This Week in Iowa Nature

Bobcat sightings are on the increase in rural, forested areas of the state. Look for their tracks and those of other animals while you snowshoe and ski cross-country.

The Iowa Nature Calendar, by Jean Prior and James Sandrock

Plant of the Week

Water hemlock

Cicuta maculata L.

other common names: beaver poison, cowbane, musquash root, spotted cowbane, spotted hemlock

Cicuta: the ancient Latin name for poison hemlock

Maculata: from Latin, meaning “spotted” or “mottled”

Parsley family: Apiaceae (Umbelliferae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "Making Bows" by Ted Kooser

In the weeks just before Christmas, my father’s store was busiest, its narrow aisles crowded with shoppers, its carefully arranged displays rumpled and disarrayed, and its floors slippery with melting snow. On Saturdays and when school let out in the afternoons, my sister and I helped out. She worked on the sales floor, and I made bows for the women in the gift-wrap booth.

The bow machine was set up in the furnace room. A single lightbulb hung over the card table upon which it sat. Behind my chair, the great gray furnace sighed and ticked, and piles of bald and disassembled manikins watched my back with wide unblinking eyes. In the shadows, bugs rustled across the floor, and above me the footfalls of customers knocked up and down the wooden floor. There I wound green and red satin ribbon into shiny bows that I dropped into a big cardboard box beside me. It was a job like those in fairy tales, in which a child is imprisoned in a castle and made to spin golden thread from flax straw.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee