The Natural Bloomington Blog

I’ve been planning to focus more on birds as I explore natural Northern Indiana. And November is peak bird season at Summit Lake State Park, which, along with its Nature Area, are well-known stopovers on migratory bird flights. But I knew I was underequipped for a bird expedition there last Monday.

I’ve only dabbled in avian photography, albeit with surprising results, so I have little technique. And my 70-300 zoom lens wasn’t up to the task. (As part of the bird plan, I had a camera store friend in Indy on the lookout for the one I needed.) But I figured with sun, sky, clouds and 800 acres of water, a trip to rural Henry County would be productive, bird-ready or not.

So, after capturing the previsualized waterscapes from a couple lakeshores inside the park, we drove outside to the Nature Area, which is separated by a county road and requires permission to explore. Just as I spotted a well-used parking area on the preserve’s southern perimeter, Raina saw the bald eagle roosting in a roadside tree, overlooking the 2,680-acre state park’s 800-acre lake of the same name.

Our Friday morning exploration of the 1,744-acre Fort Harrison State Park in northeast Indianapolis was bound for nostalgia. My connections to the place date back a half century to elementary school, when my mother worked there. Passing the Finance Center on the way to park gate did indeed release a flood of childhood memories. And I did regale landscape photographer Gary Morrison with dusty recollections of MPs and other youthful fort adventures.

But our mission was to explore and photograph two of Fort Harrison’s Dedicated State Nature Preserves – Warbler Woods and Lawrence Creek – on what the park map calls “the last forested corner left in Marion County.”

And as a small Fort Harrison State Park-Warbler Woods Photo Album shows, despite the late-autumn date, the trail through Warbler Woods, flanked by the Fall Creek on the north and backlit by a radiant sun on the south, offered a palette of fall yellow and summer green. About a half mile up the road, the Lawrence Creek Nature Preserve, however, was nearly devoid of color, and we quickly turned back.

Given the slow pace of fall color change here in Southern Indiana, I was more than ready to wander West-Central Indiana on Oct. 22 in search of images for my Northern Indiana guidebook project and, hopefully, revel in some of the familiar reds, oranges, yellows and golds Indiana autumn is world-famous for. It was, after all, a picture-perfect Sunday autumn afternoon.

I got what I needed in terms of book images from the Jackson-Schnyder Nature Preserve near Terre Haute and the Raccoon State Recreation Area (SRA) to the east in the rolling Parke County farmland near Rockville. 

But during a heavily wooded drive from Bloomington to Terre Haute, I saw one tree with color, in Bowling Green, and it didn’t exactly shimmer. I found only one with an electric yellow hue at Jackson-Schnyder, a 15-acre preserve in Vigo County. On a rugged, two-mile hike on the 4,065-acre Raccoon, brilliant, backlit colors were at a minimum.

When The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) marketing director told me the Fern Cliff Nature Preserve is his favorite, I knew I was in for a stirring photo hike. It helped that he confirmed a trail does indeed wind through the 150-acre Putnam County site. The Indiana Division of Nature Preserve's website says there isn't one. TNC's website says only that a trail exists.

While the Dedicated State Nature Preserve would have been more inspiring were I a botanist -- TNC calls it a "floral paradise" -- this sandstone marvel proved worthy of both its National Natural Landmark (NNL) status and the focus demanded by its rugged landscape. The terrain is treacherously precipitous. A trailside sign warns of "dangerous cliffs."  

Botanically speaking, Fern Cliff's sheer sandstone cliffs and moist, upland and lowland forests are literally dripping with ferns, mosses and liverworts unique to this part of the planet. Like that of the nearby Big Walnut Preserve, its NNL status means the preserve has "outstanding biological and geological resources."