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Wednesday, November 20, 2024

A Potentially Influential Burn - Superior Street Prairie

This burn represented an important new approach - though it seemed so normal. 

The photo below could almost tell the story by itself. The long-time staff people from Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and their powerful equipment are all hanging back. Local resident and Friends restoration volunteer Sheba Abernathy spreads the fire with a drip torch. The crew is seventeen volunteers and two staff people from Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. Many neighbors volunteer here or at nearby sites. Many volunteers today are in their twenties and thirties. All are being taught skills and leadership by experts. 

In the background, if you look carefully, you can see a red fire vehicle and a DNR staffer standing idle. The DNR came as back-up ... and to observe and teach. 

Far too many precious preserves that need fire are not getting it on most years. The losses to nature are substantial. 

Below, today's burn boss, Jo Sabbath of the Friends, explains the plan. In the circle are three seasoned DNR staff - Chip O'Leary, Melissa Grycan, and Brad Semel. They brought ATVs with massive water-spraying capacity. But those staff and that high-powered gear will step back and sit out the burn.

A main purpose of the day is training, by the Friends and other experts, for new volunteer burn leaders and crew.

Above, A good backfire helps make the burn safe. Here, burn boss Genevieve Nano (front right) teaches Tauri Abernathy (front left, another preserve neighbor and brush-cutting volunteer here) some of the fine points of safe drip-torch work. 

Impressed by the day's work, some of us at the end discussed possible implications. The Nature Preserves Commission and partner land-owning agencies need more staff. To get it, they (and the Friends) need constituency and support. People here today are also learning about preserve needs - and becoming more personally committed to biodiversity conservation. 

The DNR's Brad Semel quoted Bill Kleiman on some challenging criticism. Bill, the director at TNC's Nachusa Grasslands, was an original organizer of the Illinois Prescribed Fire Council. Bill took time away from his Nachusa work to do that organizing because lack of fire is the single biggest threat to most Illinois biodiversity preserves. 

Bill challenged the DNR burn bosses. Bill noticed that he would go to a burn and see five or six burn bosses all at the same site. He'd ask, why weren't they all out burning five or six needy sites? But, as Brad put it, "People don't understand the staffing levels within IDNR. (See Endnote.) You can't do a burn safely with just a person or two. Developing partnerships has been invaluable in increasing our burning capacity.” 

The Friends have been proposing that we vastly increase burn capacity by training fifty or a hundred fit, smart, dedicated burn crew leaders and members. The benefits would be two-fold: 1) we'd get a lot more burns done during the best, safest burn days (relatively few on most years) and 2) there would be a lot more public exposure to the need and, thus, more support as we reach out to the elected leaders who decide how much funding goes to conservation. When citizens are volunteering to do crucial work that governments ought to do, elected reps see the need more clearly and provide more support . 

At the end - as fire boss Jo of the Friends talked with fire bosses Brad, Melissa, and Chip of DNR, it seemed good to all of us that Friends and DNR should explore an expanded collaborative effort to recruit and train scores of new burn crew members and leaders. 

Even if staff numbers and contract funding doubled, it's hard to imagine that to be sufficient to do all the burning, invasive control, and other stewardship needs for Illinois' 600+ Nature Preserves. But it's easy to imagine moving in the right direction with an expanded collaborative program including lots of local citizen participation.

End Notes

Below are a few more examples and insights from the day.

Harrison Bruch lights a "strip fire" through the center of the site, to speed the burn. Does this look dangerous? If you know what you're doing, it's not. 

Fire vehicle - very handy - but ... 
... although such vehicles can help, they are not required. There was not the remotest need for one at this burn. 

Oh oh. So close to all those houses! But see below.

At Superior Street Prairie, owned by the Calumet Memorial Park District, the neighbors are super supportive. Some have seen these burns for decades and know the preserve gets richer and healthier each time. Local neighbor liaison June Webb posted herself by those houses and answered questions from neighbors during the burn. 


Does the above video look threatening? Perhaps if you're unfamiliar with controlled burns. But in the center of the site, with burned fire-breaks all 360 degrees around, it's just safe nature doing what's needed. The smoke from this hot fire went up and out over Lake Michigan, not drifting through the neighborhood. It was planned that way. This is nature, healing itself, with a little help from the Friends. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks for edits and comments from Jo Sabbath, Rebeccah Hartz, Brad Semel, and Melissa Grycan. 

Endnote: Illinois Department of Natural Resources staff

As Brad suggested above, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources is woefully understaffed for biodiversity conservation - especially for burns, the single most important need of most prairies, woodlands, and wetlands. Also, separation of DNR Division responsibilities has hurt the burn program.  When the Division of Natural Heritage organized burns, it used to be that staff from the Divisions of Lands, Wildlife, and Forestry would rally to the cause. Today, not as much. Staff are short everywhere.  

Partnerships with county burn crews and not-for-profit organizations have been invaluable to the burn program. But there's still not remotely the needed capacity. Studies have shown that prairies and savannas that get burned less than at least every second year (typically one-half every year) are degrading, progressively. There are indications that the same could be said for oak woodlands. But most parts of most sites today get burned every third year, or fourth, or not at all. 

Both Natural Heritage and Nature Preserve Commission staffs need substantial increases to reverse ongoing biodiversity losses on high-quality state-owned lands and all nature preserves. Many of the staff burn bosses would welcome trained and fit volunteers to increase capacity.  

Volunteer crews like the folks who burned Superior Street Prairie could help reverse the losses, especially at smaller sites owned by local agencies without professional conservation staff. And volunteers (some of whom are on good terms with elected officials) along with the Friends, Illinois Environmental Council, and others can advocate for more resources. It takes a village. In fact, many villages. 

Many studies have supported these concerns. From one of them:

To understand long-term change … we re-investigated 62 prairie stands that were originally sampled in 1976 by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory … With respect to change in species richness, higher quality prairies tended to be stable, while lower quality prairies increased in richness, presumably in response to fire management. We also found that alien species and woody vegetation increased across all sites, and that native species richness tended to decline as woody vegetation increased. Fire frequencies of about 50 %, i.e. biennial burning, appear necessary to maintain composition and structure of mesic and wet-mesic prairies, and few sites were burned at this rate. This appears to be causing long-term deterioration of many sites, and we propose that increased fire management will be needed to maintain these important natural areas.

From a study by Marlin Bowles (Morton Arboretum) and Michael Jones: CW Journal. July 2004. Pages 7-16.

Such studies are expensive and time-consuming. But we need more of them, for all fire-dependent communities, in all parts of the state. We can also learn from good studies in Missouri, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. More important, we need to learn from such studies, and act. 

Friday, November 8, 2024

Dead Pines Are Killers

On November 11, 2024, six chain-sawyers and a dozen pile builders forged a valiant start to reversing a decades old calamity. Finally, enough people care. 

At long last, we started cleaning up an unnecessary lethal mess that has been degrading one of the richest and most important biodiversity preserves in the midwest. 

Invasive pines are dying. But they don't rot or burn. They continue to kill.

Even as you approach the logs, the rich flora of this Nature Preserve starts to fade out - the soil excessively acidified by slowly rotting bark and twigs - grass fuel for healing fires thinned out and less- or not-flammable. 

Away from the log piles, the varied and rich savanna and prairie flora - and their animals - still thrive. But less and less as pines die and the mess spreads.

Huge areas are covered with just logs. It may seem hard to believe, but this problem has been recognized since Illinois Beach was dedicated as the very first Illinois Nature Preserve in 1964. 

The heroic Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves volunteer team has been working on priorities weekly - all year long - since July 2023. They tackle priorities, brush and sweet clover in the richest areas. And they also do the hardest stuff - from herbiciding crown vetch to the finding, GPS-ing, and caring for needy endangered species populations.

In the summer, we battle invasive plants in the rich turf. But those dead pines in the background remind us of needed fall and winter work.

There will be more on all this in future posts. 

But for a couple of photos from the 11th, see below:

Sawing the logs into pieces small enough to lift and pile was the first step.

Carrying some of the bigger ones took a bit of brawn.

When the day ended, we were tired and dirty, but happy. 

We had hoped to burn the piles as we worked, but the day was too windy, with acres of flammable prairie and savanna grass all around. We ended up with eight enormous piles and many smaller ones. We'll burn them spectacularly as we do more of this amazing work on more Saturdays this fall or winter, depending on conditions and other priorities. 

For updates on work priorities each week, check with: 

Please let us know if you're coming. To sign up and for any questions, go to:
or
Illinoisduneslandrestoration@gmail.com

For more photos and links about the Illinois Beach stewards, click here



Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Field seminar for conservation volunteers

                                                 Intro by Rebecca Hartz 
Some see learning as linear, hierarchical. At Somme, working with nature and with people, we’ve had the privilege of seeing otherwise. The field seminar has become a key tool for bringing stewards of all levels of expertise and experience into the work of learning together. New volunteers examine the landscape alongside staff and seasoned restorationists.  
Good stewardship is a humbling experience, a logical response to the vastness of the ecosystem, which is bigger and more mysterious than any one brain can try to manage. So we try to do a greater service to nature by thinking and working together, learning and re-learning with an ever-evolving community of hearts and minds. 
There’s hope in collaboration, and joy in sharing in each other’s observations and wonderings. Zoe Raines puts fresh eyes on this work in the post below.                                                                                     

by Zoe Raines

I’ve been a conservation volunteer for just two months. So I was incredibly grateful to be a student during last weekend’s field seminar at Somme Woods.

At field seminars, stewards discuss the ecosystem, and how to restore it. I was probably the least experienced conservationist there – eager to learn from all the great people who attended. Fifteen of us met in the parking lot and began with the customary circle, sharing our names, nature preserve sites we work at, and experience with woodland restoration.

Volunteer stewards gather for the ecological restoration field seminar at Somme Woods on October 27th.
Group photo by Eriko Kojima

Guided by Rebeccah Hartz and Eriko Kojima, our goal was to visit several woods, savanna, and wetland areas to evaluate their current state and learn to think critically about how to craft future plans of care.


Getting to know a woodland site

First, we had to understand what the site stewards were working with. Somme Woods is a combination of bur oak savanna and oak woodlands, so the principal tree populations are bur, white, and swamp white oaks. For the animals and plants of the oak communities, the tree canopy needs to be thin enough to let in light that enlivens the blanket of native vegetation below. But in the absence of fire, there are too many invading trees.

Stewards of these sites have to make the decision: Which trees do we cut? How will that impact our principal tree population and the native undergrowth?

As we hiked through Somme Woods, Rebeccah and Eriko pointed out an area where invasive trees, especially common buckthorn, have badly darkened the woods. Notice how there’s no healthy undergrowth of plants and grasses on the ground, because the density of tree cover doesn’t allow for it.

Volunteer stewards at the field seminar hike through a portion of Somme Woods thick with invasive trees like common buckthorn.

But at another site just a few minutes walk away, volunteers learned that sometimes, if you cut too many non-native or not-oak-associated trees to let in light, tall goldenrod will take over before there’s an opportunity to seed the desired native mix.
Tall goldenrod takes over the undergrowth in an area of Somme Woods

Therefore, stewards also need to be able to scythe or mow the goldenrod and gather and plant the right seed mix. In each area we visited throughout the woods, showcased in photos here, these big decisions are being made about a small area.

This is where the sustaining part of the work comes in – because the care of ecological restoration is an ongoing practice.


Making tough choices for ecological restoration

We learned that part of what makes stewards’ decisions so hard is that they’re triaging with their care. They have to decide what the most urgent needs are, and what limited resources they have available, given permissions, tools, and manpower.

And the field seminar wasn’t just theoretical knowledge. That future plan of care we were learning throughout the afternoon? It was informing the plan for real work that volunteer steward groups would be doing at Somme Woods over this coming winter season.
Volunteer stewards observe and take notes

Calling all conservation volunteers!

If you want to help stewards in their ability to make more ambitious decisions in their plans for these beautiful oak savanna and woodland sites – lend your hands and support! Come out to the woods and prairies ... and work and learn with all of us.

Find an upcoming volunteer workday near you!

The field seminar group walks through tall savanna grasses

Monday, October 14, 2024

Fox Squirrel - a missing piece in savannas and oak woodlands?

The big, burly fox squirrel is said to be declining, while the little gray squirrel increases. One possible reason is that the big guy needs richer food sources. We've wondered if the fox would increase and the gray decrease as Somme's habitats improve. So far that isn't happening. 

The gray squirrel is originally a creature of forest; the fox squirrel's classic habitats are oak savannas and open woodlands. 


Fox squirrel - tough but vulnerable 

We see fox squirrels at Somme from time to time - never more than one or two. This year, I can’t remember seeing a fox squirrel all summer. On October 7, while monitoring birds, I saw two. As for gray squirrels, though I didn’t count, I’m sure I saw at least thirty. 

What's going on? Perhaps there are clues in Wikipedia and other easily accessible literature:

Fox squirrels are most abundant in open forest stands with little understory vegetation [apparently referring to shrubs]. The size and spacing of trees is among the important features of fox squirrel habitat. Fox squirrels are often observed foraging on the ground several hundred meters from the nearest trees.

 What do they mean by “little understory”?

Optimum tree canopy closure for fox squirrels is from 20% to 60%. Optimum conditions of understory closure occur when the shrub-crown closure is 30% or less.

So far so good. Somme has a great deal of low-shrub, open woodland habitat. Red-headed woodpeckers also like such a habitat, and now breeding pairs are widespread and regular at Somme (at least five pairs this year). Is there something else missing for fox squirrels?

Fox squirrels in Ohio are said to prefer hickory nuts, acorns, and black walnuts ... and to be absent where two of these nut-producing trees are missing.

In Michigan, fox squirrels feed on a variety of foods throughout the year. Spring foods are mainly tree buds and flowers, insects, bird eggs, and seeds of red maple, silver maple, and elms. Summer foods include a variety of berries, plum and cherry pits, fruits of basswood, fruits of box elder, black oak acorns, hickory nuts, seeds of sugar and black maple, grains, insects, and unripe corn. Autumn foods consist mainly of acorns, hickory nuts, beechnuts, walnuts, butternuts, and hazelnuts. Caches of acorns and hickory nuts are heavily used in winter.

We have good quantities of most of the above, including maples and elms, although we're working to reduce the former and the later die of Dutch elm disease. 

Juveniles usually disperse in September or October, so perhaps the occasional fox squirrels we see at Somme are dispersing from successful breeding habitat elsewhere. But where? And what do those places have that Somme does not?

One mixed-message fact about fox squirrels is that they do well in some suburban neighborhoods. Human preferred landscapes often have the scattered trees and open understory that the fox squirrels need. Gray squirrels have adapted to the urban too of course.

In a U. of I. study initiated in 1997 by Wendy Jackson and Joel Brown, citizen-science reports have indicated that: 
Fox squirrels were more likely to be observed in the western and especially southwestern suburbs. There were 27 zip codes where only gray squirrels were recorded, compared to only two zip codes where only fox squirrels were recorded (60104 in the village of Bellwood and 60402 in the village of Berwyn). There were 85 zip codes for which both fox and gray squirrels were recorded.

One significant finding of that study was that fox squirrel abundance was associated with high populations of domestic cats. The smaller gray squirrel is more susceptible to predation.

Our study provides support for the idea that fox and gray squirrel coexistence is facilitated by a trade-off between managing the cost of predation and foraging efficiency, gray squirrels out-competing fox squirrels in areas of high food and low predator (or pet) density.

Decreasing numbers of fox sq
uirrels have made them a species of concern in the states of New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama. 

But this is Illinois. Since they're widespread in lots of suburban zip codes, should our conservation thinking just ignore fox squirrels? But many bird species (for example the red-headed woodpecker and the barn owl) were long considered common inhabitants of yards and farms … but later became conservation priorities when those habitats stopped working for them. Too much pesticide? Changing tastes in landscaping? In contrast to urban landscapes, survival in nature seems more secure for both the species and the ecosystem. And is it possible that the oak communities would benefit in various ways from the return of this classic species?

Ecosystems are difficult to study. The first ecological study of Somme Woods was in conducted in 1908. Then, after a long pause, dedicated researchers at the Sommes have made strides in the study of plant communities, rare plants, woodland breeding birds, seed banks, and much more. Creative approaches (both pure science and applied) are much needed to help with management questions that need answers now. 

It's interesting to consider the status of fox squirrels of southeastern United States as described in this NatureServe report:

The greatest threat to fox squirrel populations is in the southeastern U.S., where distribution and abundance have been reduced by loss of mature forest habitat. The widely spaced trees typical of mature longleaf pine-turkey oak forest upon which populations in the southeastern U.S. depend favor the squirrel's large size, running proficiency, and tendency to escape along the ground. The very open, parklike forest stands resulting from frequent fires produce better crops of pine cones and mast. However, the longleaf pine ecosystem, which once comprised some 70 million hectares across the southeastern Coastal Plain, is today represented by only about 2% of its original range. Survival of the fox squirrel in the Southeast is intimately tied to the fortunes of this declining ecosystem. 

Only 2%? That's low, but Illinois' surviving high-quality savannas comprise less than 1/100th of 1% of the original, and the more common degraded ones are losing health and sustainability fast. 
It would be tempting to hypothesize that fox squirrels might facilitate the restoration of our badly challenged oak woodland and savanna communities. What added information would we need? 

They're relatively easy to study. Fox and gray squirrels - like humans - are unusual among mammals in being out and active in the daytime, much easier for citizen-scientists to observe than coyotes, foxes, deer, weasels, raccoons, and, for that matter, flying squirrels, which too are nocturnal. Can anyone help us understand whether more of their foxy handsomeness would be a good addition to the growing biodiversity of Somme's savannas and woodlands?

References
Study comparing gray and fox squirrels in the Chicago area:


Acknowledgements
The opening photo is from our friend Michael Jeffords in Outdoor Illinois Journal.
Photo of fox squirrel eating a flower is from Welcome Wildlife. 
Final photo is from Wikipedia, a good service that deserves our support.
Proofing and edits by Eriko Kojima. 

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Hypothesis: Good Restoration for Plants will in time mean Good Restoration for Birds.

When restoration began in Somme Woods, the ground under the trees was bare. This preserve supported few birds, butterflies, snakes, or animals of any kind. 

Our hypothesis from the beginning was that restoring health and natural diversity to the plant community would also be good for the whole ecosystem, including its animals. 

But that was a hypothesis. Little such experiment has been done. Less has been tested scientifically. 

We spend most of our time as stewards working to bring back the herbs (herbaceous plants: grasses and "forbs") ("forbs" is a technical name for wildflowers). In a few mere decades we could show that basic restoration techniques could, at least for the foreseeable future, conserve large numbers of rare or uncommon plant species and gene pools that would otherwise have been lost. Most of plant diversity, even in woodlands, is among the grasses, sedges, and forbs.

This post was inspired by the impressive abundance of migrating birds feeding down in the herbs on September 24, 2024. A brief study on one day proves little. But it encouraged me to hypothesize yet more.

This year I'd been noticing large numbers of warblers flitting among the uncommon asters, goldenrods, and grasses that now grace increasingly large areas of the Somme woodland fall understory. This seemed new. When the brush is first cut, there follow seasons of bare ground and then aggressive "weedy" forb species. In the past these "weed patches" had attracted migrating sparrows, to eat seeds, but not warblers.

Few people perhaps would notice these little insect-eating migrants. Even when I found time to study them with binoculars, they were largely obscured by vegetation, or moving so fast, flitting from flower to flower and stem to stem that I failed to identify most of them. But in a few minutes I counted twenty migrating warblers of five species, and they carried a message.  

The most abundant was the Nashville warbler with eleven individuals. Like many warblers, they're mostly coming from Canada and heading for Central America or the Caribbean or the Amazon to spend the winter.

Nashville Warbler
Second most common were the black-throated green warblers (4 individuals identified) and the western palm warblers (3 individuals) - two species which typically spend their migration hunting time in very different habitats.  
Black-throated Green Warbler
In the past I mostly remember seeing the black-throated green high in mature trees. But on this warm and pretty day, hungry for insect fuel to power their long flights, they seemed to be going where the food was. I saw none feeding up in the trees. They hovered in front of flowers or jumped from stem to stem. 

Western palm warblers spend their summers in open bogs and their migration in prairies, fields, and dunes. Here they were in the herb understory of the woods, where I also saw one yellow-rumped warbler.

The other migrating warbler I saw today was an ovenbird. These handsome stripey-breasted characters hunt mostly on the ground in mature forest under thick shrubs. Or herbs? I've wondered if they might even return to nest here, as the habitat improves.  
Ovenbird
The wildflowers and grasses these birds flitted among included elm-leaved goldenrod, Short's aster, wood reed, silky rye, and woodland thistle. I saw these birds mostly in areas of improving diversity and quality.

Summer nesting birds had responded more quickly. In summers, the birds we see feeding in the herbs include the indigo bunting, yellowthroat, blue-gray gnatcatcher, hummingbird, and bluebird. Actually the bluebird perches on a low tree branch and watches like a hawk, until it sees a tasty bug and plunges down into the herbs to catch it. Once I was surprised to see a pair of scarlet tanagers foraging from flower to grass to flower, feeding on insects, leaving their expected high-in-the-trees habitat behind. This is not a common site, but then neither is an oak woods with abundant summer flora. 

Also impressive in the breeding season are the flycatchers and woodpeckers. Dramatically more common than before restoration, the flycatchers we see (and hear) most often the great crested, the eastern pewee, and from time to time the kingbird, a flycatcher that nests across Waukegan Road in the savannas of Somme Prairie Grove, but finds food in the open areas of this woodland too. Flycatchers hunt from the trees, but the flying insects they feed on may mostly get their substance eating herbs. That's probably why there were few of them when this preserve was just trees.

Woodpeckers are actually close relatives of flycatchers, and they're a major Somme success story. It's easy to see the link in red-headed woodpeckers, which also often sally out from a perch to catch flying insects. They also eat the acorns and boring beetles that feed on wood. Long described as one of the fastest-declining birds on the continent, the red-headed was absent from the Sommes before restoration but now are represented by five or more breeding pairs every year. 
Red-headed woodpecker feeding young
The flicker is a woodpecker that mostly feeds on the ground. Eating insects living there, it was absent from Somme Woods when restoration started but now may be the most common summer woodpecker. 

The pileated woodpecker also feeds on the ground a surprising amount of the time. Often they tear apart rotting logs for the delicious treasures within. But they like room to fly and have come back to Somme only recently.
Pileated woodpecker

No habitat works for every bird. But restoring plant communities at Somme seems to work well for many species of conservation concern - including migrating fall warblers. More study of varying approaches to restoring habitats would help conservation prioritizing.  

***

If you might like to help Somme's fall seed gathering or winter brush cutting with bonfires, check the schedule here

For other Somme Woods bird posts, see
and 
and

A confirming report from National Audubon Society is at:

Acknowledgements

Mourning warbler photo from A-Z Animals
Red-headed woodpecker photo from Birds and Blooms
Pileated woodpecker photo from American Bird Conservancy
Other photo credits: All About Birds (Cornel Lab or Ornithology)

Thursday, September 5, 2024

Savanna Blazing Star - and How Science Works (sort of)

Unlike other blazing stars here, this one's flower heads are on stalks.


For 35 years the rare Savanna Blazing Star (Liatris scariosa) and its noble animal and plant associates have given us a wild ride at Somme Prairie Grove. We learned along the way. For starters, let’s take a peek into some of the bad-mannered backstory. 

 

Henry Alan Gleason, an Illinois farm boy, briefly became the cutting edge of ecology - before he was banished by academics who couldn’t tolerate new ideas. As compellingly presented by Jack White, Gleason made a great start. He produced “the first quantitative descriptions of vegetation of any kind recorded by any ecologist anywhere in the world.” So far so good. But he also questioned some principles that back then were considered sacrosanct – for example, that “succession” was always good … and fire always bad. 

 

In five articles published from 1917 to 1939, Gleason battled establishment science – and lost. Today most ecologists would largely agree with Gleason, but at the time, as White put it, “His colleagues shunned him. Not a single ecology text quoted and used Gleason’s ideas for thirty years.” Gleason quit ecology, got hired as a taxonomist at the New York Botanic Garden, and put his mind to assembling the monumental New Britton and Brown Illustrated Flora of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada (1952).

 

His book deserves credit for the rehabilitation of the savanna blazing star. Just so you know, two warring books long provided authoritative catalogues and descriptions of the plant species of northeastern North America – Gleason’s book and Fernald’s. (See Endnote “What is a species?”) The traditionalist nature of botany is apparent in the very names of these two standard books. The first, by Merritt Lyndon Fernald, was entitled Gray’s Manual of Botany (1848). But Gray didn’t write it. Asa Gray (of Harvard) did write the first version, but it was later revised by others until, more than one hundred years later, the 1950 version which the title page admitted was “largely rewritten and expanded by” Fernald. The second book was initially written (1896) by Nathaniel Lord Britton and Addison Brown of the N.Y. Botanical Garden; its text was “entirely rewritten” by Gleason, but it’s still called The New Britton and Brown Illustrated Flora of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada (1952). 

 

I knew none of this, but I’d been inspired to contribute to conservation, and as this mission clearly needed help, I was eager to learn as much as I could. I bought a copy of Gleason’s flora – three-big-volumes – because I wanted the pictures. Gray is 1632 pages of mostly technical language, with no illustrations of most species. Gleason gives us 1732 bigger pages, with plenty of important technical language too, but also lots of pictures. 

 

As I worked to protect Nature Preserves, I learned to distinguish more and more wildflowers, grasses, and trees. I’d been finding one plant that puzzled me; in Gleason’s book it seemed to be New England blazing star (Liatris novae-angliae), a species not in Swink and Wilhelm’s highly-respected Plants of the Chicago Region (1979).

 

Swink and Wilhelm weren’t alone. It turned out that none of the Illinois plant books recognized the species I thought I was seeing. As my work grew in effectiveness and reputation, I increasingly had the ear of those great botanists Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm. Though very busy people, they sometimes helped me with difficult plants. But in the case of what turned out to be Liatris scariosa, both experts encouraged me to forget it. Swink told me that there were already too many species, and we ought not to be burdening the flora with more divisions. He was being what botanists call “a lumper.” Wilhelm said that the Liatris genus was full of messy hybrids, and looking deeper into this one wasn’t worth the time. Neither Swink nor Wilhelm wanted to hear about Gleason. They said they preferred Fernald.  

 

Yet, for some reason, this beautiful plant rankled my peace. I kept finding different ways to ask them about it. After all, Gleason’s book had those pictures. And a breakthrough emerged as part of my efforts to get scientists and conservationists to pay attention to the tallgrass savanna (see endnote Savanna. It was a nearly lost ecosystem – nearly gone on the ground and equally gone from the mind. It was not among the habitats discussed in the 1979 Plants of the Chicago Region. The Illinois Natural Areas Inventory had looked for it but found only two questionable acres of Grade B and no Grade A at all. I’d been claiming that we had the wrong search image, that we could learn to recognize remnants, and we could bring the savanna back. 

 

Wilhelm, bless his heart, finally listened when I told him that I was finding these plants only in savanna remnants – and indeed remnants that were fast being lost to brush and shade. He generously said, “Well, okay. It will be a lot of work. But if you can bring me examples, preserved on herbarium sheets, from a number of populations, with lists of associated species, I’ll study it and make a determination.” 

When the dust cleared, we had a formal scientific paper authored by Marlin Bowles, Wilhelm, and me. Liatris scariosa var. Nieuwlandii was now the “Savanna Blazing Star” and officially placed on the Illinois Endangered and Threatened Species list. (See more details in Endnote: Swink, Fernald, and Gleason.)

 

Okay, recognizing the plant’s existence was a good step. But what about its conservation? The populations I found were in open woods, rapidly becoming darker in the absence of fire. If some people still wanted to argue about the proper naming of this thing, we don’t much care. Any name is fine. What was really needed was to save it and the rest of its vanishing habitats and associated species of plants and animals in tallgrass savannas and open woodlands. 

 

Before long, a few sites where it occurred got better management. Others were lost to brush. We also wanted to learn more about it through restoration, and we put its seeds into the North Branch Restoration Project seed mixes. Somewhere in our records is preserved our first mention of planting its seed. In the wild, blazing stars take at least a few years to get robust enough to flower. We first recorded flowering plants at Somme Prairie Grove in 1992. There were six. We found nine in 1995. In 1998 there were six again, but then numbers started to rise. Fourteen in 2000. Eighty in 2006. One hundred eighty-nine in 2010.

 

Heedless of where we planted them, this species has seeds that blow in the wind, and plants spread on their own. The 2016 map showed sub-populations of five or more plants in eleven places. These sub-pop numbers varied widely from year to year. At one point we realized that the savanna blazing star is truly happy only in the first year following a burn. This is a highly fire-adapted plant. The graph below shows the burn/no-burn alternation for a sub-pop that benefitted from fire preceding the 2004 growing season and every second year thereafter through 2019.

Numbers of flowering plants of savanna blazing star in Sub-pop B from 2004 to 2019

Another discovery came only recently. Although we recorded 624 savanna blazing star plants in 2023 and new populations continued to show up where none had been planted, we wondered why some formerly thriving sub-pops had gradually faded out and were now gone. In some cases the plants emerged where the savanna seed mix had been planted in spots where enough brush had been cut to allow a fully vigorous growth of the taller prairie grasses. Here the savanna blazing star couldn’t compete once the grasses had fully taken hold. It seems only able to compete where semi-shade (or other factors?) limit the vigor of those grasses. But then in some of the shadier areas, woodland sunflower had taken over, and our Liatris friend also couldn’t compete with it. This was a Goldilocks plant, as are so many. They can compete successfully with all other plant species, but only in particular circumstances. 

 

Another surprise came from one area where we provided this plant with temporary artificial care. Back when we had first noticed some sub-pops fading out, apparently because of competition from temporary aggressive species, we wanted to be sure we’d have an ongoing seed source for a while. Thus we chose one of the fastest growing sub-pops and annually scythed down the aggressive plants, starting this approach at least by 2006 and continuing to this day. This experience led to a whole new restoration approach for most highest-quality, now expanded to many areas (to be discussed in a upcoming post on the concept of “lo-pro”). 

 

The area being discussed here, called Sub-pop M, from which we seemed to learn quite a bit, had no trees overhead or to the south but did have trees shading it for part of the day on both the east and west. Warm-season grasses including big bluestem, dropseed, and Indian grass are scattered throughout but mostly sparse and young. We expect them to increase. 

For now it’s sufficient to know that this small area, artificially maintained at first for assured savanna blazing star seed production, settled down into something good we hadn’t seen elsewhere. So we began scything aggressive species in a variety of habitats nearby. And bit by bit, our blazing stars began showing up in those semi-shaded, scythed areas. For many years all savanna blazing stars in this part of the preserve were only in that one little scythed area, 40 feet by 15 feet (or 12 meters by 5 meters) . In 2024 that long-scythed area had 87 blooming savanna blazing stars, and in the surrounding areas, scythed just the last few years and where none had been prior to scything, we counted 23 blooming plants. 

 

But that was just a part of the discovery. In the long-scythed area, many other high-quality plants were joining them. We were on to something. Following scything, and with increasing competition from quality species, the formerly aggressive species seemed to be fading back towards a play-well-with-others status. Little scything was needed in this area in 2024. We’ll publish more posts on this approach when we can. 

 

The photo below is not a classic “beautiful image” with  vast swaths of color or precious close-ups. But it has the beauty of health, diversity, and increasing success.

With aggressive species scythed selectively for nearly two decades, the ground here is dense with savanna blazing star, prairie obedient plant, big bluestem, cream gentian, gray goldenrod, wood betony, sweet black-eyed Susan, tall coreopsis, rattlesnake master, Penn sedge, dropseed grass, wide-leaved panic grass, azure aster, Short’s aster, and so many others. Ten feet away is unscythed dense tall goldenrod and woodland sunflower, with bare ground beneath. 

 

The deepest pleasures of this work come from the actions - some wise and mistaken - that end up producing trial-and-error-with-occasional-success learning and can lead to the recovery of healthy and happy biodiversity. 


Endnotes

 

Endnote: How to distinguish savanna blazing star from rough blazing star, for sure.


Usually in the Chicago area the savanna blazing star is easily separated from all others by the stalks that hold its flower heads away from the main stem. Rough blazing star normally does not have those stalks. 

Savanna blazing star, showing flower heads on long stalks.

But an especially good feature that may be more consistent is the character of the bracts at the base of the flower heads (technically, "phyllaries"). Savanna blazing stars have bracts that look like plain, tiny green leaves. In the rough blazing star (the only one likely to be confused with the savanna) those bracts look like the bases of iceberg lettuce leaves: they're puckered or curled with whitish or translucent parts.   

The green, leafy bracts of the savanna blazing star.


The bracts of the rough blazing star are puckered and crisped. 

Other features that may catch the eye from a distance include flower heads that are typically larger and more deeply purple in the savanna blazing star. This species also starts blooming later in the season.


According to Wilhelm and Rericha, the rough starts to bloom on July 22 while the savanna waits until August 26.


It you might get a kick out of the technical language that distinguishes these two species in Wilhelm and Rericha' key, here it is:


Rough blazing star: Middle phyllaries bullate, glabrous abaxially; distal phyllaries with broad, uneven, irregularly lacerate, eciliate scarious margins; heads all sessile or on peduncles shorter than the involucres.  


Savanna blazing star: Middle phyllaries non-bullate, glabrous, hirsutulous or cinereous abaxially; distal phyllaries uniformly narrow with entire, slightly erose or ciliate scarious margins; heads sessile to very often on peduncles as long as or longer than the involucres.


On the other hand, I can usually tell which is which with a quick glance from many feet or meters away. You need the technical language only to be sure, when learning the gestalt, or in the case of individuals that have quirky mixes of characteristics. In those cases you can, like most botanists, ignore them. 


Endnote: What is a species?  

 

The word “species” had been defined as “a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.” But we now know that many species, especially under stressful conditions, breed across species lines quite shamelessly.

 

“Endangered Species” is a status that brings funding and legal protections – determined by legislatures and votes. But what is and is not a species is determined by scientists. At one time, people would turn to Gleason’s or Fernald’s book to determine what was and was not a species. But we learn more, it gets complicated, and our expertise changes. For fuller definitions and problems on “species”, see the discussion in Wikipedia.

 

Biodiversity conservation focuses at three levels: the gene, the species, and the ecosystem. Species are the easiest of the three to study, but the least important. If a species survives but most of its genetic alleles are lost, then most of that species is also lost, although few would know or understand. Most species and most of their genetics are conserved only in living, changing ecosystems

 

As Lynn Margulis, Merlin Sheldrake, and others have pointed out, we can make it harder to understand ecosystems when we retreat too far into specializations. Science needs better ecosystem science that deals with wholes. At one point Sheldrake was asked whether universities should recognize his specialty, fungi, with full scale departments, on a par with botany and zoology. His response was basicly, God, no! Not more divisions!” It's time to recognize that “studying and saving healthy  ecosystems” and overall “biodiversity conservation” are vastly more important than just “saving endangered species,” as valuable and important as that is. As important and underfunded as specialists are, wholistic generalists are supported even less. Conservation needs both. 

 

When Illinois botanists accepted the savanna blazing star as a species, they also found some populations in the western part of the state. 

At some point Liatris scariosa was removed from the Illinois Endangered and Threatened list, perhaps because of additional populations found, or because conservationists have successfully made its populations more secure; the Endangered Species Board doesn't tell us.  


Endnote: Swink, Fernald, and Gleason 

 

It's a huge amount of work to wrestle with hundreds of species and figure out which ones deserve to be recognized as "good" species and which do not. To his credit, Fernald seems to discuss this plant under L. ligulistylis (his Liatris "no.12") as follows: 

The anomalous X L. Nieuwlandii... considered by Gaiser, from cytological evidence, a hybrid of n. 12 with a second but unidentified species (although occurring almost wholly outside the range of the western inferred parent, i.e. from Mich. and Wisc. so. into OI., Ind., Ill, and Mo., and flowering one to two months later) ... needs further consideration.


In their good wrestling with this "element" in Swink and Wilhelm's 1979 Plants of the Chicago Region, they included the following observation under “Liatris aspera ROUGH BLAZING STAR”:

 “There is a very interesting element which occurs in Cook County, and probably elsewhere in our area, that probably represents a hybrid between L. aspera and some other species; some of these have been named L. X nieuwlandii and L. X sphaeroidea. Some have been referred to L. ligulistylis, although Fernald restricts that species to an area to the north and west of us. Furthermore, Gleason gives the commonest habitat as damp low places for L. ligulistylis, whereas our plants seem invariably to be found in dry clay areas with a former history of cultivation or other disturbance.” 

 

But that's not the only clue found in Gleason. It was his description and drawing of Liatris novae-angliae that had teased me into wondering if that was the plant I was finding in the rare savanna remnants. Swink didn't mention L, novae-angliae, despite the fact that Illinois is within its range according to Gleason, who expressed that range in abbreviations as follows: “s. Me. to n. Mich, s. to Pa, W. Va, Mo. and Ark.” Thus, if you draw a line (for the western boundary of this plant’s range) from northern Michigan to Missouri, Illinois is well within it.   


I was not the first Illinoian to notice. In 1846, S.B. Mead, a country doctor, published a list of plants and habitats mostly from west central Illinois, and he identified Liatris scariosa as a species of the barrens, a name sometimes used back then for the savanna. Mead was a sufficiently accomplished botanist that a number of species now have the specific name "meadii" - in his honor. When I referenced that list and this plant in support of the idea that the savanna was as real as prairies and forests and equally worthy of conservation, some rebutted by questioning whether the plants Mead referred to as scariosa were the same as the ones I was finding. I looked for confirming herbarium specimens but failed to find any. Then by extraordinary luck I was invited to give a talk at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew near London. There, in one of the world's great herbariums, I found Liatris specimens collected by Mead. On the sheet to which he had fastened his specimen of rough blazing star, Liatris aspera, he wrote the word "prairies". On his specimen of Liatris scariosa, which sure looked like the ones I was was finding, he wrote the word "barrens." A photocopy of that herbarium sheet now is part of the Morton Arboretum herbarium. 

 

Thus, in the 1994 edition of Plants of the Chicago Region Swink and Wilhelm bring us up to date on this species:

 

Liatris scariosa (l.) Willd. var nieuwlandii Lunell SAVANNA BLAZING STAR … According to Bowles, Wilhelm, & Packard (1988), who discuss its taxonomy, distribution, and ecology, this species is prevailingly a plant of savannas on the Tinley and Valparaiso morainic systems in the Chicago region, growing only on the Morely-Markham-Ashkum silt loam soil catena. … Single Cook and Will county sites containing this species have been managed by prescribed burns. All other Illinois populations are very small and appear vulnerable even to minimal disturbances. Quercus macrocarpa is the characteristic overstory tree ... Forty-one herbaceous species have been recorded withing one meter of Savanna Blazing Star, the more frequent and characteristic being … Arenaria lateriflora, … Lathyrus venosus, Polygala senega, … Taenidia intergerrima, Thaspium trifoliatum.” 

 

I wasn't asked to comment on that draft, which I don't at all intend to quibble with. Swink and Wilhelm's noble 921-page book would never have been finished if the authors stopped to check with everyone on everything. But in retrospect I might suggest that “disturbance” was less the threat to the surviving populations than lack of fire. Indeed, much savanna and woodland biodiversity had to date been saved from the deadly dark only by various disturbances; cutting some trees down or some amount of grazing had allowed some species to survive. I might have added that I had also found this plant under white oaks (not just bur). And perhaps it's worth pointing out that there was something special about five of the forty-one ‘prairie’ and ‘woodland’ species that I’d found growing within one meter of the savanna blazing star. Those species are among the ones that seem to be indicators for the black-soil savanna ecosystem, which was only beginning to be recognized by ecologists as a distinctive community type which has some characteristic species.  


Those five, with their common names, are: 

Arenaria (or Moehringia) lateriflora - grove sandwort

Lathyrus venosus - veiny pea

Polygala senega (or Senega officinalis) - Seneca snakeroot

Taenidia intergerrima - yellow pimpernel

Thaspium trifoliatum - meadow parsnip. 


So how well is the species status of Liatris scariosa now established? Internet searches seem to indicate that it's documented well for many states and regions. 

On the national level, the U.S. Forest Service has a good report indicating that this species, which they describe as relatively uncommon everywhere, includes three varieties:
Liatris scariosa var. Nieuwlandii. "Savanna blazing star." Midwest United States.
Liatris scariosa var. novae angliae. "New England blazing star." Northeastern United States. 
Liatris scariosa var. scariosa. "Devil's bite" Southeastern United States.

Though often very helpful, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service's entry for this species in its PLANTS Database leads with
 a photo that does not seem to have the characteristics by which we identify the savanna blazing star. It maps all three varieties but shows Nieuwlandii - which it calls Nieuwland's blazing star - reaching all the way from Missouri and Illinois into New York and Connecticut. The maps in the PLANTS Database show all three varieties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Are all three really there? Interbreeding or not interbreeding? Or is there just not clear information from those states? 

Endnote: What is a Savanna?

 

This is a more difficult question than you might think - especially if the answer is to be interesting enough to read.

 

This blog has posts called What is a Grade A Prairie? and What is a Grade A Woodland? The answers to those questions seemed basically straightforward.

 

But the word savanna has an especially troubled history. It was little used in the Midwest before John Curtis’ seminal book, The Vegetation of Wisconsin, in which he pointed out that the savanna had been the most common vegetation type in the southern half of the state but by then was largely gone. He used the pioneer term Oak Openings for that major savanna type.

 

The Illinois Natural Areas Inventory, which followed Curtis extensively, defined the “Savanna,” and “Sand Savanna,” and "Barrens" as the principal types. In efforts to explain all this to the public, it has been awkward to explain that the term “Savanna” does not include the “Sand Savanna.” I kind of wish it had been called the Black-soil Savanna or the Tallgrass Savanna or such. Trying to clarify, others have renamed this community “Fine Textured Soil Savanna “ and other names perfectly hopeless to become part of common speech.

 

An additional confusion came from the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory's attempt to solve the “missing piece” problem. They understandably decided to use the word savanna for the ecologically wide gradient between the treeless prairie and the dense forest, so their savanna has a tree canopy of up to 80%. That turned out to be too wide, so subsequent work defined an additional community type, the oak woodland. 

 

There was a basic challenge in reaching the definitions and resulting ecological descriptions that are needed to guide conservation action. No high-quality examples of tallgrass savanna survived. Thus there was little point in being as detailed as was done for the prairie and forest, where there were high-quality models to learn from. The only real way now to understand the tallgrass savanna and oak woodland would be to see if good management could restore high quality.

 

An additional challenge arising in the context of this post is that we named the savanna blazing star in the context of the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory definition of the savanna, as it was back then, that is up to 80% canopy. It could be that, as we continue to learn, we’ll find that the savanna blazing star should have been called the woodland blazing star. Or it could be that this species will thrive in both savannas and woodlands.

 

As for what a savanna is, if you’ve been patiently waiting for an attempt:


The tallgrass or black-soil savanna is a community with substantial amounts of both trees and tall grasses, best defined by its dominant and characteristic species – especially those that most depend on it. The principal trees in northeastern Illinois are bur oaks in drier areas and swamp white oaks in wetter areas. In other parts of Illinois, other oak species may predominate. The typical graminoids are the “prairie grasses” plus many sedges, wood reed (Cinna), and rye (especially Elymus virginicus, riparius, and Canadense). 

 

Perhaps more significant for recognizing quality are the less dominant but more characteristic species. Among the plants these include veiny pea, purple milkweed, cream gentian, bearded wheatgrass, and Maryland snakeroot. Among the birds, characteristic species include the ruby-throated hummingbird, black-billed cuckoo, eastern kingbird, orchard oriole, sparrow hawk, and Cooper’s hawk. Many amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, and fungi also deserve to be on this list. To be sure about all this we need enough large high-quality sites and experts to study them. The animals will likely play a major role in helping the best sites to recover; without them we’re not looking at a real and sustainable ecological community.


"Barrens" and "glades" are related communities which support some of the same species. In early writings, these terms along with prairie and savanna were often used interchangeably. As they are defined today, barrens occur on very poor soils, which limits what plants can grow there. Glades and dolomite prairies occur where shallow soil, often just a few inches of it, lies on bedrock. 


References


The extensive references to how this new Illinois species was verified are summarized in:


Bowles, M.L., G. Wilhelm, and S. Packard. 1988. The Illinois Status of Liatris scariosa (L.) Willd. var nieuwlandii Lunell. A New Threatened Species for Illinois. Erigenia. Illinois Native Plant Society. Number 10. Pages 1- 26.


Acknowledgements


Hundreds of smart, dedicated people did the work on which this report is based.


Eriko Kojima caught an atrocious number of typos and made helpful editorial suggestions.