I'd like to write about one of my favorite places in Lansing, a sort of natural oasis in the middle of the city.
Fenner isn't big; it's mainly open grassland, surrounded by mixed-growth woods; they have a nice nature center with small exhibits. I worked there for about six months back in 2012. It's the sort of local place that, without being really famous or distinguished, attracts fanatical devotees from the local populace. I'm not at the "fanatical" stage yet, but I'm still very fond of the place, and half-consider it my stomping ground.
The Fenner Conservancy performed a radical "habitatectomy" of the main area within the last couple of years, converting what was once a tussocky patch of field into a shortgrass prairie, complete with all-native grasses (although it's a bit hard to tell, so you'll have to take their word for it). Surprisingly, it has improved the walk. Where once they used to mow the grass down to the nubbins and sell it, they now provide a few narrow pathways through the field, where you can stroll down lanes of bee-balm, butterflyweed, and nettles of all shapes and sizes, depending on the season. Not only does this restore natural habitat, but it's also a cunning way to cut down on the mowing bill.
Here's a view looking west, toward Aurelius road (hidden by trees, natch). To the left of the picture would be the main prairie trail; in the clearing far ahead, you can see the remnants of the Fenner apple orchard, all dried up now. The big trees on the right include some 500-year-old oaks, and in the woods beyond is the last remaining section of the Mason Esker. Eskers are masses of gravel, deposited by rivers that flow beneath glaciers; once the glaciers recede, the riverbeds appear as twisting berms, sometimes hundreds of miles long. It's not much - just a wooded hill with a trail on top - but if you know what you're standing on, it gives you a spooky connection to the Ice Age.
There's a lot more Ice-Aginess here, in places you'd least expect: the trees. In the southeast corner of the park, in the woods by the fenceline, there's a row of Bodark trees - commonly but clumsily known as Osage Orange - that harken back to a time when mammoths and mastodons roamed the Midwest.
To the right is pictured an Osage orange, with my car keys for scale. They look...vaguely like oranges. More like a waxy green brain. Inside they're sticky and tough, resembling some kind of sea creature, with orange-like seeds locked into the pulp. Not an especially effective way to spread your seeds, which begs the question: what on earth would eat these things? Squirrels like the seeds, but only attempt it if they're already broken open. Cows sometimes swallow them, but tend to choke or get their stomachs ruptured (which is why modern farmers hate the trees). Naturally, deer won't touch them.
But they're great for elephants: pachyderms don't mind the taste (bitter) and their lackadaisical digestion swishes them around and deposits the seeds - along with most of the fruit - in a nice moist pile of dung, none the worse for wear. Because elephants travel vast distances, the seeds get a free ride several miles from their parent tree before being "planted". Michigan was once home to both mammoths and mastodons, who couldn't resist the fun-sized (to them) green globes and their gnashy texture.
More evidence for this comes from the trees themselves: bodarks are covered in spines, which - like acacias in Africa - keep large mammals from browsing or damaging the tree, limiting their gustatory adventures to the fruits. These trees were apparently once limited to the Red River area of Texas before European settlers arrived and spread the tree for its useful wood; but ancient evidence suggests they were widespread in the Pleistocene, when megafauna ranged over North America.
And bodarks aren't the only trees like this. Honeylocusts have suspiciously large, tasty pods, and are covered in some of the nastiest spines in North America; they, too were confined to small regions before settlers spread them northward. Kentucky coffeetrees aren't spiny, but their pods are also large and robust, and they went through a similar slow-decline, fast-spread pattern through human intervention.
The last, but definitely not least, of these "elephant fruit" is the beloved pawpaw - yes, like "Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch". And Fenner has them (I'm going to keep the exact location secret - it's better if hordes of people don't rush to find them). Behold, the Indiana Banana:
This is a view from inside the largest grove; you can see the trees, some an impressive twenty feet in height, arching overhead. I remember seeing paw-paws all over the place in southern Indiana when I worked in Bloomington, down in the ravines; but they would never get more than ten feet, and according to my co-workers (I worked at a Boy Scout Camp) they "don't get fruit this far north." More on that in a bit.
There is actually a village in central Michigan called Paw Paw, but the eponymous trees all died when the woods were cleared for farmland - pawpaws like a lot of shade. I guess that precludes a Paw Paw Pawpaw Festival. But they do have grape-stomping, so...whoopie.
Pawpaws are really lovely, with huge, aromatic, tropical-looking leaves. In the spring they grow strange brown flowers, always in pairs, which turn (if pollinated) into two fruit which ripen in August to October. Weirdly, one fruit is always smaller than the other. Insert your own joke here.
Having heard from my knowledgeable Scouting compatriots that pawpaws don't fruit "this far north", i.e. Bloomington, Indiana, I was a bit surprised to find the trees flowering. Naturally I suspected that, if the trees were flowering, they might also fruit.
I came back in August to find, lo and behold, the twinned fruits hanging from a few of the branches. Not many, mind you; but enough to bust my former coworkers' assertions.
I picked some of the fruit in August, but they were rock-hard. It's a bit difficult to tell when the fruit are ripe. Thankfully I managed to find a couple when I came back in early October, and they were just at the point of peak edibility. On the left is a distorted pic; they were about the size of golf balls, and a little oblong.
They have a very strong flavor. The closest analgam is a mixture of papaya and banana, yet a little more acrid. I personally found them delicious, although I would understand if others found it unpalatable. They certainly aren't as mealy as bananas, with firm but yielding flesh, slightly greasy.
The flesh is yellow-white. The seeds are ridiculously large, smooth and hard as river pebbles; I found at least ten of them even in the smallest fruit. I made sure to spit them out a fair distance from the patch, in the hopes that a new patch would form.
Anyway, enough about the pawpaws. I just like the fact that I'm eating the same food an ancient mastodon might have snacked on. It almost feels like a privilege; I'm reminded how interconnected the natural world is, and how greatly the ecosystem is affected when a single animal disappears.
Let's turn to other Fenner matters.
(These pictures were all taken in different seasons, so bear with me if the foliage jumps from Vernal to Autumnal).
The best part about Fenner is, of course, the trail system. There's about five miles of them in all, and they cross through several different ecosystems. On the left is the Sugar Bush trail, which is the main loop leading from the Nature Center building. The "Sugar Bush" (right) is a mature grove of sugar maples, which the Nature Center taps for maple syrup; they have a Maple Syrup Festival in March. Their maple butter is amazing...ly expensive. Like eight bucks for a little bottle. But still really good.
The Sugar Bush is really quite something; its unofficial name is the "Maple Cathedral". It's difficult to capture its beauty on a phone. When the leaves are still fresh in June, sunlight filters through the swaying leaves like reflections on water. And of course, the fall colors are an explosion of neon orange and yellow. I've seen several weddings held out there; it's certainly a magical place.
What follows are a few more pictures of trees and trails. These are all from spring and fall; I should probably get some in the snow, too. Left is a shot of a gorgeous Tuliptree (Yellow Poplar, if you're feeling nasty). They're not as common this far north, which is why seeing one is so special. Their waxy leaves turn a uniform golden-orange, all at once, which makes the tree look like a tower of flame.
The undergrowth is always a source of interest for me, too - there's always something scuttling around down there, and the plants are always fascinating, especially in the spring. Fenner, like much of Michigan's forests, is cursed with non-native species like invasive Oriental bittersweet, multifloral rose, garlic mustard, dame's rocket, and many, many others. Bittersweet is especially awful because it covers everything, and can kill trees like a strangler fig. But there's still plenty of wonderful things to find; chipmunks chittering around, deer ghosting between the trees, unseen turkeys scratching and clucking as they roam about. On the left is a giant puffball mushroom; it's about two feet across, and they get even larger.
Fenner has a good system of wetlands as well. Below is a forest pond, home to multitudes of tadpoles, fish, turtles, frogs, and probably muskrat. I'm personally drawn to swamps - I spent a formative portion of my childhood "mucking" in fens and ponds - and so I'm always interested in what Fenner's have to offer. Swamps are the first ecosystems to sport new foliage in spring, with amusingly unpleasant plants like jack-in-the-pulpit and skunk cabbage, and of course there's that sun-warmed rotten-egg stink I've come to love. The stink, by the way, really is the same as rotten eggs: the anaerobic bacteria in both produce traces of hydrogen sulfide, a gas so dangerous, humans evolved to consider even a few parts per billion as disgusting. Naturally the trace amounts in swamp-gas aren't deadly, but stepping down into bubbling bog-mud can be an overwhelming olfactory experience.
More shots of trails. The bell on the left belonged to an old one-room schoolhouse, appropriated by the Arboretum as a fire-signal. Aside from prescribed burns, Fenner's grasslands have burned surprisingly recently; apparently there was a sizable blaze in 2006, some years before I worked there. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but for some reason I relegate wildfires to "way back when" or "out West" - not something modern, urban Michiganders should have to worry about. But we're still closer to nature than we like to pretend. Michigan's environment is varied and unpredictable; the north-central Lower Peninsula, around Grayling, is a tinderbox for most of the year. People still lose their homes to small blazes annually.
Let's protect ourselves from fire by going back to the water. Here's a bullfrog - hard to see, but he's there in the middle. It's odd, but I don't see a lot of bullfrogs around; green frogs are much more common. I have a theory that the green frogs will eat bullfrog tadpoles if they find them, which explains why either one of these species can dominate a particular pond at a time. Or maybe they require more specific environments. Bullfrogs are terrifying predators, known to eat birds, if they can catch them; some places in Europe are currently awash in imported American bullfrogs. Worse is the situation west of the Rockies, where bullfrogs aren't native, and the local amphibian populations are much more diverse and fragile. Rampaging bullfrogs, through competition and the carrying of chytrid fungus (to which they are immune) are helping to drive local mountain frogs to extinction.
I'll leave you with a special little gal. Here's a scarab beetle, aka dung beetle...I think it's covered in dried poop. No matter. Like a lot of my serendipitous encounters with interesting flora and fauna, I just happened to glance down and see her trundling across the concrete. I've only seen one scarab larger than this one, an iridescent rhino beetle that someone had smashed with their shoe; the human impulse to smash anything with more than four legs is something I find maddening. Bugs are amazing, intricate creatures, more like clockwork than living flesh. I found it a privilege to hold this scarab in my hand...even if it was covered in feces.
There's a lot more to Fenner, but I hope this was a good introduction. I'll keep going there and taking pictures, and probably posting them on this same blog post, just so you can see the place. If you live in Lansing, or even if you're just visiting, be sure to make it down there and see what you can find.
Rick Out.
Fenner isn't big; it's mainly open grassland, surrounded by mixed-growth woods; they have a nice nature center with small exhibits. I worked there for about six months back in 2012. It's the sort of local place that, without being really famous or distinguished, attracts fanatical devotees from the local populace. I'm not at the "fanatical" stage yet, but I'm still very fond of the place, and half-consider it my stomping ground.
The Fenner Conservancy performed a radical "habitatectomy" of the main area within the last couple of years, converting what was once a tussocky patch of field into a shortgrass prairie, complete with all-native grasses (although it's a bit hard to tell, so you'll have to take their word for it). Surprisingly, it has improved the walk. Where once they used to mow the grass down to the nubbins and sell it, they now provide a few narrow pathways through the field, where you can stroll down lanes of bee-balm, butterflyweed, and nettles of all shapes and sizes, depending on the season. Not only does this restore natural habitat, but it's also a cunning way to cut down on the mowing bill.
Here's a view looking west, toward Aurelius road (hidden by trees, natch). To the left of the picture would be the main prairie trail; in the clearing far ahead, you can see the remnants of the Fenner apple orchard, all dried up now. The big trees on the right include some 500-year-old oaks, and in the woods beyond is the last remaining section of the Mason Esker. Eskers are masses of gravel, deposited by rivers that flow beneath glaciers; once the glaciers recede, the riverbeds appear as twisting berms, sometimes hundreds of miles long. It's not much - just a wooded hill with a trail on top - but if you know what you're standing on, it gives you a spooky connection to the Ice Age.There's a lot more Ice-Aginess here, in places you'd least expect: the trees. In the southeast corner of the park, in the woods by the fenceline, there's a row of Bodark trees - commonly but clumsily known as Osage Orange - that harken back to a time when mammoths and mastodons roamed the Midwest.
To the right is pictured an Osage orange, with my car keys for scale. They look...vaguely like oranges. More like a waxy green brain. Inside they're sticky and tough, resembling some kind of sea creature, with orange-like seeds locked into the pulp. Not an especially effective way to spread your seeds, which begs the question: what on earth would eat these things? Squirrels like the seeds, but only attempt it if they're already broken open. Cows sometimes swallow them, but tend to choke or get their stomachs ruptured (which is why modern farmers hate the trees). Naturally, deer won't touch them.
 |
| Bodark (Maclura pomifera) |
More evidence for this comes from the trees themselves: bodarks are covered in spines, which - like acacias in Africa - keep large mammals from browsing or damaging the tree, limiting their gustatory adventures to the fruits. These trees were apparently once limited to the Red River area of Texas before European settlers arrived and spread the tree for its useful wood; but ancient evidence suggests they were widespread in the Pleistocene, when megafauna ranged over North America.
And bodarks aren't the only trees like this. Honeylocusts have suspiciously large, tasty pods, and are covered in some of the nastiest spines in North America; they, too were confined to small regions before settlers spread them northward. Kentucky coffeetrees aren't spiny, but their pods are also large and robust, and they went through a similar slow-decline, fast-spread pattern through human intervention.
The last, but definitely not least, of these "elephant fruit" is the beloved pawpaw - yes, like "Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch". And Fenner has them (I'm going to keep the exact location secret - it's better if hordes of people don't rush to find them). Behold, the Indiana Banana:
This is a view from inside the largest grove; you can see the trees, some an impressive twenty feet in height, arching overhead. I remember seeing paw-paws all over the place in southern Indiana when I worked in Bloomington, down in the ravines; but they would never get more than ten feet, and according to my co-workers (I worked at a Boy Scout Camp) they "don't get fruit this far north." More on that in a bit.
There is actually a village in central Michigan called Paw Paw, but the eponymous trees all died when the woods were cleared for farmland - pawpaws like a lot of shade. I guess that precludes a Paw Paw Pawpaw Festival. But they do have grape-stomping, so...whoopie.Pawpaws are really lovely, with huge, aromatic, tropical-looking leaves. In the spring they grow strange brown flowers, always in pairs, which turn (if pollinated) into two fruit which ripen in August to October. Weirdly, one fruit is always smaller than the other. Insert your own joke here.
Having heard from my knowledgeable Scouting compatriots that pawpaws don't fruit "this far north", i.e. Bloomington, Indiana, I was a bit surprised to find the trees flowering. Naturally I suspected that, if the trees were flowering, they might also fruit.
I came back in August to find, lo and behold, the twinned fruits hanging from a few of the branches. Not many, mind you; but enough to bust my former coworkers' assertions.
They have a very strong flavor. The closest analgam is a mixture of papaya and banana, yet a little more acrid. I personally found them delicious, although I would understand if others found it unpalatable. They certainly aren't as mealy as bananas, with firm but yielding flesh, slightly greasy.The flesh is yellow-white. The seeds are ridiculously large, smooth and hard as river pebbles; I found at least ten of them even in the smallest fruit. I made sure to spit them out a fair distance from the patch, in the hopes that a new patch would form.
Anyway, enough about the pawpaws. I just like the fact that I'm eating the same food an ancient mastodon might have snacked on. It almost feels like a privilege; I'm reminded how interconnected the natural world is, and how greatly the ecosystem is affected when a single animal disappears.
Let's turn to other Fenner matters.
(These pictures were all taken in different seasons, so bear with me if the foliage jumps from Vernal to Autumnal).
The best part about Fenner is, of course, the trail system. There's about five miles of them in all, and they cross through several different ecosystems. On the left is the Sugar Bush trail, which is the main loop leading from the Nature Center building. The "Sugar Bush" (right) is a mature grove of sugar maples, which the Nature Center taps for maple syrup; they have a Maple Syrup Festival in March. Their maple butter is amazing...ly expensive. Like eight bucks for a little bottle. But still really good.The Sugar Bush is really quite something; its unofficial name is the "Maple Cathedral". It's difficult to capture its beauty on a phone. When the leaves are still fresh in June, sunlight filters through the swaying leaves like reflections on water. And of course, the fall colors are an explosion of neon orange and yellow. I've seen several weddings held out there; it's certainly a magical place.
What follows are a few more pictures of trees and trails. These are all from spring and fall; I should probably get some in the snow, too. Left is a shot of a gorgeous Tuliptree (Yellow Poplar, if you're feeling nasty). They're not as common this far north, which is why seeing one is so special. Their waxy leaves turn a uniform golden-orange, all at once, which makes the tree look like a tower of flame.
The undergrowth is always a source of interest for me, too - there's always something scuttling around down there, and the plants are always fascinating, especially in the spring. Fenner, like much of Michigan's forests, is cursed with non-native species like invasive Oriental bittersweet, multifloral rose, garlic mustard, dame's rocket, and many, many others. Bittersweet is especially awful because it covers everything, and can kill trees like a strangler fig. But there's still plenty of wonderful things to find; chipmunks chittering around, deer ghosting between the trees, unseen turkeys scratching and clucking as they roam about. On the left is a giant puffball mushroom; it's about two feet across, and they get even larger.
Fenner has a good system of wetlands as well. Below is a forest pond, home to multitudes of tadpoles, fish, turtles, frogs, and probably muskrat. I'm personally drawn to swamps - I spent a formative portion of my childhood "mucking" in fens and ponds - and so I'm always interested in what Fenner's have to offer. Swamps are the first ecosystems to sport new foliage in spring, with amusingly unpleasant plants like jack-in-the-pulpit and skunk cabbage, and of course there's that sun-warmed rotten-egg stink I've come to love. The stink, by the way, really is the same as rotten eggs: the anaerobic bacteria in both produce traces of hydrogen sulfide, a gas so dangerous, humans evolved to consider even a few parts per billion as disgusting. Naturally the trace amounts in swamp-gas aren't deadly, but stepping down into bubbling bog-mud can be an overwhelming olfactory experience.
More shots of trails. The bell on the left belonged to an old one-room schoolhouse, appropriated by the Arboretum as a fire-signal. Aside from prescribed burns, Fenner's grasslands have burned surprisingly recently; apparently there was a sizable blaze in 2006, some years before I worked there. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but for some reason I relegate wildfires to "way back when" or "out West" - not something modern, urban Michiganders should have to worry about. But we're still closer to nature than we like to pretend. Michigan's environment is varied and unpredictable; the north-central Lower Peninsula, around Grayling, is a tinderbox for most of the year. People still lose their homes to small blazes annually.
Let's protect ourselves from fire by going back to the water. Here's a bullfrog - hard to see, but he's there in the middle. It's odd, but I don't see a lot of bullfrogs around; green frogs are much more common. I have a theory that the green frogs will eat bullfrog tadpoles if they find them, which explains why either one of these species can dominate a particular pond at a time. Or maybe they require more specific environments. Bullfrogs are terrifying predators, known to eat birds, if they can catch them; some places in Europe are currently awash in imported American bullfrogs. Worse is the situation west of the Rockies, where bullfrogs aren't native, and the local amphibian populations are much more diverse and fragile. Rampaging bullfrogs, through competition and the carrying of chytrid fungus (to which they are immune) are helping to drive local mountain frogs to extinction.
I'll leave you with a special little gal. Here's a scarab beetle, aka dung beetle...I think it's covered in dried poop. No matter. Like a lot of my serendipitous encounters with interesting flora and fauna, I just happened to glance down and see her trundling across the concrete. I've only seen one scarab larger than this one, an iridescent rhino beetle that someone had smashed with their shoe; the human impulse to smash anything with more than four legs is something I find maddening. Bugs are amazing, intricate creatures, more like clockwork than living flesh. I found it a privilege to hold this scarab in my hand...even if it was covered in feces.
Rick Out.
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