Goose Lake Prairie Needs Us!

Goose Lake Prairie is enormous, and its wildness is electrifying.

Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves, just after our formation, published the post below to invite people to turn out and help this great site on March 7, 2020. (We didn't know that Covid would shut much of Illinois and the country down the next week. Even outside volunteer work was shut down by most agencies, for a while.) This post describes that interrupted beginning of something important. 

As we made plans for the day, great flocks of American White-Fronted Geese wheeled overhead - making their glorious goose music. These flocks of "Speckle-Bellies" are headed for the high arctic.

A Bald Eagle flew by. Freshly back to nest here, Sandhill Cranes trumpeted. A Chicago garter snake was out sunning itself. But the habitat was suffering. This treasure of a big prairie has never had the Stewards Community that it needed.

White-fronted Geese. By the thousands, at Goose Lake now.
(Photo from the Crosley ID Guide.)

We decided to start on the gem of the site - the two precious acres that were found to be High Quality.

Can you believe that those two acres have much grim brush? Decades ago botanist Dr. Roger Anderson installed two deer-exclusion fences in parts of those two acres.

Inside both fenced squares, insidious brush degrades. It needs to go.

DIRECTIONS TO GOOSE LAKE PRAIRIE:

Park in the little picnic parking lot on Jugtown Road
It runs north from Lorenzo Road (if you're coming west from I 55).
Or from the same road, called Pine Bluff Road (if you're coming east from Morris).

This post finishes up with three more photos:

Here, inside the fence, brush had killed some of the diversity that should be the heart of the recovering prairie. This pitiful giant of a natural area needs lots of people to care and help! 

Do you know how to recognize prairie species while they're dormant? If not, might you want to learn? Come on down, we'll teach you. Here, the richer color is little bluestem. Also easy to see here: prairie dropseed, white false indigo, and wild quinine. 

The above photo by Dan Kirk shows an American Bittern coursing over Goose Lake Prairie. This Endangered Bittern breeds in these sprawling marshes and prairies, along with Blanding's Turtles, Bell's Vireos, Regal Fritilaries, Sandhill Cranes, Rattlesnake Master Moths, Yellow-breasted Chats, Hill's Thistles, Bobolinks, Grass Pink Orchids, and so many endangered to rare species.

Dan Kirk is staff. Why can't he do all this himself? Because beyond these thousands of acres he has other thousands, spread over seven counties. 

Such preserves each "need a village" - a community of stewards. (And all communities of good people who care need to grow and expand and join together as an effective power upon the Earth.) Covid interrupted us, but we shall return. 

We can each do only so much, as individuals. We hope to build conservation community to restore and support this great big ecosystem.