Though the winter oak savanna of Fullersburg Woods is a busy mess of trees, grass, and snow, the horizontal Rayleigh-scattering-blue shadows of the riverbanks add large-scale structure to the landscape.
Tag: Fullersburg
Canada Geese from Above
Canada geese clustered around the newly restructured Salt Creek through Fullersburg Woods form an array of little dots and dot-pairs: sitting geese form single blobs, while standing geese make for a dot-pair from a goose and their shadow. It occurs to me that I might analyze the distribution between the two to understand flock dynamics if I weren’t the particular kind of scientist I am.
Oak Savanna in the Shadow of Towers
I’ve long been drawn to images where I could capture nature and dense urban settings in close proximity. Perhaps it’s the utopian feel of those images—if a lot of people want to live in harmony with nature, we need to pack ourselves into dense structures to do so. Does that make this just a little solarpunk?
Dead Tree in New Prairie in Winter
Fullersburg Woods was the location where I captured some of my earliest Decaseconds posts (all the way back to December 27, 2011!); it was a delight to revisit the location after the nature preserve has been completely restored to the oak savanna ecosystem it originally exhibited.
Crusty Ice
On the same day that I took this photograph, I found this awesome, half-frozen pond in the back of the forrest preserve. Though the sun was setting and the clouds were already picking up an orange-pink color, from this angle only the bluest parts of the sky were reflected. It had been above freezing for a couple of days, and the ice had melted to the point that it comprised two or three different textures. The brightness of those colors and the variations in the pond’s surface made for a nice contrast with the dormant and dead plants surrounding it.

