I thought I knew all the plants that would attack me in southern Illinois…then I headed off trail to find a good spot for a cathole and started to push through a shoulder-high thicket of these guys:
This proved to be a mistake, due to the hitherto-unnoticed-by-me spiky thorns all over their stems. I found another spot, so now I’m just left with small punctures & curiosity.
this seems like a prime use case for AI image recognition tools. There was some iphone app called leafsnap that does somthing like this… can you upload a picture and it finds likely candidates. Haven’t used it in years, this was pre-chatGPT era
Oh and yeah… could be black locust. Not sure why I didn’t tihnk of that, I have a billion of them in my yard
Pretty sure black locust leaves are rounded instead of pointy.
I wonder if they might be honeylocust saplings.
It’s not honey locust either. Those leaves are tiny and very distinctly feathery looking.