Tuesday evening Myra and I went to watch the MSU Spartans men’s basketball team have a harder time than it should have beating the Purdue Boilermakers. We like Purdue because West Lafayette is right next door to several good sites related to the Black Hawk story. East Lansing does not have such good history connections for this blog. But we’re Spartans fans, anyway. We scored some tickets for the Breslin Center when they became available at the last minute.

The game was a late one, so we took advantage of the opportunity to first walk over to the map library to look up some information for the above map. I had a few days earlier downloaded, imported, and re-projected maps of the settlement-era vegetation landscape from the Michigan Natural Features Inventory. But I was puzzled about the areas classified as savanna.

In the above map of the Climax area in eastern Kalamazoo County, the orangish area is Climax Prairie — classified as grassland on the MNFI map. The greenish and yellowish are oak savanna. On the wall-map version of these data, those two types of savanna are all mooshed together into one catgegory, “oak savanna.” But the downloaded shapefiles indicated that there were several types of savanna. And I had known from other maps that the greenish area southwest of Climax Prairie seemed to have a special status for the early settlers. That land was gobbled up quickly by the first buyers. What I wanted to know was what distinction the makers of the presettlement vegetation maps were making, because whatever it was, it seemed to be one that was significant to the early settlers, too.

The document I needed was:

Conner, P.J., D.A. Albert, H.A. Wells, B.L. Hart, J.B. Raab, D.L. Price, D.M. Kashian, R.A. Corner & D.W. Schuen. 1995. Michigan’s Native Landscape, as Interpreted from the General Land Office Surveys 1816-1856. Report to the U.S. E.P.A. Water Division and the Wildlife Division, Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Michigan Natural Features Inventory, Lansing, MI. 76 pp.

We got to the map library just a few minutes before closing time. While Myra’s attention was attracted to a John Farmer map of 1840 that was out on display, I learned that the green areas in the above map were categorized as “Bur Oak Savanna” and the yellowish ones as “Oak Opening.” Unfortunately, I failed to take a few more minutes to try to learn just what it was that the map compilers used to distinguish the two. That part will have to wait a bit.

Tonight I took a few minutes to compare the outline of that Bur Oak Savanna with the satellite image available at Google Maps. I was wondering if there are any obvious, visible signs still visible to distinguish it from the surrounding Oak Opening. The answer? I’m not sure. But here is one possibility:

The photo below is from a December 1 bike ride to the area. My bicycle is at the point on the map marked with a red X. The tree line visible in the distance, to the left of the houses, seems to follow the edge of the Bur Oak Savanna that’s marked with the red Y. If I remember right, there was a slight elevation difference along that line. Maybe the soil types are different, too. I’d have to look at a soils map to see.

That’s about all I can say about it at this point.

It’s weird that I get so anal about understanding such small differences on a flat landscape, no? But I enjoy learning about it. It helps me enjoy my rides more when I can interpret what I see in terms of history and natural history.