Ya'll give a welcome to Evan Devine, my brother who helped post this entry (Daniel is just doing the writing). He'll be the regular "picture guy" around here for awhile, posting both pictures I've taken and interesting science stuff from the net. Evan's first series of images will be "Memories of summer," which is a artsy way of saying these are the pictures I never got around to posting online until now. That is, I made Evan do it.

The photos in this post are from Pinhook Bog, a peat bog in northern Indiana that is part of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (a nat'l park bordering Lake Michigan.) A peat bog is a water basin with no outlet that has grown enough moss, plants and shrubbery to form a floor of peat stable enough to walk on or support small trees. The water is more acidic than a regular pond, so bogs host a variety of unique and often rare plants. The picture above is of blueberries, which grow prolifically in the bog (the previous owners of the land Pinhook Bog sits on sold them locally every summer, and one year made $1000 at 50 cents a pint.)

Below are pink ladyslippers.

 If I remember correctly, the flower above is from a pitcher plant, and the plant itself is below.

 Below is honeydew. Three types of carnivorous plants grow throughout the bog: Pitchers, honeydew, and bladderwort. My photos of the bladderwort didn't turn out well, since the plants grow underwater, but the species is fascinating: It uses a special trapping mechanism with a hair trigger to capture small underwater insects.

What else grows in Pinhook Bog? Tamarack trees, sphagnum moss, poison sumac, yellow-laced orchids, cattails, arrowroot, and many other species. One thing that doesn't grow in the depths of the bog (wonderfully): mosquitoes. The water is too acidic.

 all photos copyright Daniel james Devine.