A Trip to Cedar Bog

On Thursday, I made a visit to a longtime destination of mine: Cedar Bog Nature Preserve, located 4 miles south of Urbana, Ohio in Champaign County. The 450-acre state nature preserve is actually a fen, not a bog, left behind by retreating glaciers over 10,000 years ago.

Bogs and fens are both a type of mire (an open wetland dominated by peat-forming plants), but they get their water differently. Bogs receive almost all of their water from rainfall, while fens are fed by surface and/or ground water. Water in a bog is trapped and only leaves via evaporation, while the water in a fen trickles out. You can remember this with the following handy mnemonic: "Bogs clog, fens flow." 

So why is it called Cedar Bog, then? The unsatisfactory answer given to me by an interpretive sign was that "people are slow to change." Well, Cedar Bog, then why don't you speed up the process by changing your erroneous name? But I didn't go there for a nomenclature argument; I went to see some of the rare flora and fauna Cedar Bog is known for, and I wasn't disappointed.

The 1-mile boardwalk passes through a variety of wetland habitats.

The boardwalk cuts through a wet forest (swamp).

A wet prairie bordered by hardwoods.

A sedge meadow dotted with white cedar, Thuja occidentalis.

In the forested areas, the ground was dominated by skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus. The flowers are gone—they bloom as early as February because they can melt the snow and ice around them—but not the huge leaves.

It's the motherleaf!

Here's another cool plant: bittersweet nightshade, Solanum dulcamara. It's in the same genus as the tomato plant, but you wouldn't want to eat it (hint: it's poisonous).

But the real botanical prize was the showy lady's-slipper, Cypripedium reginae. Cedar Bog is the best place in the state to see this rare orchid, which is listed as threatened in Ohio.

Note the tiny katydid nymph on the right blossom. :3

And now, on to the critters!

Well, what do we have here? A bumble bee? Think again! This is a fly; see how short the antennae are? It's Laphria thoracica, one of the "bee-like robber flies." An apt name for the genus, I would say.

Here is the beautiful ebony jewelwing damselfly, Calopteryx maculata.

This is probably my favorite damselfly, and I saw dozens of them. They are easily identified and sexed at a glance. Both males and females have all-black wings and iridescent green bodies, but females are duller in color and have a white spot (stigma) at the end of each wing.

A female ebony jewelwing.

Depending on the light, they can also appear blue or even bronze.

A male ebony jewelwing rocking electric blue. That wad of
snuff in his mouth was formerly a gnat or other small insect.

Beautiful, but deadly (if you're an insect). That's why I love odonates. Here's a dragonfly, and this one's a first for me:

It's an arrowhead spiketail, Cordulegaster obliqua.

Moving on to larger fauna, I had read of the climbing prowess of the eastern ratsnake, Pantherophis alleghaniensis, but now I've seen proof. As I came into a small wet prairie edged by trees, I looked up at one tree and saw this:

Yep, just a snake chillin' in a tree cavity, probably a good 30-40 feet off the ground. To give you an idea how high up it was, here is a zoomed-out shot with the snake circled.

And it climbed all the way up there without any arms or legs! Snakes are awesome.

But now to my main reason for this trip: skinks! I had been wanting to visit Cedar Bog ever since a friend told me that skinks just jump off the boardwalk in front of you as you walk. She wasn't wrong.

Close-up of a juvenile common five-lined skink.

The skinks in question are common five-lined skinks, Plestiodon fasciatus. As their name implies, they are Ohio's most common lizard and can be found throughout the state. Despite this, I had never seen one, or any wild lizard, in Ohio before, so you can understand my excitement.

Juvenile five-lined skinks have bold, dark brown or black stripes and a bright blue tail.

The tail is brightly-colored to make it more appealing to predators. If it is grabbed, it will break off, leaving a predator with a mouth full of wriggling tail while the skink makes a speedy getaway. Eventually, the skink's tail will grow back, but it won't be as long or brightly-colored as the first one.

As the skink matures, both its tail and its dark stripes fade, leaving it brown overall, but the head of the adult male turns red during the breeding season. The one adult male I saw wanted to stay hidden, but he couldn't resist poking his head up between the slats of the boardwalk to show me his color.

"Yes. My head is fabulous."

Skinks are among the fastest reptiles in the world, and it was fun to see and hear them darting over and under the boardwalk as I sauntered along. My only regret is that I didn't see the threatened spotted turtle or the endangered massasauga rattlesnake, both of which call Cedar Bog home. Nonetheless, a rare orchid, a new dragonfly, and my first lizard made for a great trip.