Some might call this a harvested soybean field. I call it a pre-prairie.
When Midewin was established in 1996, only 3% of its 20,000 acres remained in native prairie. The rest had long ago been plowed for farming before the United States government bought 450 farms to build the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant — the largest and most sophisticated of the 60 or so munitions plants constructed to arm the US and its allies during WWII.
To date, about 20% of Midewin has been restored to its tallgrass prairie origins. The restoration process typically follows the same playbook. For pasture lands within Midewin, the lease is reassigned to a farmer to grow soybeans for two or three years. This earns the US Forest Service a little money to channel into restoration efforts and also, courtesy of pesticides applied by the farmer, provides a relatively clean slate to begin the restoration — to give native prairie plants a chance to take root and out-compete non-native plants.
Nonetheless, this step in the process can be shocking. This is Tract 104. It is the site I monitored for birds for several years prior to my departure to run the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, NY. Aside from a train track that ran through its northern edge, this particular tract was never developed by the Army. It was buffer land for the storage and transport of TNT. Even during the war, the government leased some of its buffer land for grazing or raising crops — to help avert food shortages. Upon the establishment of Midewin, the government continued to lease lands for certain kinds of farming — primarily for cattle grazing, since grazed field tended to support healthy populations of grassland birds.
So it was with Tract 104, which I secretly rechristened Bobolink Meadow. During my years of monitoring the site, I tallied an astonishing wealth of bobolinks. Stunning in appearance, they are frequently described as “wearing a tuxedo backwards.” Thoreau described their even more stunning song thusly: “It is as if he touched his harp with a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the strings…away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody.”
Today, in this scorched soybean field, I tally one Bobolink. During my years of monitoring, I encountered every species of grassland bird in Tract 104, including rare Upland Sandpipers. Today, not a single other grassland bird.
Many of my birding colleagues bemoan the loss of prime bird habitat, even if it was just an old cow pasture. Their concern is justified — grassland birds, as a group, are among the most imperiled in North America. With so little prairie left in the Prairie State (and elsewhere), the leading cause for their decline is the intensification of agricultural production. The good news, however, is that Midewin is large enough to encompass a diverse and dynamic matrix of habitats — reflecting the diversity and dynamism of the pre-settlement prairie. Periodic controlled burns at Midewin result in a certain kind of plant structure preferred by some species of grassland birds. Prairies that haven’t been burned in a while provide habitat preferred by other types of grassland birds.
Birds are generally adaptive enough to find the habitat they prefer, which means that Bobolinks, state-threatened Henslow’s Sparrows and other grassland bird species are still found in relative abundance throughout Midewin’s large and diverse array of habitat types. (State-endangered Upland Sandpipers are the only grassland species that hasn’t been seen at Midewin in a while.)
Although the soybean field of Tract 104 was a virtual bird desert, the adjacent tract — South Patrol Road Prairie — is one of the first large areas to be restored back to prairie. Earlier this spring, it was burned by Midewin’s Hot Shot crew and is springing back to life with a thrilling diversity of native plants and birds — from Bobolinks to Bald Eagles to Blue-winged Teals, from Sora Rails to Sedge Wrens to Sandhill Cranes and more. Much more.
