Month: November 2019

sumac thicket

Meet Your Neighbors: Meet the Sumacs

By Jack MacRae The burgundy leaves of sumac fill the Fox Valley’s fall woods.  The hue comes from the pigment anthocyanin and is greatly influenced by the weather.  Here is how: Cool nights (below 45f) inhibit the tree’s chlorophyll production.  Without chlorophyll, sugars accumulate in the leaves.  Increased sugar leads to a rise in anthocyanin in the leaf.  The more … Read more

burning river

It’s Your River – Vote to Protect It!

By Gary Swick, President While in Waubonsee Creek in Oswego, with 7th graders from the Aurora University STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) school, I got a surprise. We were doing a physical-feature analysis to make a map of the creek segment that we were monitoring. Students focused upon two concrete pipes which were discharging a … Read more