It’s another cold morning with a sharp wind out of the west. But once you get lopping, you’re plenty warm. Hewing down Osage orange shrubs is rather like tangling with an octopus crossed with a mad cat. Each of several long arms is littered with sharp thorns, whose scratches feel particularly delightful on chapped cheeks. Even more fun are the Osage oranges intertwined with multiflora rose. Double the prickles (the correct, if silly-sounding scientific name for thorns.) Double the fun.
For a change, we’re working on the east side of Midewin today. Since Midewin was established in 1996, most of the restoration work has been concentrated on the west side of Route 53 – the former Route 66 – which divides the 20,000-acre site roughly in half. Over the years, I’ve spent many an hour cutting brush, pulling garlic mustard, planting seedlings, even damming up a troublesome culvert in the six west side restoration areas: South Patrol Road Prairie, Drummond Prairie, Blodgett Road Prairie, Grant Creek and Little Grant Creek Prairies, Prairie Creek Woods, and a prairie area located directly opposite of Midewin’s welcome center.
On the east side, there are only three restoration areas: Doyle Lake and Iron Bridge Prairies and a small patch around the welcome sign. All told, across both the east and west sides, there are about 2,000 acres under active restoration. That leaves about 18,000 acres – or 90 percent of Midewin – awaiting restoration. But that doesn’t mean that the land lies fallow or unmanaged.
Today, for instance, we’re cutting brush along an abandoned rail line in the middle of a cow pasture. At least that’s the way it might look to some. Actually, what we’re doing is more accurately described as helping to protect some of the most endangered birds in the world.
As farmers plowed the vast Illinois prairie into one big farm, many grassland birds adapted to life in soy bean fields and hay pastures. But as farm fields have given way to more and more subdivisions and shopping malls, many species of grassland birds have found themselves on the threatened and endangered list. The eastern meadowlark, for instance, a common grassland bird that graces the logo of Midewin, has declined by 72 percent over the past 40 years. As a New York Times editorial pointed out, “this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens.”
Until such time as more of Midewin can be reclaimed as prairie, modern-day cattle play the historic role of bison, keeping the land free of weedy vegetation. Keeping volunteers and staff on lopper patrol along former arsenal-era rail lines helps keep invasive trees and shrubs at bay, allowing for the wide open habitat that grassland birds require. (Trees and shrubs tend to harbor predators that prey upon grassland bird nests, which are on the ground.)
So, yes, it’s cold, hard work. And I’m sure to be picking some imbedded prickle tips out of my legs when I get home. But it’s worth it. Beyond my modest membership contributions to conservation organizations, I can’t directly save the rainforests where birds spend the winter, or protect critical “layover” habitat along the thousands of miles of their migration routes. But what I can do is spend an occasional winter morning cutting brush to ensure that critically-imperiled grassland birds have a home here. To feed. To breed. To raise their young. And to return after year to fill our skies with song.
Smooth white lettuce (Prenathes racemosa) is not threatened or endangered in Illinois, but it is uncommon enough that it is not listed in any of my native wildflower guides. Nor does it appear in the on-line database www.illinoiswildflowers.info. I’ve never seen this plant in the wild, but according to a 1914 manual about weeds, it is a native prairie plant – “of very stately appearance, with a stout stalk, two to six feet or more in height” with dense clusters of pale purple florets.
It can take a couple of runs through this machine and trying different grade screens to achieve the desired goal of a “clean” batch of seed. Even then, the seed must be viewed under a microscope to ensure that it is viable, meaning that it is capable of germinating. The last time I looked at anything under a microscope was in high school biology class. If memory serves (high school was a long time ago) I wasn’t much impressed by what whatever magnified algae or frog part I was looking at. Some 30-plus years later, I was enthralled by the beauty and complexity of a tiny seed. What looked like a nondescript splinter in a petri dish became a cocoa brown torpedo deeply scored with vertical lines along its entire length. It took a while to master the tweezer point that became a 2 x 4 under the microscope, but I eventually managed to scrape away a bit of seed husk to reveal the “meat” of the seed beneath. This compared favorably to my microscopic examination of seed from various chaff outputs. To the naked eye, this seed looked no different than any other, but under the microscope it was clear that the “meat” was gone, leaving nothing but shattered husks.
