On a recent afternoon, far from any chores at home, I found myself at the tallgrass prairie’s edge at Lakeview Nature Area in McDonough County. There were several trails to choose from, but a distant, singing sedge wren soon decided my direction, for a better look at the bird. And it wasn’t long before I saw it perching about five feet above the ground at the top of a dead shrub, surrounded by a dense mixture of wildflowers and prairie grasses.
While focusing on the wren, I heard the undulating song of an American goldfinch in flight, common yellowthroats from several directions, and a song sparrow from a patch of shrubs. But as long as the wren was singing I found it difficult to look at anything else, as I rarely encounter this strictly grassland species on a day-to-day basis. After a few minutes, the small bird flew off, and I continued the hike, freer to notice other things. Big bluestem grass had recently begun to bolt throughout the prairie, sending its multi-pronged panicles high above the other prairie plants, perhaps five or six feet tall, commanding attention by their movements with every gust. Common milkweed was still in bloom in places, and occasionally a whiff of its fragrant scent, like a natural air freshener, floated past on warm breezes. And beyond the prairie and across the county road to the east, agricultural fields stretched as far as I could see below highly dynamic cloud formations reaching to great heights, possibly a sign of developing thunderstorms. It was a timeless scene, one that might have repeated any number of times in the Illinois landscape for thousands of years—over tallgrass prairie, though, not corn fields.
The Lakeview Nature Area prairie, August 8, 2020.
[Listen to a singing sedge wren at Lakeview Nature Area by clicking the link
Download Sedge wren at Lakeview Prairie 8-Aug-2020.]
The Lakeview prairie that I walked through in search of the sedge wrens was very special, especially because large patches of prairie in Illinois are few and far between. Prior to the 1800s, just over half the land cover of Illinois was prairie of various types, but by the end of that century, most of it had been developed into agriculture or other uses. In fact, an inventory of prairie remnants completed in the late 1970s found that only 0.013 percent of the original Illinois prairie remained, and most of this was scattered over the state in small fragments along railroad lines, at old cemeteries, on land poor for agriculture, and on steep southwestern-facing hillsides. Donald Culross Peattie wrote about this transformation in his classic 1938 novel, A Prairie Grove: “But we have come to subdue the grasses, to conquer the empire of locked roots. The furrows lie even and open now, in spring and fall. The geometry of fields rules the landscape. It is a land turned to use, and I do not say it is not a good use, but some purity is gone. For the fallowed field does not grow up again into prairie…nothing wholly wild is left.”
To be sure, I can’t really blame those first nineteenth century farmers in Illinois who broke the prairie and converted it into sustenance and profit. Few at the time could have been thinking about preserving the prairie for its scientific value as a unique, complex system of interacting plants, animals, soil, and climate—an ecosystem, in other words. Even fewer may have thought about preserving the prairie for its intrinsic or aesthetic values. For reasons of survival and the practice of business, putting all of the land to work would have been the only perspective that could have made sense at the time. What business owner, for example, would decide at some point that he has made enough profit? Who would say: Well, it’s eleven o’clock already, and I guess we’ve made enough money today. Everyone go home and relax. Indeed, I suspect most were glad to see the prairie gone, as such open land could be a dangerous place to get caught traveling on foot or by animal power during a freak winter storm or while a wind-driven autumn fire rolled across the land—the famed “red buffalo.” And crossing the prairie in summer must also have been a challenge, as described by one W. Oliver in 1843, as quoted in The Prairie of the Illinois Country by Robert F. Betz: “Among the novel discomforts of the West, that of insects is one of no trifling character. The whole earth and air seems teeming with them, and mosquitos, gallinippers, bugs, ticks, sand-flies, sweat-flies, house-flies, ants, cockroaches, etc., join in one continued attack against one’s ease.” Christiana Holmes Tillson, traveling through the Illinois prairie in 1822 further illustrates what might have been a typical perspective concerning the prairies, as she wrote that “…I could not succeed in finding anything to admire in the prospect around….” And later in the same book: “ …to those who have seen western prairies after the autumnal fires have passed over, leaving them in all their blackness, with an occasional strip of coarse grass or a scrubby bush, it will be needless to describe, and I think hard to gather beauties from it.” At the same time, a notable exception to the foregoing view is that of Eliza W. Farnham in her book Life in Prairie Land, published in 1846, concerning the Illinois prairie: “We crossed a little stream at some distance from the town, and our road thence onward, for more than a mile, wound among beautiful heights, thinly wooded and covered with the clean brown grass. As we mounted one of these the country opened before us, and swept away to the eastern horizon, a distance of many miles—a smooth, open plain, undotted by a tree or other familiar object. I can never forget the thrill which this first unbounded view on a prairie gave me. I afterwards saw many more magnificent—many richer in all elements of beauty….” One wonders how different Illinois would look today if more at the time had shared Farnham’s sense of aesthetics in nature.
The largest and perhaps best example of a tallgrass prairie that has survived throughout all the turmoil of a continually growing Illinois is at Goose Lake Prairie State Park (2,537 acres) in northeastern Illinois, which I first visited in 1980, at a time when trees from surrounding lands had been gradually gaining a foothold over the natural prairie for many years. Since that time, resource managers have been more consistent at conducting controlled fires to maintain the prairie and discourage tree invasion. So that particular prairie, at least, is now in better shape than when I first saw it.
Goose Lake Prairie State Park, Grundy County, 1980.
Prairies have also been restored on a widespread basis throughout the state, though still only in comparatively small fragments. The 55-acre prairie at Lakeview Nature Area, in fact, is a restoration, planted over fallow agricultural fields, which were likely, in turn, once prairie or a mix of open timber and prairie, commonly referred to as “savanna.”
Still, the overall feeling when walking over the Lakeview prairie is the same as at Goose Lake Prairie, this sense of existing outside of the present time. Big bluestem, being a dominant grass at both sites and a signature tallgrass prairie species, confirms that notion; because even though a prairie consists of wildflowers, shrubs, and grasses, it is the grass that truly defines a grassland. The big sky, unobstructed winds, and the sounds of insects and prairie birds, such as the sedge wren, complete the landscape. So there is little reason to lament that it may never be possible to restore prairie to the horizon as it once was. For Illinois, those days are long gone (carefully staged and manipulated photographs, though, may hint at such a view). More satisfying it is to defer chores, and to celebrate and improve what we still have.
Goose Lake Prairie Natural Area (photo courtesy of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources).
Guzy Pothole Wetlands, Shelby County, with monarchs feeding on swamp milkweed.
References
Betz, R.F. 2011. The prairie of the Illinois Country. DPM Ink, Westmont, Illinois.
Farnham, E.W. 1988. Life in prairie land. Originally published in 1846. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.
Peattie, D.C. 1938. A prairie grove. The Literary Guild of America, Inc., New York.
Taylor, C.A., J.B. Taft, and C.E. Warwick, editors. 2009. Canaries in the catbird seat: the past, present, and future of biological resources in a changing environment. Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 30. Champaign.
Tillson, C.H. 1995. A woman’s story of pioneer Illinois. Originally published in 1919. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville.