The Minnesota master naturalist program was very kind about the difficulty of finding volunteer opportunities, given that so many were canceled. Anyone who recorded any volunteer hours in 2020 will receive a service pin, rather than the required 40 hours of volunteering plus 8 hours of advanced training in typical years.

It was a good year to spend time in nature — but individually, not in groups. Fortunately for me, my volunteer gig with the Big River Big Woods chapter of Wild Ones is essentially a solo endeavor, anyway. I post several-times-a-week updates on the Big River Big Woods Instagram feed, documenting what’s happening in gardens, parks, and wild spaces throughout the year.

Most of the photos I post on this Instagram feed are from my own garden, or from my hikes in the Twin Cities metro area, but I also post photos from other members from time to time. I especially appreciated that option when I broke my foot in early May and couldn’t easily get outside to see what was blooming!

In 2020, I posted 228 photos on this Instagram account. To make time-tracking easy, I count each post as 15 minutes. Some posts are short (just a sentence for a caption) and quick to do when the flower is in my own yard. Other posts are longer and take some time to research, not to mention travel time to parks. In the end, I’m undercounting by using that average, but I’m not worried because that many posts added up to 57 volunteer hours with just this one activity! Here are the three posts with the most likes:

In January, to help promote the annual Big River Big Woods winter seed planting event, I created a “name that seed” campaign. Each day leading up to the event, I posted a photo of a plant’s seeds, and invited people to swipe the photo to see the flower in bloom or scroll down to see the scientific and common names in the caption.

Planning this campaign and photographing the seeds was a lot of fun. It even evolved into a live guessing game during the seed planting event!

I also added an “invasive plant of the week” campaign, showing a flower that was blooming at that time, and describing why it’s a problem.

Besides these educational Instagram posts, I found some other opportunities to log volunteer time, too: some before the lockdowns, and some afterward but on my own.

Winter tracking survey: In January, about 30 people gathered at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve for their annual winter animal tracking event. My group (by chance, made up of four master naturalist volunteers) headed to a small lake, where we found wolf tracks, as well as coyote and fox prints along the trail. Another group investigated a deer that had recently been killed by a wolf and found signs that a fox, a fisher, and birds had been scavenging on the carcass. The third group went to an open field and found tracks of coyote, vole, mink, and several fishers. All three groups found plenty of evidence of deer: many well-worn deer trails, along with areas where they had rested, and areas where they had scavenged for acorns. In all, 15 species were recorded. Here are two of the master naturalist volunteers studying the wolf tracks on the frozen lake:

Snow seeding (native prairie plants and grasses) in the woods for the City of Roseville:

Snow seeding wildflowers and grasses with the Lower Phalen Creek Project at Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary:

Roseville parks: Stacking pre-cut Siberian Ash trees into wood storage boxes near fire pits at Central Park. It was March 14, two days before the city closed public facilities due to COVID-19. People were leery about what we were about to head into.

Spring tracking survey: Two-day tracking survey of the Minnesota Wildlife Tracking Project that got moved to the Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area after the Cedar Creek spring survey was cancelled due to COVID-19. It was modified to a do-it-yourself survey, rather than the typical group activity. We went to one entry point on Saturday and another entry point on Sunday. Highlight of the first day was recording many frog calls, and the following day we not only heard but also saw the frogs in a wetland closer to the trail. Plus this canine scat:

Pulling invasive garlic mustard at Reservoir Woods (which needs a lot of help with this problem):

City Nature Challenge, a competition among cities all across the world. People go outside and take photos of life forms, living or dead. Could be a flower, a mammal, a feather, a print in mud, a skeleton, scat — any evidence that something is or was there. The photos are then uploaded to iNaturalist, with date and time, location, and any categorization the photographer knows (even if it’s just “tree”).

A second part of the challenge is identifying the photos, and anyone can take part in that, even if they didn’t take any photos. This event is usually a friendly challenge to see which city can record the most verified observations, but in 2020 it turned into a friendly collaboration due to the pandemic.

Ask me to go out to parks and take photos of everything I see? I’ll do that every chance I get. For the 2020 challenge, I took two days and visited two Twin Cities area regional parks each day. I also did a bit of identifying for other local observations.

(Save the dates for the 2021 City Nature Challenge: take photos from April 30-May 3, and ID from May 4-9.)

Weeding the children’s pollinator garden at the Roseville library, one of the Big River Big Woods chapter’s projects. I’ve unofficially claimed removing the invasive species birdsfoot trefoil as my personal project. Here’s a before-and-after of one of the walking paths; note the lack of yellow in the second photo:

The DNR’s Scientific and Natural Areas program held several bioblitzes during 2020. A bioblitz is very similar to the City Nature Challenge, only with a designated location. The SNA program uses information submitted during a bioblitz to expand its species lists. I happened to be relatively close to La Salle Lake SNA during its late-August bioblitz, so I headed over to see what I could find. In this case, I was one of 9 people who made 850 observations of more than 300 species. Note that in a bioblitz, all species are recorded, whether invasive (like the thistles below) or native (like the blazingstar).

Seed collecting at Crow-Hassan Park Reserve for Three Rivers Parks: Gathered stiff goldenrod, showy goldenrod, and assorted asters. (Staff realize that asters are hard enough to tell apart when they’re blooming, let alone when they’re in seed, so we got to collect them all without worrying about sorting by species.)

And finally, I helped the master naturalist program’s Instagram account a few times too, contributing photos and text for three posts:

Are you a Minnesota master naturalist volunteer, too? Program leaders are always looking to share stories of how we’re volunteering and what we’re seeing. Contact master naturalist staff to share nature photos from your own adventures.

All of these activities added up to 85.75 service hours, just under my personal record set in 2019. The travel time was less than half, no surprise due to fewer in-person volunteer activities.

Previous volunteer recaps

• 2019 volunteer service hours
• 2018 volunteer service hours
• 2017 volunteer service hours
• 2016 volunteer service hours

The wild ginger stands out in my garden, before its neighboring summer-blooming flowers have started appearing.

This woodland plant has beautiful, heart-shaped leaves.

Landscapers say this is an excellent groundcover. It spreads, but not too quickly.

This spot in my garden has roughly tripled in size in six years.

Every year I see people comment on Instagram that they didn’t realize these plants have flowers. They hide really well!

The flowers are weird and wonderful.

They’re close to the ground, sometimes even resting on the ground, which makes them attractive to ants that carry the seeds to new areas. The dark color and bad smell (which I cannot vouch for) apparently attract flies that pollinate the flowers.

The leaves start out lying flat.

Then the leaves pop up and the flower appears — like a sea creature poking out of its shell.

Within a couple days, the leaves are fully grown. Sometimes they look like a pair of antennas.

New plants apparently start out as teeny-tiny replicas. I’ll have to watch these next year to see if they’re “oldies” that will flower.

More about wild ginger

• Basics about Canadian wild ginger, Asarum canadense (MinnesotaWildflowers.info)
• More details about Canadian wild ginger, including an image of the seed pod (Friends of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden)
• More of my wild ginger photos

I had forgotten I even bought a pasque flower the year before, so when I rounded the corner to the backyard and saw this beauty, I gasped:

I bought two pots of blueflag iris at a spring sale, and each produced three gorgeous blooms:

A brand-new harebell:

This one was particularly embarrassing. I had bought these two pots in 2018. Not only were the tags weathered and unreadable, but I had not even the slightest memory of what they were — and they had been in that spot so long, roots had grown out the bottom, so the pots were stuck in the ground.

They turned out to be wild petunia:

And last but certainly not least, this dark blue stunner I didn’t see coming: bottle gentian.

Best new addition

Meadow blazing star…

…which really is a monarch magnet.

Other new plants

Swamp milkweed was successful in my yard for the first time!

I planted this thimbleweed from seed several years ago, and it finally appeared.

This is narrow-leaved coneflower, the native version of the popular purple coneflower found nearly everywhere. I bought just one of these plants and it seemed pretty lonely in its new spot in the garden. Hopefully it will spread quickly.

I also purchased two other blazingstars (rough and prairie), a bottle gentian, two blueflag iris, and aromatic aster. (The other pots are plants that are, ahem, still hanging around from 2018.)

Successes

All of the milkweeds and the blazingstars did well — possibly because we fenced them in and the rabbits didn’t get to eat them this year. (This one is whorled milkweed.)

The false indigo produced one flower spike in 2018. The following year: about 60!

It had a relatively short blooming period, but it was much loved by bees when the flowers were around.

Wild ginger is doing spectacularly, especially in the more shaded backyard garden.

Fails

The bishop’s cap gave up after two years, possibly crowded out by violets.

The butterflyweed up front, which was a huge two-colored beauty for years and was a host of many monarch caterpillar eggs in years past, and survived the sewer reconstruction of 2018, petered out in 2019. These buds did bloom, but that was the extent of the plant.

Oopsie

When pulling grass from my backyard garden, I suddenly realized I had gone too far and hit the spiderwort.

Fortunately, it was early enough in the year, and it grew anyway, blooming for the first time.

This wild columbine survived being eaten by deer (twice) and a transplant during the blooming season. What a strong plant!

Unwanted

This pretty vine…

…turned into the pretty but invasive crown vetch. Out it came.

And I gasped when I saw this one: garlic mustard! I spend hours helping parks get rid of this terrible invader! And I probably carried seeds back home with me on my shoes from one of those events. I pulled it out long before it could create seeds.

Best unexpected find

Bird’s nest fungus! It’s obvious how this one got its name. Notice the (small) clovers for perspective on just how tiny these treasures are.

New bugs

This chrysalis was hiding under a common milkweed leaf. Could be a red admiral; I’m not sure. I watched it for a couple weeks but it disappeared — likely eaten, since the chrysalis “shell” was gone.

I believe this is a red admiral caterpillar. It’s so blurry because it was almost dark and my phone did the best it could to compensate. I was looking for caterpillars on the pennsylvania pellitory plants in my front yard, since I’ve heard they are a host plant, and I lucked out! Good reminder that what we may consider a weed (in this case, a mildly aggressive sticky weed) may be vitally important for our insect friends.

Previous recaps

• • 2018 recap
  • 2017 season wrapup
  • 2016 season wrapup
  • 2015 successes | 2015 failures
  • 2014 successes | 2014 failures

In my three previous years of volunteering as a Minnesota Master Naturalist, I put in most of my hours in stewardship / restoration events.

While I still love those one-off, practically-no-commitment-needed events, this year I added a few new components, courtesy of my local Wild Ones Native Plants chapter, Big River Big Woods.

In the fall of 2018, just three days after completing my second master naturalist biome course (which I have yet to write about), I went to the monthly Big River Big Woods chapter event. Full of excitement about nature and eager to participate, I filled out their volunteer survey, checking off several boxes: help with the website, give a plant talk, bring snacks.

I was soon asked to give a short presentation on a wildflower — so, on January 24, full of fresh confidence after giving a couple of short species presentations in my class, I gave a 5-minute talk about pearly everlasting. I enjoyed sharing photos of the pretty flowers, of course — but the bigger goal of my presentation was to show how looks can be deceiving, and we should not be striving for perfection from a human perspective. The plants look terrible in early summer, when they are taken over to provide protective nests for American Lady butterfly caterpillars, but I think I convinced the crowd to be patient when this happens because the plants will be just fine and will still flower like they should, just a few weeks later.

I was also asked to help with a redesign of their website, since my day job for the past 20 years has been managing websites. So with the help of the board of directors, a friend and I reorganized the navigation, tightened up the content, and added big, beautiful photos to the brand-new Big River Big Woods website.

Once that was done, I convinced the chapter to launch an Instagram account since native plants are so naturally visual. Most of the photos and descriptions were my own, though I love to get submissions from other chapter members. In 2019, I created 112 posts, which I recorded as volunteer hours at about 15 minutes apiece. (Follow along at @bigriverbigwoods.)

Those three activities alone — in the “education” category for master naturalist volunteers — accounted for more than the required 40 hours of volunteering! But I still love to help with volunteer events, so I didn’t stop there. Here’s how I recorded the rest of my volunteer time in 2019:

January 12, Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge (education): A couple dozen volunteers and I helped with the beginning stages of an art installation, Kaleidoscope, that would eventually be “flying” at the Mall of America to bring attention to the importance of pollinators. The mall commissioned an artist to create a 30-foot monarch butterfly sculpture with a flock of 300 monarchs (and a few Karner blues) fluttering below to hang from the north atrium of the mall. We started with plastic bags (because the display also talked about upcycling) to form the shape of the body.

And a few months later, this is what the Kaleidoscope art exhibit looked like:

January 26, Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (citizen science): Took part in Cedar Creek’s largest wildlife tracking survey to date, with 27 trackers and naturalists on five teams who recorded the tracks and sign of at least 18 different species of mammals across the reserve, on a day that was double-digits below zero. We began with a discussion about tracking and learned from experienced wildlife trackers about how to distinguish tracks. (I counted this activity as 1 hour of training — since I’m new to this — and 5 hours of work.)

March 15, City of Roseville (stewardship): Snow seeding (native prairie plants and grasses) in the area between the Roseville arboretum and ballfields.

April 16, City of Roseville (citizen science): Volunteers have been conducting frog and toad call surveys in select city parks for a few years. Frogs and toads are indicator species — they can tell us about habitat condition, water quality, and more. An important part of monitoring of frogs and toads is to gather data each year. This allows researchers to detect trends and help provide feedback about management work that is occurring in our parks. I first participated in an hour-long training session, then monitored calls on 3 nights during spring, early summer, and mid summer.

April, City Nature Challenge (citizen science): Hiked at three regional parks, taking photos of all of the species I could find, and then went to an “ID party” to help identify or confirm identifications of species reported by other local people. Parks visited:

• Minnehaha Regional Park
• Bald Eagle / Otter Lake Regional Park
• Pine Point Regional Park

May 7, Saint Paul Natural Resources (stewardship): Gorgeous spring evening for a volunteer restoration event. Hauled pre-cut brush and dug out burdock plants at Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

May 9, Wood-Rill Scientific and Natural Area (citizen science): Helped other volunteers identify as many plant species as possible in the first BioBlitz at Wood-Rill SNA.

May 11, Three Rivers Park District (stewardship): Garlic mustard removal event at Silverwood Park.

June 1, Friends of the Mississippi River (stewardship): Planted trees on a hillside of the new Heritage Park.

June 10, Ramsey-Washington Metro Watershed District (stewardship): Joint RWMWD / Wild Ones Big River Big Woods planting event to restore the shoreline of a large wetland at Snail Lake Regional Park. This is a two-year project restoring native habitat in a large county park interspersed with large woodland, prairie, and wetland areas.

June 15, City of Roseville (stewardship): Planted native plugs to restore shoreline at Lake Owasso. Cardinal flower, blue lobelia, grass-leaved goldenrod, prairie blazing star, blue flag iris, common rush, bottlebrush sedge, among others — 750 plants in all. With more than a dozen volunteers, it only took two hours.

June 18, Friends of the Mississippi River (stewardship): FMR has been restoring a bluff prairie on the overlook slope at Indian Mounds Regional Park. We tended to the area around native plants at this site, removing burdock, crown vetch, grapevines, thistles, and more.

June 27, Friends of the Mississippi River (stewardship): Removed hoary alyssum at Hastings Sand Coulee Scientific and Natural Area. This isn’t the worst weed, but it doesn’t belong in this high-quality site, so Friends of the Mississippi River and their volunteers are removing it.

August 4, Dakota County Parks (citizen science): Bumblebee survey. I wasn’t so successful personally, though my husband caught quite a few. (The bees are always released after being identified and marked.)

August 15, Mississippi National River & Recreation Area (stewardship): Coyote howling survey. We visited three separate stations more than 1.5 miles apart and played a pre-recorded coyote sound three times each followed by 90 seconds of listening. We heard coyotes before the survey began and after it ended.

August 17, Minnesota Bee Atlas (citizen science): Bumblebee survey at Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. There were so many other volunteers, and so many bumblebees, that I only collected one bee and spent the rest of the time helping the gatherers ID the flowers where they were found and then sorting the containers by flower. 112 bumblebees were collected, totalling 7 species, but no rusty-patched.

September 4, Carleton Arboretum (stewardship): Seed collecting in the prairie, followed by an observation of a monarch roost!

September 5, Saint Paul Natural Resources (stewardship): Collected bottlebrush grass seed at Phalen Regional Park.

September 7, Three Rivers Parks (stewardship): Collected leadplant, Golden Alexanders, purple prairie clover, and gray-headed coneflower. Elm Creek Park Reserve has 40 acres of prairie, and Three Rivers Parks District is expanding that to 200! Awesome project. It was a gray and wet day on the prairie. Just look at all these purple prairie clover seedheads!

September 17, National Park Service / Coldwater Spring (stewardship): Removed river grape vines. I only participated for half an hour, but a little is better than nothing!

September 21, City of Roseville (stewardship): Got to a volunteer event late enough that the plants were mostly planted already, so I spent my time pulling buckthorn seedlings — easy to do after a bunch of rain. Left them on logs so they won’t grow back into the ground!

September 26, Settler’s Island in Cottage Grove (stewardship): Volunteer tree planting event with Friends of the Mississippi River that started by kayaking out to an island! Restoration event at an area that had recently been cleared of buckthorn and other undesirable trees. Planted white oak, Ohio buckeye, viburnum, highbush cranberry, dogwood red osier, and catalpa.

September 28, Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge (stewardship): U of M students and alumni and master naturalist volunteers participated in a Planting for Pollinators event on National Public Lands Day and National Urban Wildlife Refuge Day. We planted 4,500 native plugs! It was inspiring to see the transformation of this place that used to be gravel and buckthorn. Now it’s a place to play, rest, and enjoy nature. And next year it will be full of wildflowers.

In all

That all adds up to…

…more than 100 hours! Whew!

See more of my 2019 volunteering photos

Previous volunteer recaps

• 2018 volunteer service hours
• 2017 volunteer service hours
• 2016 volunteer service hours

Clusters of berries that have been partially eaten, perhaps by birds that will spread the seeds to new areas:

Beautiful ripe berries:

Because there are berries, these two plants were female.

But get this: next year, both of these same plants will probably be male! Jack-in-the-pulpits change sex depending on how much energy they have stored. Producing berries takes a lot of energy, so usually the next year they’re male.

Family photo of four blooming jacks under their tall, umbrella-like leaves. I assume the two plants on the right are male, though I didn’t know to check while they were blooming. Next year I will look more closely!

Stretching their leaves open:

Unfurling:

Just getting started:

About this flower

• Arisaema triphyllum, jack-in-the-pulpit (MinnesotaWildflowers.info)
• Jack-in-the-pulpit, or is that Jill? (Northern Woodlands)

Their sleeping positions are sometimes peculiar.

A few rest on the top of flowers — like this bee that looks like it’s sleeping on a pink cloud.

But most of them hang upside-down from blossoms or under leaves.

Joe-pye weed was a particular favorite this year.

This has to be the funniest flower choice I’ve seen. The bees are bigger than the flowers!

I try not to spend too much time looking at them, though, because they seem to get stressed out if I’m too close.

It’s better to take a quick picture and then admire digitally.

More of my posts about bumblebees

• My favorite post: Where do bumblebees sleep? (2013)
• Bees and turtlehead (2017)
• Where the bees are (2019)
• Honeybees and bumblebees (2016)
• Shelter from the rain (2014)

I was one of them, but I knew that they don’t usually show up until the bee balm starts blooming, so I wasn’t too worried. Only a few showed up then, though.

It wasn’t until the joe-pye weed, purple giant hyssop, and cup plant reached full bloom that the bumblebees arrived en masse.

And now, whenever it’s sunny, the front yard is in constant motion.

Bumblebees on cup plant, with a monarch flyby at the end:

Bumblebees on purple giant hyssop:

Not just bumblebees, but other bees too.

The only thing I haven’t seen much of this year is honeybees.

Where are the bees? In my yard. Plant native flowers, and you’ll see bees, too.

 
Allium:

Bee balm:

Blazingstar:

Phlox:

(I’m choosing not to include the invasive creeping bellflower, though it is purple.)

But is this joe-pye weed pink or purple?

 
Color is indeed subjective. I would say these flowers are pink, but they’re called purple coneflowers:

I would definitely call this one purple, but its name is blue vervain:

And this is purple giant hyssop, but it looks less and less purple every year: