this hike passes through the middle of the Great Marsh on an abandoned road. A small foot bridge is maintained over a cut in the road that allows water to flow along its natural course. This photograph shows how lush the marsh is this time of year.
I came across this pair of Sandhill Cranes foraging pretty close to the trail. They are three to four feet tall and can be pretty aggressive. This pair eye’d me suspiciously while I took their photographs. Shortly after I had moved on they took flight, passing overhead while squonking at me loudly.

Camping – Day 1

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A good chunk of day one is usually spent getting the campsite setup. Sometimes I will for a short hike at a nearby trail afterwards, but often I just grab my camera and focus on the area right around my site. There are always interesting things to observe and photograph right at hand. Sometimes all you gotta do is look straight up as in the photo at the top of this page.

The images which follow were all taken within a stones throw of my campsite on this day.

Being late August you will see lots of foliage which has been chewed up by insect larvae such as this leaf. Many insects deposit their eggs inside of leaves, the larvae which emerge have the food they need right at hand. You can easily follow their paths. The brighter green football shaped growth on the leaf is a gall. Galls are also the result of insect eggs being deposited on the leaf. The eggs act like an irritant which stimulates the leaf to encapsulate it with new growth. Galls appear on leaves in an amazing variety of lumps and bumps, many of which can be quite colorful and beautiful.
Goldenrod is fast becoming one of the dominant wildflowers and it always attracts plenty of pollinators. When I took this photo all I saw was the large Bumblebee. It was not until I was looking at the image on my computer screen that I noticed the butt of a metallic green bee just to the right of the Bumblebee, and another bee flying in from the left. Looks like a traffic pileup in the making.
Speaking of metallic green bees, here is a clear photograph of one all by itself on a different Goldenrod plant. The “metallic” appearance of these insects is the result of a phenomena called diffraction which scatters the light in a unique way that produces what our eyes interpret as a metallic effect. Being a diffraction effect the color actually vanishes if you look at the bee close up enough. Then it would appear to be a rather dull grey color.
Here we have one of my favorite members of the Beetle family, a Weevil. The long extended snout with a pair of antenna’s branching off of it is unmistakable. The first time I saw one of these I thought someone had replaced the beetle’s face with a vacuum hose attachment. As a result I now think of these as the Hoover Vacuum Beetle.
This time of year most of the wild flowers you encounter are yellow or white. So when you do come across one of the more colorful flowers such as this Baldwin’s Ironweed, it really pops and stands out from the rest of the foliage.
As I mentioned the landscape this time of year is rich with white flowers like this Pennsylvania Smartweed.

With all of the above and much more to be found right next to our campsite it was pretty obvious that sights of the next two days out in the wetlands were going to be pretty awesome.