Anatomy of a New Community

A bit of magic starts every week, on Saturday, at 9am, at Shaw Prairie. A new stewards group is inventing itself and learning to think like an ecosystem. 

This was Grade A prairie. One of the best. But now, much of it is head-high brush. 

In a circle at 9 AM, the site's new stewards and mentors review and tweak a plan that some of us drafted a week ago, at the end of work, at noon. After the quick review, we plunge in, and our challenge looks like this:

Too much prairie degradation and death. Shade has killed off thousands of rare plants that had assembled their complexity over thousands of years. Toward the edges of the brush patches, diverse but weakened plants survive - hoping for sun next year. So "Let there be light!" That's why we're here. 

We too are varied - diverse levels of experience and expertise. Many of us had never seen a rare, healthy prairie. But through this blog and elsewhere, we've seen the photos. Anna Braum, now one of us volunteer stewards, nine years ago as a scientist and grad student, took the photo below in this part of the prairie. May 13th, 2012. Take a look. You can see a few blackened brush stems. Fire had burned them back that spring. A patch of tall, unburned brush is visible back by the trees. But spectacularly in the foreground is the rare sight of a millennia-old grassland ecosystem, surviving into this age. 

That photo inspires our work - as does a study of this prairie by Chuck Bushey and Robbin Moran done in 1978, which in turn was inspired in part by the trailblazing Illinois Natural Areas Inventory. It found this site to be one of Illinois' best surviving prairies in 1997. (See also Endnote 1.)

So today, first we open enough space in the dense brush for the bonfire. We wouldn't want to sterilize the soil of the remnant prairie, so we burn the invaders at the center of the woody infestation, where there's little prairie left to save. Soon the brush begins to pile up. 

For about five million years, this continent's prairies had burned by lightning. Then, some thousands of years ago, peoples who may have come from similar areas in Siberia arrived. They managed this land by fire, in part to assure its productive values for the plants and animals that sustained their culture. Only recently have conservationists started to grapple with how to care for the remnants of biodiversity surviving here today.

As we do this work, we sense that we're developing intimacy - a kind of love really - with the ecosystem and its biodiversity. The above photo was taken in a small unburned patch of relatively healthy Shaw Prairie last spring. You can see last year's grassy thatch that would have been the fuel, if this area had burned. Poking their heads up are scarlet painted cup, yellow-orange puccoon, white bastard toadflax, and the green leaves of prairie dock, just starting to expand to their summer massiveness. To stay healthy these days, studies show that prairies have to burn at least every second year. Shaw Prairie will start to burn that often now, thanks to the collaboration between Lake Forest Open Lands Association and Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. Bless them both. But it's the stewards below who have been learning to do the delicate, careful, hands-on, miraculous rescue of degraded high-quality areas.

Piece by piece, brush battles are being won by our side. (See Endnote 2.) And here we see just one piece of that adventure. At this point in the day, while the fire dies down, some of us head off to gather seed. 

And in fact, we've been gathering seeds all summer. The prairie won't come back from just dirt. Seeds from nearby will assure that the recovering turf has high diversity, the best chance of excluding a return of brush, and the greatest opportunity for full recovery of all biota. 

Then we wrap up with snacks, a discussion of the day's challenges, insights, and adventures. 

 

As some of us clean up, stow tools, and head home, another half a dozen of us vanish into the brush to learn a bit more while we choose and mark the best spots for next week's sacrificial brush pile burns. This is good. We are becoming a force of nature. 

Might you or someone you know be interested in helping? The Shaw volunteer team meets every Saturday at 9 am in the parking lot at the west end of Laurel Ave. in Lake Forest (north of Deerpath and west of Green Bay Roads). If you have questions, or if you'd like to join in, ask or RSVP here. 

Endnotes

Endnote 1.

The Illinois Natural Areas Inventory was a first and became a model for other states. It determined where healthy natural communities survived here. Shockingly, only one one-hundreth of 1% of original prairie survived here, and Shaw was one of the best of those survivors. Most of the highest quality remnants are now "preserved" as part of the Illinois Nature Preserves System. But they're preserved only "legally" - in the sense that no bulldozer can legally turn them into parking lots. The problem is that the founders of this system had little idea how much such sites needed protection from invasive species, especially those that proliferate in the absence of natural fire. It had been assumed that, with good legal protection and a policy of non-interference, preserves would regain full health, with their rare animal and plant populations expanding to fill the preserves to their boundaries. Instead, the preserves most left alone have been diminishing the most. That's a main reason for the founding of Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves and initiatives like this one at Shaw Prairie (the key part of Skokie River Nature Preserve).   

Endnote 2.

We work and plan in collaboration with Lake Forest Open Lands Association and Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. Our initial brush-clearing priority area is roughly shown on the aerial below.

The start we made in our first month is sketched on the "pirate map" below (which shows the same area as the aerial above, plus additional prairie to the south and east): 

Click here for an intro to this and similar Friends initiatives and an introduction to Shaw Prairie. 

And check out our sponsors and partners at Lake Forest Open Lands Association and Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks for proofing and edits to Jessica Sladek, Christos Economou, Karen Ohayer, Kathy Garness, and Eriko Kojima. Thanks to Anna Braum for that great 2012 photo.