First spring wildflowers!

A capacity crowd of 300 people jams the barn where the annual Amish Bird Symposium takes place near Wheat Ridge, in Adams County, Ohio. Yesterday was the 17th version, and things are not slowing down. Roman Mast was the catalyst behind starting ABS, and I was at the inaugural one in 2004. While Roman, who always served as emcee - and a great one! - has moved to north-central Ohio, a wonderful organizing committee runs the show smoothly.

I've been to most of these, and was there yesterday to kick off the speakers with a talk about sparrows. They wisely don't pack the agenda - two talks in the morning, two in the afternoon. All of the talks were great, and the other covered migration, hummingbirds, and John Howard wrapped up with a look at Adams County's incredibly diverse flora and fauna through the seasons.

Photo courtesy Kathy McDonald

One of the best parts of the symposium is catching up with people that I don't get to see that often. Attendees come from all over the state, and you'll never know who you'll see. Here we have Bruce Miller (excellent bird photographer!), your narrator, Tim Colborn (president of the Ohio Ornithological Society), and legendary Jenny Richards, longtime naturalist at Shawnee State Park.

Speakers have always been gifted with a beautiful handmade wooden plaque. Normally they feature specialty birds of the region, such as blue grosbeak, chuck-will's-widow, and loggerhead shrike. I got a special one this year. Mine featured my favorite bug and inarguably the most spectacular insect in the solar system, the amazing Amorpha borer, Megacyllene decora! This rare beetle is a coleopteran specialty of this region and an animal I have long been smitten with. Read more about them HERE.

Not that the symposium wasn't fun, because it was, but I was really looking forward to stopping at a favorite spot on the way home. This stunning riparian corridor is lined with limestone cliffs, and the protected calcareous soils send wildflowers forth before they can be found in most other places. This truly Lilliputian parsley is the aptly named harbinger-of-spring, Erigenia bulbosa, and it was near peak bloom yesterday. Some plants are so small they barely protrude beyond the leaf litter.

I had figured on a quick half an hour here, but that stretched to two hours. I've not been able to get afield much at all of late, and it was glorious reveling in the onset of spring and its first wildflowers on a crisp blue sky early March day.

My primary target was our smallest and earliest trillium, the snow trillium, Trillium nivale. Paying homage to these elfin lilies is a near annual rite of spring for me, and the sheer number of trillia at this site can be breathtaking. They were just coming on yesterday, and if it's a big year, several thousand plants could be in flower here later.

As the afternoon sun waned, I decided my time of botanical communion was up and it was time to hit the road for Columbus. Walking out of the woods, I glanced up the slope and saw that the sun was streaking the forest floor with golden strips of light. I raced up to see if I could find an open trillium lit by the sun's rays, and Bingo! I got my plant just before the massive star dipped below the horizon. A great ending to a wonderful day.

PHOTO NOTES: I went off the photographic reservation on most of these images. I was in an experimental mood, and shot all but the last of the plant images with Canon's beautifully bizarre but utterly superb 200mm f/2 lens, with a 25mm extension tube. If you saw a recent post that I made about shooting lambs, HERE, that was the lens that I used. People and other larger animals, and sometimes tight landscape shots, would be this lens' typical uses for me. But, coupled with an extension tube to allow it to focus much more closely and the 200 turns out to be an excellent botanical lens. The lens is a tank, and a tripod is essential for this work.

The last image was shot with Canon's ultra-wide angle 16-35mm f.2.8 II lens, handheld and laying on the ground for perspective. Wide-angles, which often focus very closely as this one does, can be great tools for casting your subject plant in a broader light and putting it in a habitat context.