Langham Island Will Rise Again! (again!)

The ecosystem needs help. And we conservationists need help!

Below are brief notes on: 

1. A new "core group" is forming. 

2. How the island's rare mallows are faring.

3. Our goals for Saturday, Sept. 12. (Might you volunteer too?)

1.  New "core group" forming. 

For many months, we had no events. This precious nature preserve deserves "a congregation" of stewards and citizen scientists who will assure its continued recovery and future. Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves is an important new group that the Langham Island effort inspired and was organized by some of the same folks. Last month, the Langham Friends and the statewide Friends worked together to assemble and empower a new core group for Langham. At this point, it consists of:

Christos Economou

Matt Evans

Karen Horn

Peter Kim

Eriko Kojima

Katie Kucera

Emma Leavens 

Stephen Packard

John Sullivan

We work with staffers Kim Roman and Dan Kirk (of IL Nature Preserves and IL Dept. of Natural Resources) to make the plans, spread the word, schedule the dates, lug the tools, and study the results. Many hands make light work, and many different talents are needed. There's room for many ore hands. If you might be interested in being on the team, comment on this post, or on the Facebook page, or let any of us know at any Langham "workday." 

2. How are the rare mallows doing?

When we started, in 2014, our most endangered plant, the Kankakee mallow (Iliamna remota), had not been seen here, its only natural habitat, for ten years. 

Ecologists who'd worked to restore it previously said it seemed to germinate only near hot wood fires. That fall we developed the technique of "rolling bonfires" (also unique to this island?) and were thrilled to find baby mallows in the charcoaly tracks of those fires in Spring 2015. We watched the little plants grow, and then we watched them shrink. White-tailed deer were eating them voraciously. Don Nelson and Trevor Edmonson installed two large deer exclusion fences and soon, within those fences we saw about a thousand of the rare six-foot-tall, pink-flowered plants. 

Last fall we tried alternate approaches. We built some fires larger and some smaller; we tried to make the impact more gentle by burning lighter fuels (branches instead of logs) and raking the coals away so that the heat would have impact for shorter time. We were eager to see the results when we visited the island on August 1st. The results were disappointing. The lightest fires seemed to have produced no mallows. We found three mallows in one track and one in another. Inside the cages, where the hotter fires had burned years ago, we counted nearly a thousand mallows. 

Katie Kucera and Eriko Kojima harvest mallow seeds to broadcast into the mallow's former habitats.

Outside the deer exclusion fences, we couldn't find a single mallow. 

When we returned for more reconnaissance and planning on August 8th, we decided to check again. Perhaps we'd looked too hastily. But this time we found no mallows at all. We could not find those four we saw a week earlier. That casts the whole experiment into doubt. Did we have a lot more new mallows, but the deer ate them all? Was the problem that we didn't monitor earlier and cage the seedlings? After considerable looking around the islands, we found no mallows surviving outside those two cages. 

Another solution of course is predation. Bow hunting is legal in this nature preserve. Perhaps we need more volunteer hunters. (Our "hunter-gathering" so far has been all for plants.)

Click here for a video about the island's mallows by the Field Museum's irrepressible Robb Telfer and Emily Graslie.

What else did we find? A large population of the rare marbleseed (Onosmodium hispidulum). We look forward to identifying two types of orchids (not yet identified to the species level); the orchids surprised us, as the intensive 1985 plant inventory by state botanist John Schwegman found no orchids of any kind. 

Now that we're burning again, are the rare plants coming back? We'll look again for the rare Pitcher's leather flower (Clematis pitcheri), which we photographed in front of someone's hand in 2015 and haven't seen since. 

We found wild stonecrop (Sedum ternatum), just one plant of it, growing on a limestone ledge. 

We looked for the prairie grasses that apparently were common on the "grassy banks" of the island's south slopes. We found one plant of big bluestem and one plant of switchgrass. Well, that was at least two plants. This Illinois Nature Preserve deserves more volunteer botanists to help complete a new inventory. 

No one has seen the rare buffalo clover (Trifolium  reflexum) since 1884. But it too responds to fires, in this case grass fires. Its habitat here hasn't yet been burned with grass fires. Stay tuned for more strategic thinking about how to restore them. 

3.  Saturday, September 12. 10:00 AM. Join in?

We'll row or paddle you out to the island. Or if you're good with boats, perhaps you can row us! If you want to come, please sign up on our Facebook page. 

Many of us will cut brush and burn brush piles. If you have tools and gloves, please bring them. But we'll have extras. Some of us will gather seeds for ecosystem restoration (see below). All you need for that is eyes and hands. Perhaps the most important and demanding work, if you have the patience and skill, is cutting small invasives away from rare plants so that people with herbicide authorization can carefully dab the stems so they won't resprout. If you want to break for lunch at noon, bring your lunch.  

We work from 10 AM to 2 PM. Many wonderful people are needed and valued. Meet at Kankakee River State Park "Island View" parking lot (at the south end of the park).

Click here to check out last month's Langham update.

Langham Island is owned by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as a little part of Kankakee River State Park. Park Superintendent Stacy Johnson, ecologist Dan Kirk, and Illinois Nature Preserves field rep Kim Roman are all super-supportive and crucial to this work. Thanks to them, to every volunteer, and to nature for bequeathing this treasure to us. 

Matt Evans' 2020 photo of one of the nearly one thousand mallows blooming this year.

For edits to this post, thanks to Eriko Kojima and Kathy Garness.