I was going through my old files, and I ran across a bunch of the slides I took in Summer 1998 when I was doing all my prairie sampling and later had scanned for a presentation. Because some of the media I'm storing stuff on seems to be degrading (a CD-rom that had my dissertation on it no longer claims the existence of such a document), I figured I'd at least upload them to my hard drive and from there to Flickr. Just for the heck of it.

And I can share a few of them with you.


Damme, these shots make me homesick.



I'm pretty sure this is Beach Cemetery Prairie in Ogle County. (I'm guessing that because it's a hill prairie without many trees, and because of the twin nuke towers in the far distance). Beach was a lovely site - a glacial drift hill prairie with lots of gravel in the soil and some different species. And being up on top of it, you could see so far. And get the summer breeze.



A lot of the remnant prairies in Illinois were old pioneer cemeteries. I don't remember which one this was. The cemeteries were among my favorites because they had high species diversity and usually a lot of things were flowering.

I have to admit, I also like the IDEA of a cemetery being a prairie; I'd rather my final resting place be under coneflowers and bee-balm than in a manicured monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass.



I THINK this may have been from Spring Grove (I'm guessing from the type of fencing and the density of the vegetation). Yellow coneflowers. Everything looks so lush.



And here I am, ten years younger than I am now (but my hair is the same length and I'm about the same size), sampling in one of the cemetery prairies - I think the same one I have the photo of above.

It's funny how much I grumbled about that summer of sampling when I was doing it, how overwhelming it seemed. But looking back on it, it was probably one of the best experiences of my grad school life - I got REALLY GOOD at identifying prairie plants (still am) and also got really good at interpreting the Illinois Gazetteer and the sometimes-somewhat-cryptic Nature Preserves maps. And it was fun, bouncing down the back roads, with one of my many "field hands" (a lot of times my mom acted as my field hand when I couldn't find anyone who owed me a favor or whom I could take out to lunch in return for a half-day's or day's labor. It was actually really good because it was spending time with my mom as an adult, you know, without the "little kid" baggage that sometimes comes with adult-child-and-parent relationships. And she knew a lot of the plants I didn't, so it was a lot better having her along than some random zoologist who could, at best, shrug and go, "Well, it's in the daisy family...")

Oh, and one more shot:



"Fire! Fire!"

"Yes! yes! fire! fire! fire!"

uh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh.

(And yes, the grad students used to do the Beavis and Butthead "fire" quotations when we were getting ready to go out and do a prescribed burn.)