The Natural Bloomington Blog

The Guidebook to Southern Indiana Guidebook Natural Areas is due Wednesday, so what Natural Bloomington time I've eked out this past week -- in between my classroom responsibilities and mayoral reporting project -- has been focused on tidying up the manuscript and supporting materials. Today I've been triple checking the species list, which includes 500-plus plants and animals mentioned in the text.

The big news is I received a letter today from James Alexander Thom asking if a 1,400-word foreword is too long. (He misplaced my phone number, but I love trading letters, even if his are handwritten in elegant script and mine are manufactured digitally on a screen.)  I left a voice mail saying I can't imagine 1,400 of his words would ever be too much.

I know I've reported a lot of project lasts these past few months, but Jim's foreword truly is the final piece in the mosaic. I will edit the photos one last time, and IU Press may want some tweaks, but I'm ready to hand it off.

The winged shadow on the trail almost seemed scripted. Granddaughter Raina and I had just begun our descent along a half-mile Hoosier National Forest trail that leads from atop the precipitous bluffs we'd just walked along to the Ohio River below. A sign had just warned the trail was "steep, rocky, and slippery." The vulture overhead circled three times, just above the treetops, before drifting west in search of more promising fare.

I was changing lenses on orbit one, and lost my balance on the second. On the third orbit, the vulture, a.k.a. buzzard, a.k.a. peace eagle, passed over the opening in the bare tree branches just as i had hoped. I stood steady and nailed the image we had ventured a hundred miles to capture.

Indeed, the buzzard at Buzzard Roost was -- most likely -- the last image I will shoot for the Guidebook to Southern Indiana Natural Areas project. That's why we were so deep in Perry County. To fill the last two holes in the guidebook's photo collection, one at the Buzzard Roost Recreation Area and another just down the road at the German Ridge Recreation Area.
 

Even as I drove north from Mt. Vernon under increasingly heavy cloud cover, I still harbored poetic visions of my 12-month journey through natural Southern Indiana ending with a blazing sunset on the Wabash River in Harmonie State Park. I hadn't planned it that way. I hadn't even thought about it until a few hours before while exploring the Wabash Lowlands under a brilliant January sun.

As the clouds built, I kept my eye on the sky and lowered my expectations, maintaining a relaxed pace on State Road 69. One scenario involved making the park stop a quick photographic shoot-and-flee so I could at least drive through nearby New Harmony, my favorite historic site in Indiana.

The sun piercing the clouds just past the park gatehouse quashed the anticlimactic storyline I had accepted on the road. An albeit narrow window for light on water superseded New Harmony. The speedometer approached 70 – inside the park. The road ended here: Harmonie State Park – Wabash River -- but, it turned out, the journey ended a couple hours later just outside Petersburg on I-69.

It's fitting that the final trip on the Guidebook to Southern Indiana Natural Areas project included a stop at Wesselman Woods Nature Preserve, which is not just the largest stand of virgin timber in the state; it's the largest urban forest in the nation. I hiked part of the trail with naturalist Neal Bogan – first stop, the state's tallest tulip poplar. And as I learned from Nature Center Executive Director John Foster, that former state champion tree's existence today is owed to happenstance, not design.

Unlike many of the natural areas discovered on this journey, nearby Kramer Original Woods Nature Preserve, for example, Wesselman's  old-growth trees were not preserved for future generations by far-sighted or eccentric landowners. Bordering the historic Wabash & Erie Canal, they were part of a 539-acre estate that passed through a series of landowners, each of whom could have but didn't cut them before the land became state property in 1919. Had the canal, which originated Toledo, not failed two years after it reached Evansville in 1874, their owner most likely would have, Foster told me.

Today, the 197-acre Wesselman Woods Nature Preserve is located in the city-owned Wesselman Woods Park and is managed by the nonprofit Wesselman Nature Society. Its lowland forest supports roughly 125 trees per acre, some more than 150 feet tall and 300-plus years old. Its forested wetlands and seasonal pond provide habitat for a variety of animal species, including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds.