#Burnidge Forest Preserve

[onehungryhumorist]

Burnidge Forest Preserve Trail Review: West Trail Loop

The West Trail Loop in Burnidge Forest Preserve is a 1.47-mile unpaved nature trail that meanders through both woodlands and prairie. Offering gorgeous views of seasonal colors at the low cost of a few small hills. To get to this trail from the parking lot, you need to take the Centrail Trail Loop. Overall Thoughts on Burnidge Forest Preserve West Trail Loop: Difficulty (Lower is…

[tedschnell]

Life Lessons and Woodland Trails

 They are well-worn by the many feet that have passed as walkers, runners, and even the hop-skip-and-jumpers have trod these woodland trails and prairie paths.

Even the occasional imprints of a cyclist’s tire or a horse’s hooves can be read in the muddier sections of these pastoral pathways that meander through Burnidge Forest Preserve, which comprises 600 acres of land west of Elgin, Illinois.

It is a popular place for hikers, riders, nature lovers.

Old oak trees, whose sprawling branches reach toward the sky like the arms of faithful worshippers, have shed their leaves. Those oak leaves, along with the assorted fall castoffs from shagbark hickory, black walnut, apple, and dogwood trees, among others, carpet these trails, crunching underfoot as a photographer strolls along, pausing from time to time to look at this branch or that tree or whatever other wonder draws his attention.

The air is cool and crisp on this day, and a little damp from a brief sprinkling of rain in the past hour or so. The skies are overcast but not necessarily gloomy.

Throughout the woodland, the trails wander, sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, often shaded by oaks or hickories, or by thick brush and smaller trees like staghorn sumac. The trails beckon on, and here and there are diversions aplenty that catch the artist’s eye. Some call out from a distance – “Come this way! Make a new trail that you might clearly see me completely.

The photographer pauses.

One image he had recorded earlier had reminded him of a Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Dwelling on that for a moment, he considers many of the trails, some plain, some hidden, that stretch throughout this preserve. Many he knows well – this was his playground as a child, and he has explored many of its secrets, although some, such as a favorite tree here or there, have fallen or otherwise vanished with time.

This forest preserve is like life – with its four seasons, and with paths that offer many opportunities to explore, to wander. But not all paths can be explored at once, and some are more enjoyable, or even more difficult to traverse, often depending on the season. Each has a start, each leads to a final destination. What happens from start to end depends on which turns we take along the way.

My life’s path has taken many twists and turns. I pause to consider that, and wonder whether the season I am in is fall or winter, and how close I am to my final destination.

Either I am in the fall of my life, or I am entering winter, I conclude. I cannot be certain. And while I am indisputably closer than ever to my final destination, my arrival time is something I cannot know.

Shrugging, I step forward once again and leave life’s imponderables behind me as I step off the trail to see what there is out there. Whether fall or winter, I have not arrived yet. There is life to live, pathways to walk, and trails to blaze.

[blueeyeswandering]

Hiking at Burnidge Forest Preserve in Elgin, IL | 2/4/17

[iheartteas]

Went on a fun hike with my daughter, doggie, and this fine elixir of English Breakfast Black Tea and 10 Mushroom Blend. Mushrooms from @foursigmatic. #powerup #energy #mushrooms #shrooms #tea #blacktea #englishbreakfast #vegan #organic #fresh #foodie #teaaddict #hiking #hike #exercise #familytime #healthy #health #fit #fitness #nature #freshair #woods #forest #grass #flowers #summer #kids #love #dogs #iheartteas (at Burnidge County Forest Preserve)

[fuckyeahsparrows]

Song Sparrow - Jul-25-2015 (2-1) by JPatR

[kaneforestpreserve]

Wetland at Burnidge Forest Preserve, located at 38W235 Big Timber Road, Elgin, IL 60124. 

It's even prettier in person!

[onehungryhumorist]

Burnidge Forest Preserve Trail Review: Centrail Trail Loop

The Centrail Trail Loop in Burnidge Forest Preserve, part of the Kane County Forest Preserve is a great place to start exploring this dog-friendly park. This .56-mile walk connects the parking lot to the West Trail Loop (1.47 miles) and South Loop Trail (2.23 miles). Although a smaller loop, this trail offers stand-alone or main character energy with a view of both the lake and woods that showed…

[tedschnell]

Seeing God in a Fall Fog

 The fall colors this year were occasionally spectacular but generally muted, the product, I guess, of a dry summer and unusually warm autumn that left expanses of drying mud in place of some ponds, like the large one that greets visitors entering the Coombs Road entrance to Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

The colors were there – I’ll share some in a later post – but you often had to look for them. They just were not as vivid and expansive as they have been in recent years.

The fog on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016 seemed to accentuate the season’s diminished colors, which largely have faded away already.

Fog is a moody sort of weather pattern that some photographers dislike, but which I find refreshing. Even as it obscures vision, it adds a mystical, magical quality to the landscape, a characteristic that, for me, anyway, is reminiscent of the works of J.RR. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, two of my favorite authors.

I spent most of my time at Burnidge walking around the two ponds that lie off the Big Timber Road entrance to the preserve’s Paul Wolff Campground. I had hoped to see perhaps a solitary heron fishing among the cattails and reeds, since the mud flats that were once a pond at the other entrance appear to draw little interest from wildlife – at least during the day.

But there was no heron, and even other common pond-side birds seemed absent, or called plaintively from hidden roosts in the thick willows or nearby woodlands. There was a smattering of mallards on the pond, but they seemed to avoid me, staying always at a distance on the opposite side as I walked.

So, I focused on the landscape, the often-skeletal remains of plant life that was so verdant scant weeks ago, and I enjoyed my hike as I took it all in, framing and creating my images as I went.

Even in fall, a season of decline, I see God’s fingerprints in his creation. A leaf, even dry and faded, is one of a kind. The skeletal husks of Queen Anne’s lace, wild carrot, Daucus carota, which from a distance all seem so similar, are markedly different if you step close enough to examine individual plants.

The fog hovers heavily over the land, a shroud of sorts for a dying landscape. Soon, winter snows will seal the tombs, creating its own stark beauty in the process.

The pond and the woodlands will enter a largely monochrome phase, where color virtually ceases to exist – except on blue-sky wintry days when the sun does shine. Life will be largely muted until spring, a metaphor for the hope I find in God’s promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Some may scoff at that. That It’s not the first time someone will disagree with me. But over the past 57 years, I have found ample evidence, historically and otherwise, that affirms my faith. One of those evidences is in the nature I photograph. From a tiny clover bloom in the spring to a stand of sawtooth sunflowers in late summer, to the beaver I saw swimming in the pond on this foggy day, they all scream that God is there, the master artist and creator.

And I, with eyes that have faded with age but with a love for that which can be seen, am privileged to document just a small part of his handiwork. I trust that the joy it brings me likewise blesses you.

[tedschnell]

Cold Swim on a Foggy Day

A young beaver swims across the pond near Paul Wolff Campground on a foggy afternoon in Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016.

[tedschnell]

Night Wings

It's after midnight, Overhead, Canada geese Call out plaintively.

[tedschnell]

Grace and Age, Willow and Oak

 There’s a reason we use the term willowy to describe a ballerina, for example, whose thin, slight figure moves gracefully with the melody and rhythm of the orchestra.

Willow trees, especially, it seems to me, weeping willows exhibit that same sense of grace and rhythm as the lithe dancer. As their branches sway in the breeze, they also reflect the streams of water flowing downward in a fountain.

This weeping willow stands along the shores of a marsh in a woodland clearing at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois. I visit this clearing perhaps once a month, admiring the willow almost with a sense of romance.

On Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016, her leaves had not begun to don their fall colors. In a woodland whose rich green hues are rapidly fading to yellows and oranges and browns – and whose leaves already are piling up thickly on the ground – she stands like a lonely sentinel. The swampy area she overlooks is filled with waters covered with a green pond scum that is broken only by fallen tree limbs that jut upward like large, dragon-like creatures which have chosen to bathe in the afternoon sun.

There are other willows along the edge of this marsh, but none are particularly close, and give this tree a sense of isolation from its own kind – a feeling one would not expect in a rich woodland.

I lift my camera to my eye to take its portrait, move to another position and lift my camera to my eye again. Trees are ancient things that have borne witness to much more of life and history than I can ever hope to see. Some, like the ancient oaks that dominate much of the preserve’s woodlands, seem to reflect the weight of the history they have lived through. Their branches and trunks are thick and gnarled and twisted, as if they have endured great hardship over time.

But the graceful willow, like a fountain, simply weeps over what has passed.

I pause for a moment before framing my next image. Trees fascinate me because of the sense of history they represent. The rings in their trunk, for example, bear witness to growth cycles that clearly show the lean years of drought, and the moist years of plenty through which a tree has lived.

Some trees seem to demand that, as a photographer, I not simply photograph them, but that I pause to plan and take their portraits.

This weeping willow is like that. So is this gnarly old oak tree I photographed in the same preserve on Oct. 16, just a week earlier.

I love the oaks, but on this day, the willow strikes a chord in my heart, and I am not entirely clear about why it does so. Perhaps a part of it is the sense of loneliness that comes after a broken relationship. But I think it also reflects mourning, both for that which I have lost, and the tragedies and sorrows I have witnessed over the course of my life.

I suppose that, in a way, the romantic in me relishes the memories, both good and bad. At first blush, that may sound contradictory, but over my lifetime, God has taught me I can trust him completely, including when he says, “that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

What we often forget, however, is that, just as the trees bear witness to far more years than we do, God is eternal. So, we must wait for that “good” knowing that it may not come to pass in our lifetimes.

It’s about perspective. This is what the trees remind me of – that regardless of how I feel at any given moment, the story has not unfolded in its entirety.

Therein, even on my worst days, I find comfort, and joy.

[tedschnell]

Season Changes

  I am not the first writer, nor will I be the last, to notice how the seasons and the transitions between them reflect the segments in the life of a man or woman.

Spring, of course, is youth. The season abounds with new life – from the emergence of the tiny beginnings of wildflowers, grasses, and cattails, to the births of young mammals or the hatching of chicks in nests nestled closely among the brush and shrubs or hung high overhead in the overarching branches of oaks and other trees.

Later in the season, we move into adolescence, then blossom into pre-adults awash in a churning sea of hormones as our bodies grow and mature, leading us into desperately unfamiliar but often exciting new territory.

Come summer, and we have matured into the prime of our lives – a time to step out into the world on our own and to face its challenges, as well as the dangers that threaten to ensnare us.

But at some point in the summer, we begin another change. By late summer, the emergence of new varieties of woodland blooms diminishes dramatically, and the luster of the season’s earlier blooms begins to fade. Leave, on bush or tree, begin to show the ravages of pests, just as we find crow’s feet at the corners of our eyes, or new creases at the edges of our mouths or etched upon our foreheads.

Come fall, those lines and crow’s feet clearly are establishing themselves as wrinkles, although the vain might be inclined to call them the marks of character or wisdom.

And just as snow begins to frost the mountains’ highest elevations, gray begins to make its presence visible on our own peaks.

It is fall, a season when life slows as the tally of years takes its toll upon the living. Now is the time when living things go full-bore into the preparation for the final season, when life in many cases virtually comes to a standstill, or fades altogether.

But fall is not entirely tragic. In fact, for many, those twilight years have a golden glow that, only briefly, perhaps, outshines some of the other seasons.

Look at trees and other vegetation, for example. The green in which they adorn themselves during most of the warm=weather months is not their true color. That green is chlorophyll, which allows plants and some other life to convert the sun’s rays into energy in a process scientists refer to as photosynthesis.

The green of the chlorophyll permeates the plants’ leaves and often the stems, masking the plants’ true colors. But, as summer passes, days grow shorter, nights grow cooler. This signals a change to the plants, and the chlorophyll fades away, revealing each plant’s true colors.

In the Midwest, the sumacs are among the first to turn. I point out sumacs, such as the leaves of those pictured here, because their hues are among the most vibrant, although these images show only the beginnings of their switch to fall. I photographed these on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016, at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

The leaves will briefly reveal their true color – largely red for sumac. Other plants may turn from green to a flat yellow – or to a vibrant gold, like some maples. Still others may become aflame with orange and red hues. Still others simply fade to brown.

In the end, all but the evergreens will shed their leaves as fall yields to the colder weather heralding winter, a time when virtually all is still, as if dead.

Some leaves fall early and quickly. But for a while, many leaves will cling to their branches, reluctant to accept the inevitable separation from that which has sustained them for so long.

I wonder, as my hair grays and my knuckles slowly swell and my joints occasionally ache a little more each passing year, what kind of leaf I will prove to be.

Will I glow with warmth as some leaves do, or will I simply shrivel up and fade to a dull tan or brown? Personally, I am hoping I go the warm glow route.

But leaves also differ from tree to tree and shrub to shrub in another way that can be quite remarkable.

The same conditions that cause leaves to change color in the fall also trigger another action by trees and other plants, which close the spot at which a leaf’s stem attaches to the branch. It is as if the tree turns off the faucet from which flows into the leaf the water and nutrients gathered by the roots.

So as the leaf changes color, it dies. Some leaves fall early – it’s not unusual to see them on woodland floors as early as mid- to late August. Others, as maples seem to do, shed their leaves en masse, throwing down a thick carpet of gold and red onto woodland floors and residential lawns.

But some hold on, unwilling, it seems, to release their grip until winter snows begin to melt away. Some varieties of oak are like that, which can be a nuisance to homeowners with several varieties of oak on their properties, as we had when we were kids. We had an abundance of leaves (and acorns) to rake up and burn in the fall, but come spring, we often had more oak leaves to gather and burn.

Will my fall come early, as I suspect, or will I linger on well past the usual time?

That is a question only God can answer, and I am OK with that. ]šXZe

[tedschnell]

Thorny Beauty

An aberational white bloom of a thistle stands out among the brush and other woodland plants on Sept. 4, 2016 at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois. Thistle flowers usually are a rich deep pink to prurple color.With thorns covering much of their tall stems, and often lining their leaves as well, thistles are considered by many as weeds. Still, their blossoms usuallly are quite colorful and attractive to bees and other pollinators.It is possible that this flower indicates that the plant is an albino, lacking the ability to produce color, even though the rest of the visible plant is clearly green. Nit the green we see in plants are not their true color -- it is the color of the chlorophyll that plants use to convert sunlight into energy. In the fall, plants' leaves reveal their true color as the chlorophyll fades in the cooler conditions and shortening days.

[tedschnell]

Enchanted

 A year ago, I photographed this pond under nearly identical conditions as the late summer sun casy its rays upon a pond hidden among the trees in the oak and hickory woodland of Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

When I returned there on Sept. 18, 2016, just four days shy of the start of fall, the late-summer sun once again was casting a spell upon the pond and the weeping willows and other brush and trees surrounding it.

Unlike the larger pond to the north that greets visitors entering the preserve from its Coombs Road entrance, this pond has not dried up. Duckweed and algae covers the surface of the open water that extends south toward a border of cattails and sundry other reeds and bulrushes.

It is a peaceful place, next to a glade on, the preserve’s western edge, where deer and the occasional coyote pass through, and which is home to a variety of wildflowers, not to mention myriad berry bushes – various types of elderberry, occasional pokeweed, honeysuckle, and oriental bittersweet, whose tiny fruit first appears like clusters of tiny oranges whose rinds eventually split three seams to reveal a luscious red berry in the center.

The woodlands surrounding the glade are rich with song and calls as various birds move in to take advantage of the feast as late summer moves into fall. Some of these winged wonders soon will depart for southern climes, and this final feeding will energize them for their journey. Others, however, like chickadees and sparrows, need to build up fat reserves to carry them through winter, when food supplies can grow scarce.

While the woodland leaves have not changed yet, summer is over. Even as the sun casts its rays upon the emerald woodland surrounding this small pond, evidence of the seasonal transformation is growing. Some leaves have mottled green and yellow edges, signaling the decline of the chlorophyll that provides plants energy and gives them their green hue in the warm-weather months. A nearby trail is littered with fallen leaves – the now gray and brown raiment of plants and trees that already have surrendered to the coming sleep of winter.

Seasons change, and fall is upon us. The first frost is drawing near, and then a deeper chill will grip the woodlands.

[tedschnell]

Egrets, I’ve Seen a Few …

 The summer was dry this year in the Fox Valley, and as the season draws to a close, the drought’s effects are plainly visible in some areas.

Rock and sand bars have surfaced up and down the Fox River. Some of the area’s grassy wetlands now are more like lush pastures – green and grassy, but where the footing is solid instead of soft and spongy and wet, as it was in the spring.

Dry conditions do that, and sometimes the effects are surprising – even seemingly large ponds, like the one that that dominates the landscape to the south of the Coombs Road entrance to Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

The pond has been drying up steadily since July, and now is largely a mud flat, largely overgrown with various weeds.

But in its final weeks, before the last of the waters dried up, it was a favorite feeding spot for an unusually large number (to me) of great egrets, Ardea alba, which gathered in the increasingly shallow waters to feast on the concentrations of aquatic life on which they feed – fish, amphibians, crawfish and more.

On Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, while our nation recalled the horrific, cowardly attacks on our nation by Islamist terrorists, a flock of about two dozen of these graceful, white birds whose outstretched wings give them an almost angelic appearance gathered for one of their last feeding frenzies of the season at this particular pond.

A week earlier, there had been 13 egrets and a great blue heron, Ardea herodias, which was nowhere to be seen on this sunny afternoon. The two species do not always get along – I’ve watched a great blue heron flutter down from up high in a dead oak tree as it attempted to intimidate an egret sitting on a lower branch. And, at another pond, I once watched as an egret aggressively chased away a heron that had tried to land there.

More than half the birds summed themselves while they perched in an old, dead oak tree whose skeletal remains stand starkly, like a monument to what once might have been the largest living thing near the pond. Oak trees are strong, tough, and resilient – something to which, even in death, this tree’s trunk and tired branches could clearly testify.

It is no wonder then that these egrets showed no hesitation at roosting in the old dead tree.

At some point in the coming week, however, this flock would move on, likely to better feeding grounds, because by the same time on Sept. 18, there would be no sign of the birds anywhere around the pond.

Having no foresight, I could not know that, but I did recognize this was a rare time, so I lifted my camera lens and began to frame my shots and take my photos. I don’t recall how long I stood there, except that the whole time I did, I was in awe of the beauty of this flock, and was grateful that one of its members stayed fairly close to me, allowing me to take its portrait in several different positions.

Eventually, I left the pond’s edge by the trail someone had pushed through the cattails some weeks ago. As I left, I began scanning the sides of the trail for other things to photograph, but even as I did, I wondered if I ever would be so blessed to photograph so many egrets in one area in the wild again.

SOURCE: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[tedschnell]

Woodland Chapel

Sometimes, a simple woodland clearing seems just as holy as any church sanctuary I've ever visited. And of course, it is -- God created it, after all. Still, as awesome as it is, it lacks the fellowship found in most churches.I photographed this at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois, on Sept. 11, 2016.