The River Landing

Return to a Hill Prairie

“When greenery goes out of the landscape in autumn, a haze of bright, ruddy color lies over most of the hills on the east side of the river…and over remnants of prairie which have resisted the plow.”—from the book River World by Virginia S. Eifert, 1959

 

Attorney and writer Edgar Lee Masters’ (1868-1950) relates in his book, The Sangamon, published in 1942, that when his grandmother first looked northward toward the Mason County Hills in the late 1840s, she was saddened.  This central Illinois landscape was wild and uncultivated, and she wanted to see a settled land with farmsteads, accented here and there with well-kept homes.  The hill prairies on high bluffs over the Sangamon River valley also might have conjured up visions of a not so distant past when the land was occupied by a native race of people, a culture alien to her that embraced those same hills as home and as a source of sustenance.  That same location today, though, might have her smile, as the land has become dominated by intensive row-crop agriculture, exuding prosperity; but she may also wonder why those hill prairies are still there.

 

 

          In The Sangamon, Masters often writes of Illinois’ prairies as expansive landscape features; he even writes a poem about prairies, but fails even once to explicitly mention the comparatively small hill prairies which his grandmother as well as he would have witnessed on the steep Sangamon River bluffs.  It would be 1955 before the state of Illinois would publish Robert A. Evers’ landmark study, Hill Prairies of Illinois.  So to be fair, probably not too many people were thinking about such things with the Great Depression tenaciously holding on while another world war seemed inevitable.  As far as The Sangamon is concerned, apparently more impressive to Masters than the hill prairies were certain eccentric personalities of the locality, who now seem to be of little consequence other than adding a bit of color to his narrative; and yet, he devotes considerable space in the book to such individuals.  But today, as one looks toward the Sangamon River bluffs, those hill prairies are the only original prairies left in view; it would be difficult not to notice them, even for a person uninterested in such things.

 

The Sangamon River, bottomlands, and distant Revis

Hill Prairie Nature Preserve on the Mason County Hills,2012.  

 

Just over three decades ago, I first visited Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve (422.8 acres), north of where Salt Creek enters the Sangamon River.  There were no trails that I could see, and maps were not offered; so I pushed through the brush at the prairie’s edge and began a steep 200-foot climb along a narrow ridge of prairie, with woods on either side, to the top of the bluff.  Here I found a place to sit and lean against the hillside, on what could only be referred to as a natural sofa, looking out upon the prairie ridges, surrounding forests, flatlands of the river bottoms, and southward toward the uplands of Menard County with modern no-nonsense farms.  These prairies, I thought, had been there for a long time, an original landscape that existed from well into the deep past. The thought held my attention; I felt as if I had stepped out of a time machine, and I looked closely around me at the loess soil, little bluestem, side oats grama, big bluestem, indiangrass, lead plant, and more.  A gentle breeze blew from the south, enabling turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks to soar on updrafts overhead, but sometimes at eye level.  With the wind blowing through nearby oak trees, the only sound I heard was rustling leaves, the nearest highway being far removed from this preserve in a remote part of a remote county.  I would return here many times over the next three decades, but that first visit will always stand out from the rest.

 

Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, early 1990s.

 

Loess ridge at Revis Hill Prairie, early 1990s.

 

        For someone who grew up within the old neighborhoods of Chicago and Cicero—with its paved streets, concrete sidewalks, sewer systems, mowed front lawns, and blocks of bungalows, each small house separated from the next by only a few feet—a mindset was ingrained in me early on that most of what surrounded me had been put there by someone, designed and managed to look and function a certain way.  That may be why at an early age I was already drawn to what I perceived as unmanaged landscapes such as the Chicago area’s forest preserves, especially those along the Des Plaines River.  After being free in the forest preserves for an afternoon, returning to the rectangular blocks and sidewalks of our city neighborhood felt like being put into a cage.  That feeling is still with me every day, and I know that it is one of the reasons why I am still drawn to natural areas, particularly those within the Illinois Nature Preserve System.

        At some point, though, I became aware that natural areas had to be managed to maintain their characteristics, which, in a way, suggests a contradiction in terms.  Of course, there are many issues that require this to be necessary, including but not limited to invasive plants that can quickly overrun even a supposedly pristine area, successional changes in plant communities that evolved with frequent fire, decline of species due to habitat fragmentation, and species populations falling below some minimum viable size.  When I began working for the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission several years after my first visit to Revis Hill Prairie, I had long been aware that my precious natural areas were not unmanaged as I had once thought, but actually were among some of the most managed lands in the state, with activities such as prescribed fires, brush and tree removal from prairies and savannas, seed collection and distribution, herbicide treatment of invasive plants, and, in some cases, reintroductions of rare plants and animals.  Being actively involved in these activities on a professional level permanently altered the way I would view a natural area; and that became clear to me one day as I realized that instead of closely looking at a tree to admire its beauties in shape, color, and texture, I would be thinking of the best way to drop it safely using a chain saw—where to place the initial cut, how the tree was naturally leaning, and how it would fall and on what.

        Management at every natural area, though, seems to be always running behind the needs; at the same time, it is also important to monitor the effects of management or lack thereof.  Part of the monitoring process is simply to visit a preserve for a close look with a critical eye.  Was the natural area beginning to look the way it was originally envisioned when it was entered into the system?  Were we making progress or falling behind?  Were there any new challenges?  Eventually, even when visiting a preserve on my own time, purely for pleasure, I found it difficult not to make mental lists of issues that needed attention.  There were always issues, even at the best sites.  But even so, I always took a few moments to reflect upon the meaning behind these protected natural areas and to recall why it was that I was initially drawn to them.  If I had ever lost sight of that, then my tasks would have become routine and mechanical, like a musician merely playing the correct notes, but not feeling the music.

 

                                        *      *     *

This past September, I took advantage of an opportunity to visit Revis Hill Prairie with the Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves, a new group formed to help with the management of nature preserves, especially using volunteers.  It was my first visit to Revis since just after my retirement over four years before, and I was curious to see how the site had fared over the interim.  There were several folks from the Friends group on the field trip and also a few former colleagues.  We climbed the bluffs so well known to me and then gathered to discuss familiar management issues and the challenges of applying consistent follow-up.  As in past times, it’s still a matter of how to accomplish what everyone knows is necessary to preserve a natural area.  I listened closely, but said little, interested more in what others, especially the new folks, had to say.

Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, 26 October 2022, looking

back toward the direction of the previous 1990s photograph. 

 

        A lot has happened since my first visit to Revis Hill Prairie, illustrating just how long a time it has been:  Thirty years ago, Seinfeld was a new program on network television, the Internet was not yet available to the public, George H.W. Bush was still struggling through the final years of what would be his only term as president, the Soviet Union was collapsing, the 911 terrorist attack was still a decade away and now is over two decades behind, and few spoke of the possibility of a deadly pandemic capable of touching every corner of our modern world.  And I now have the benefit of the type of long-term perspective that only an older person can truly possess, appreciate, and learn from.  Even three decades, though, is nothing compared to how long those prairies on the Mason County Hills have existed.  I have a good feeling about them.  For as Masters once wrote:

        To contemplate the prairie is

        To fathom time, to guess at infinite space,

        To find the Earth-spirit in a dreaming mood.

 

References

Evers. Robert A.  1955.  Hill Prairies of Illinois.  Illinois Natural History Survey Bulletin, Volume 26, Article 5.

Masters, Edgar Lee.  1988.  The Sangamon.  University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

Prairie State Conservation Coalition.  I-View (arcgis.com) accessed 11 October 2022.

 

Related Posts on The River Landing

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve:  A 30-year Perspective on Meanings and Change

Change and Comfort in Nature

Hill Prairie Photo Gallery

Protecting Hopewell Hill Prairies, Marshall County, Illinois

An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire

 

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve: A 30-Year Perspective on Meanings and Change

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak

[Download a pdf file of this essay by clicking Download SPSO 30-year perspective.]

In the summer of 1991, I moved to Mason County in central Illinois.  I was to begin what would be a twenty-eight-year career with the state of Illinois in the field of natural resources.  But even before getting settled into my new surroundings, my first priority was to find large natural areas nearby where I could wander all day by sun and compass.  So naturally, I was attracted to Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve (1,515 acres), about eight miles south of my new home.  It remains one of my favorite places in the Midwest, even though recent visits have been few and far between.

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Fall 1992

 

      But this winter I had the opportunity to re-visit Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve with a friend, and I once again enjoyed experiencing the preserve’s special features and wilderness feeling, especially seeing it through the eyes of someone experiencing it for the first time.  The day’s adventures reminded me of my first visit in 1991, which I described in an essay called "Mississippi River Full Circle": 

 

      [Given the emphasis on prairie in the preserve’s name,]… I was surprised to find such a heavily forested site.  In the large prairie that I expected, I would be able to see where I was going, but in a forest without trails, I was a bit intimidated, and so I brought along a compass.  Carefully entering the woods on a warm July day, I proceeded westward.  The preserve measures one mile from east to west and about two and a half miles from north to south; so I planned to walk about a half mile west and then turn northwest to see what I could find.  Very quickly, the small parking lot with my vehicle was obscured by trees; all I could see in any direction were more trees.  But a short distance ahead I soon noticed some prairie vegetation; it was a small opening in the woods, with enough light to support a little bluestem-sand lovegrass community.  The gnarled blackjack oaks, prickly pear cactus, and open sand gave it a desert-like feel.  I earlier read that during the waning days of the last ice age as the climate warmed, the sand now in Mason County had been brought down the Illinois River valley in glacial melt waters and then blown by prevailing winds into upland sand dunes.  The quiet was almost overpowering.  I continued walking slowly westward while the narrow prairie opening gradually became a bit wider, but then it ended abruptly in a wall of forest.  Here I turned to the northwest and soon noticed a larger opening ahead through the trees.  I thought this must be the western boundary of the nature preserve and I expected to see boundary signs or a road.  But no; this was an even larger prairie opening with large, widely scattered, black oak trees:  I was looking at a remnant sand prairie and savanna, one of those rare, hidden pieces of the original Illinois landscape.  I climbed about half way up the slope of a small rise, took a seat among the prairie grasses and wildflowers, and remained still.  The only sounds were of insects, the gentle breeze, and a singing eastern towhee.

 

Prairie opening at Sand Prairie-Scrub-Oak Nature Preserve, winter 2013

 

      In those days, I had only recently absorbed new and developing ideas on the dynamic aspects of ecosystems, especially when considered from a long-term perspective; I understood how they functioned in an abstract, statistical way, but had only begun to appreciate theory from plant ecology textbooks and scientific journals within the context of what I could actually see in the real world.  The biggest revelation I had at the time, though, was discovering how Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve and other nature preserves across the country were being actively managed to maintain or guide natural communities toward a preferred condition. 

      Of course, the removal of aggressive plants not native to Illinois made immediate sense, but resource managers of natural areas would also determine how many trees of this or that native species should be considered appropriate and where they should be growing; such determinations are extended to other plants as well, according to an official site management plan.  Management goals are accomplished by using controlled fires (referred to as prescribed fires), hand tools, chain saws, and herbicide.  Once, after presenting an evening talk on management of natural areas, a colleague asked, “So there is no longer anything natural in Illinois?”  “Well,” I answered, “that depends on your definition of the word ‘natural.’”

      In 2016, Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley published my essay "Change and Comfort in Nature" in which I examined how I came to terms with the idea of managing a natural area:

 

      The preserve [Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve] is a mosaic of remnant and restored sand prairie, woodland, and savanna; it has been managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources with controlled fires for several decades.  With an excellent fuel source of dried oak leaves and prairie grasses, the fires can be intense, especially with warm temperatures, low humidity, and even moderate winds.  Yet even though trees may show fire scars, most survive the fires intact.  Saplings are typically top-killed, but readily re-sprout from the undamaged root systems, later sending up multiple shoots.  Fire management may have slowed the advance of the woody vegetation onto the sand prairies, but the advance continues nevertheless.  The prairies have not advanced into the woodlands, despite all of the controlled burning.

      Because decades of fire management have not been adequate to maintain the natural communities at this site, as a desperate attempt to reverse these successional changes to a previous state, to prevent further loss of the prairies, state biologists have made the decision to begin cutting back the advancing oaks with chainsaws and treating the cut stumps with herbicide, thereby preventing regrowth.  On one workday, I joined a crew of resource managers to cut advancing oak trees on the periphery and within the highest quality prairie opening at the preserve.  At day’s end, I looked back upon our work at this nature preserve, a site that has had a special place in my life for over twenty years, a place to escape the rigors and complexities of the modern world, not just in imagination but in reality; it is a place wherein, according to the Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act, which allowed for the creation of the Illinois Nature Preserve System, “…one may envision and experience primeval conditions in a wilderness-like environment.”  What I saw were slash piles and stumps, and my feelings were ambivalent.  But what was the alternative?  Continued succession to forest and eventual loss of the prairie, and I did not wish that.  And what of the primeval, wilderness-like qualities?  Does a natural area maintained with chain saws and herbicide still qualify to be called a natural area?  Perhaps imagination must now play a larger role.

 

Oaks encroaching onto prairie, at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, 2014

 

      In 1992, I took some photographs of the landscape where I first saw the sand prairie and savanna at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, where I felt as if I had gone back in time 400 years to view the original Illinois landscape, where if a cougar chasing an elk had run across my view, I think I would not have been surprised.  On my return this year, I again photographed that same scene from the same vantage point, and there is no doubt that changes have occurred.  In 1992, acorns from the surrounding woodlands, which seemed dense with undergrowth, had already been sprouting up further into the sand prairie.  By the time of this year’s visit, oaks encroaching on the prairie and filling in the forest understory in some areas had already been cut to ground level, rendering the overall area much more open; and the lone mushroom-shaped oak seen in the 1992 photo had been dead for a while, probably killed from an intense prescribed fire.  But this management has been done in such a way that the scene appears natural, not the work of managers…exactly the way, in fact, natural area management should be done. 

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, winter 1992-93

(Same scene as in first photograph)

 

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, 21 January 2021

(Same scene as in the first and previous photographs)

 

      Twenty years ago, I walked over Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve following a very intense fire on an autumn day of low humidity, high temperatures, and high winds; during the fire, prairie grasses lit up like gasoline, and five-foot flames roared through the woodlands, fueled by years of leaf and woody debris accumulations.  Leaders in the field of natural resources had been harping for years at conferences that a fire like this was exactly what was needed to encourage prairie over forest.  At the time, I was studying overwintering red-headed woodpeckers that used the preserve in varying numbers from year to year.  The following passage is from in my book Side Channels, in Chapter 13, entitled "Dead Trees, Disturbance, and Illinois’ Red-headed Woodpeckers":

 

      Frequent fires…[at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve] have left their mark on the landscape.  Ultimately, and taken to the extreme, fire favors grassland over trees.  Though black and blackjack oaks at the preserve have thick bark and are fairly fire resistant, they are not immune from damage.  And if a collection of fallen branches, twigs, and leaves has gathered at the base of a tree, a hot fire can do extensive damage.  Eventually, a fire-damaged tree will have fire scars, where fungi and bacteria can enter, and dead branches and dead wood within the trunk where parts of the tree can break off during strong winds…[Snags]and fire-damaged trees in these upland oak woodlands play a necessary role in maintaining the ecological health of the system as a whole....  

      I once stood at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve over the faint, lightly tinted image of a log in charred dust—all that was left of the log following a fire of major proportions.  The image suggested that even within this complex mix of destruction, ecological balance, and rebirth, the red-headed woodpecker has made a home for thousands of years.

 

      I need places like Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve in my life, places to experience that indefinable wilderness feeling, a feeling that was still intact on my most recent visit.  Since I will continue to visit this site every now and again, I guess I should plan on doing another thirty-year photo shoot in 2051, perhaps on my 94th birthday.  What a wonderful gift that would be.

 

Selected References

Kilburn, P. and R.B. Brugam. 2010. How natural is nature?  The effect of burning on presettlement vegetation in west-central Illinois.  The Confluence Spring/Summer Issue:42-55.

McClain, W.E., S.D. Turner, and J.E. Ebinger.  2002.  Vegetation of forest communities at the Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Mason County, Illinois.  Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science 95 (1):37-46.

 

 

Links to Further Reading on this Blog Related to Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

Change and Comfort in Nature

Mississippi River Full Circle

The Missing Red-Headed Woodpeckers of  Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

Record Count of Overwintering Red-headed Woodpeckers

Side Channels E-Book (see Chapter 13)

 

Prairie to the Horizon

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.

 

Red-headed Woodpecker Overwinters within a Central Illinois Black Locust Stand

It is well known that overwintering red-headed woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), a species experiencing a long-term population decline, are drawn to woodlands with abundant hard mast available in the fall, particularly from oak (Quercus spp.) trees. Red-headed woodpeckers store acorns in caches during the fall and defend the caches plus a small surrounding territory throughout the winter months, when they draw upon the mast for sustenance. Because of this close connection with oak woodlands, it seemed worthwhile to document observations of an overwintering red-headed woodpecker defending a territory within a stand of black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) trees in the sand areas of rural Mason County, central Illinois (USA).

        Black locust is native to Illinois, but only in its far southern region; at the same time, it has become well established throughout the state, and except for southern Illinois, is considered an invasive species, and is a target for eradication during habitat improvement projects. The small black locust stand mentioned in this article (< 1.0 acre) is near the northwestern edge of a much larger tract of highly fragmented forest (approximately 400 acres) with black oak (Q. velutina) and hickory (Carya spp.); the surrounding area is mostly agricultural fields with small groups of homes or scattered home sites. Other less dominant tree species within the black locust stand include white mulberry (Morus alba), common hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), Siberian elm (Ulmus pulima), and eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana). Small diameter (< 6 inches) snags are plentiful. Beyond the black locust stand is an open field where cold, north winds can blow unimpeded into the red-headed woodpecker’s territory.

        Oak woodlands experiencing mast years (i.e., unusually abundant mast) typically support higher numbers of overwintering red-headed woodpeckers than years with poor mast production. So the numbers of red-headed woodpeckers setting up winter territories in a particular stand of oaks can vary considerably from year to year (see related blog posts listed below). It follows that timber lacking mast trees would be of dubious benefit to overwintering red-headed woodpeckers.

        Because this particular red-headed woodpecker territory lacked immediately available mast to establish a sufficient cache—although travel to nearby mast trees outside of the overwintering territory must have occurred—and the territory can be exposed to the full brunt of weather systems from the north, there was a question of whether the red-headed woodpecker first observed during the fall of 2018 would survive the winter or possibly migrate before winter’s end in search of better habitat. So the presence of this bird was frequently monitored beginning in November 2018. There was a high degree of confidence that the woodpecker seen in the black locust stand on each day of observation was the same individual because overwintering red-headed woodpeckers defend territories rather than roam widely in search of food sources. [Interestingly, when a barred owl (Strix varia) was being mobbed by blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and other species within the black locust stand, a second red-headed woodpecker was observed along with the original bird; these two birds were antagonistic toward one another, which suggested that the interaction occurred at a territorial boundary. This second red-headed woodpecker was observed several times throughout the winter, but not as consistently as the original bird.]

        By the third week of March, nearing the vernal equinox, the original red-headed woodpecker was still being observed on its territory. It was not clear if the second red-headed woodpecker was also defending its territory. Once overwintering behavior ceases, red-headed woodpeckers will likely migrate to breeding areas (open upland woods, oak savannas, floodplain forests, riparian areas).

 

Selected References

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-headed_Woodpecker referenced 14 March 2019.

DeVore, S., S.D. Bailey, and G. Kennedy. 2004. Birds of Illinois. Lone Pine Publishing, Auburn, Washington.

Leopold, D.J., W.C. McComb, and R.N. Muller. 1988. Trees of the central hardwood forests of North America. Timber Press, Portland Oregon.

Walk, J.W., M.P. Ward, T.J. Benson, J.L. Deppe, S.A. Lischka, S.D. Bailey, and J.D. Brawn. 2010. Illinois birds: a century of change. Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 31.

 

Related posts on The River Landing blog:

Record Count of Overwintering Red-headed woodpeckers 

Red-headed Woodpecker Count Plummets 

Red-headed Woodpecker Update Winter 2013-2014 

Return of Red-Headed Woodpeckers to Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve 

The Missing Red-Headed Woodpeckers of Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve 

Dead Trees, Disturbance, and Illinois' Red-headed Woodpeckers – Side Channels, Chapter 13 

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak, Havana, Illinois

 

 

Impermanence and Deep Time

        On a recent visit to Dickson Mounds Museum in Fulton County, Illinois, I spent some time on the rooftop observation deck. Here I found myself picking out distant landmarks along the Illinois River valley, repeating what I had done many times in the twenty-seven years since first traveling to the area for a job interview. With the sun’s direct rays on my face, I tried to imagine what the scene before me might have looked like a thousand years ago.
        Over the last three decades, I have spent considerable time learning about the ecological changes that have occurred over central Illinois since the last Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago: how the climate changed from the Pleistocene cold to a long, warm and dry period (when prairie first became established); then changed to cooling, warming, and cooling again (see page xi in Theler and Boszhardt [2003]); and how plant communities tracked these changes, from tundra to forest to prairie grasslands and savanna. Humans, who had been in Illinois for around 12,000 years, certainly witnessed all of those changes. Their stories are well told in the museum’s exhibits; in fact, a great deal of what is known about prehistoric Native American cultures came from the Illinois River valley. When I view the river valley from the museum’s rooftop, their stories, with only a bit of imagination, come alive.

 

Dickson Mounds Museum and Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge (foreground)

        One landmark barely discernable from the rooftop is probably unknown by most folks viewing the river valley; it is a small, native sand prairie at Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve, ten miles to the northeast of the museum, across the river in Mason County. This is the site where Gleason himself, in the early 1900s, conducted foundational research on plant communities and succession. During this recent museum visit, the skies were clear and calm, and so I had little trouble finding the ridge of sand dune with golden brown prairie grasses that stood out against the surrounding forested hills. And I wondered whether Hopewell or Mississippian inhabitants of this area would have gazed toward the distant prairie as I did; or from the other direction, sighted a direct line to the village that once existed where the museum now stands.

 

Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve, early 1990s

        I also thought about the influences human-set fires might have had on the wholesale plant community changes of prehistoric times until the prairies became fully established—those same prairies, like the one at H.A. Gleason Nature Preserve, that greeted the first Europeans who entered the Illinois country. We know from historical accounts that Native Americans burned the prairies, and tree ring analyses show evidence of frequent fires sweeping through savannas as well as forests. Today, experience has taught us that Illinois’ grasslands will eventually change to forest in the absence of periodic fire because the current climate—together with all of its variability over hundreds of years—favors forest. When did the practice of burning the landscape begin? Were people during the Archaic Period, roughly 10 to 3 thousand years ago, burning the landscape as the historic Native Americans did? Was this the ultimate factor which ensured that prairie would persist in central Illinois? Viewing the Illinois River valley before me from the H.A. Gleason Nature Preserve or from the Dickson Mounds Museum observation deck, I think that the answers to these questions lie scattered before me in thousand-year-old burial mounds and former village sites; artifacts from a martial, state-like society that vanished well before Europeans ever ventured into Illinois; and by the small, remnant prairies and other natural communities that have survived. Or maybe they more than likely have been scattered by the winds and erosion of too many years.

 

Ogden-Fettie Mound (Havana Hopewell - 300 B.C. to 300 A.D.)

        All of this has given me a thoughtful appreciation of deep time and how the modern era is merely a data point on a long continuum of change, and my lifetime is even less. But some might ask why expend the effort to think of such things when planning for the future is what we should be doing and there are so many pressing issues of the day that demand attention. Concerning that viewpoint, I recall the classic bored high school student’s question about history: Why do we need to know this? I counter with a question: Why does anyone need to know anything? Louis Pasteur once said that Chance favors only the prepared mind. One can never know how a miscellany of facts may combine to produce an insight sufficient to shift a paradigm. Perhaps knowledge of the past may alert us to dangerous pitfalls before it is too late.  Has it really been such a long time between the Clovis point and smartphone?

 

Selected References

Berkson, A. and Wiant, M.D., editors. 2001. Discovering Illinois archaeology. Illinois Association for the Advancement of Archaeology and the Illinois Archaeological Survey.

Gleason, H.A. 1926. The individualistic concept of the plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53:1-20.

Pielou, E.C. 1991. After the ice age. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Struever, S. and F.A. Holton. 1979. Koster: Americans in search of their prehistoric past. Waveland Press, Inc., Propect Heights, Illinois.

Taft, J.B., R.C. Anderson, and L.R. Iverson. 2009. Vegetation ecology and change in terrestrial ecosystems. Pages 35-72 in C.A. Taylor, J.B. Taft, and C. E. Warwick, editors. 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, Illinois.

Tallis, J.H. 1991. Plant community history. Chapman and Hall, London.

Theler, J.L. and R.F. Boszhardt. 2003. Twelve millennia: archaeology of the upper Mississippi River Valley. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

 

Related Posts on The River Landing Blog

"Woody Vegetation Regrowth Following Fire"

"An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire" 

"Change and Comfort in Nature" 

Change and Comfort in Nature

(with acknowledgement to D.B. Botkin)

 

"When learned men state a fact in a voluminous report one feels it impertinent to doubt their word." - From A Hive of Bees, John Crompton 

 

By Thomas V. Lerczak

 

            There is great comfort in the concept of stability.  It makes me feel good, for example, returning to a favorite forest, even after many years between visits, and finding it appear to be unchanged and stable.   Even as I grow older, the forest seems the same, and it makes me feel young, as if I have stepped back in time.  In what seems like a chaotic world at times, having something to count on is important and maybe even necessary.

            But it works only if I don’t think about it too much.

            In his book Discordant Harmonies, Daniel B. Botkin writes:  “Wherever we seek to find constancy [in nature], we discover change…[and] we find that nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure, or proportion, but changes at every scale of time and space.  The old idea of a static landscape…must be abandoned, for such a landscape never existed….”  He made these statements after many years of studying the natural world in great detail in a scientific manner and from a variety of angles. 

            I have been thinking about these topics because of recent drought years in the Midwest followed by a record-breaking flood on the Illinois River, and then the harshest winter in decades; these weather events have led me to think about the concept of stability in nature.  On this topic I cannot help but think of the climate.  A stable climate, of course, is highly desirable for a variety of reasons; agriculture and preservation of natural areas are two that immediately come to mind.  Our wants and needs notwithstanding, however, historical records bear out very clearly that over the long term, climate is no more stable than any other aspect of nature, and there is no reason why we should expect it to be any other way.  One example is the Medieval warm period, a time when the Vikings were able to colonize Greenland.  It was not long, though, before the onset of a colder climate called the “Little Ice Age,” which may have continued through the 19^th century.  During the Little Ice Age, crop failures and famine were common.  In Illinois during 1816, cold weather and frosts occurred repeatedly in July and August.  Going back further, we find many examples of the climate changing, not the least of which were several great ice ages, where the last one, called the Wisconsin Glaciation, ended only about 10,000 years ago.

            Another example that stands out is the 1930s drought combined with the misery of the Great Depression.  Folks who can relate firsthand accounts of those days are, alas, dwindling in number with each passing year; even so, memories can be unreliable.  To even get a sense of the 1930s, I might read a book such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or listen to a few of Woody Guthrie’s dust bowl ballads, with titles like “The Great Dust Storm” and “Dust Bowl Refugee.”  And still, I’ll never really know what it was like back then.

            The article “Late Quaternary Vegetational History of Illinois,” by James E. King of the Illinois State Museum, has shed even more light on past climate changes.  He made a study of ancient bog sites in Illinois in order to reconstruct changes in Illinois’ natural landscape following the Wisconsin glacial period.   He did this by studying the pollen that had fallen into the bogs and then remained ever since.  By constructing detailed graphs showing years versus pollen abundance for a variety of plant species, King was able to show what types of plant communities occurred in the area over thousands of years.  One of the most striking of his findings was that prairie grasslands, which covered about half of the state just before settlement by Americans of European descent (roughly before 1800), did not occur in Illinois until about 8,500 years ago; before that, Illinois for a time was covered in deciduous forest.

            How did prairie take over the landscape from forest?  The answer seems to be extreme heat and drought combined with fire.  A drought not measured in decades, but in centuries.  Perhaps 35 centuries.  It was the mother of all droughts.  For all that time, the climate must have been so severe that prairie was able to move into Illinois from the even dryer West on the Great Plains; trees died, and forests and the advancing prairies became tinderboxes, which must have burned on such an intense scale that, over time, prairie vegetation—which requires open, high-light conditions—supplanted forest.  Following the expansion of the prairies, the climate changed yet again allowing wooded communities to expand as much as they were able to against frequent prairie fires, most probably set by the Native Americans.  When the first Europeans viewed the Illinois country in the late 1600s, what they saw was really the latest state of a dynamic landscape that had been ebbing and flowing with climate changes and other factors for thousands of years.     

            Currently, prairie communities in Illinois, the few that are left from the pre-1800s landscape, struggle against encroachment by woody plants.  The 1,500-acre Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, in Mason County, Illinois, provides a good example of this phenomenon.  The preserve is a mosaic of remnant and restored sand prairie, woodland, and savanna; it has been managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources with controlled fires for several decades.  With an excellent fuel source of dried oak leaves and prairie grasses, the fires can be intense, especially with warm temperatures, low humidity, and even moderate winds.  Yet even though trees may show fire scars, most survive the fires intact.  Saplings are typically top-killed, but readily re-sprout from the undamaged root systems, later sending up multiple shoots.  Fire management may have slowed the advance of the woody vegetation onto the sand prairies, but the advance continues nevertheless.  The prairies have not advanced into the woodlands, despite all of the controlled burning.

 

Oak encroaching on the prairie at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

 

            Because decades of fire management have not been adequate to maintain the natural communities at this site, as a desperate attempt to reverse these successional changes to a previous state, to prevent further loss of the prairies, state biologists have made the decision to begin cutting back the advancing oaks with chainsaws and treating the cut stumps with herbicide, thereby preventing regrowth.  On one workday, I joined a crew of resource managers to cut advancing oak trees on the periphery and within the highest quality prairie opening at the preserve.  At day’s end, I looked back upon our work at this nature preserve, a site that has had a special place in my life for over twenty years, a place to escape the rigors and complexities of the modern world, not just in imagination but in reality; it is a place wherein, according to the Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act, which allowed for the creation of the Illinois Nature Preserve System, “…one may envision and experience primeval conditions in a wilderness-like environment.”  What I saw were slash piles and stumps, and my feelings were ambivalent.  But what was the alternative?  Continued succession to forest and eventual loss of the prairie, and I did not wish that.  And what of the primeval, wilderness-like qualities?  Does a natural area maintained with chain saws and herbicide still qualify to be called a natural area?  Perhaps imagination must now play a larger role.

            With these thoughts in mind, it seems clear that rather than seeking in vain for constancy in nature, our labors might be more fruitful if we looked for signs of change, which are all around us.  But because the clues are usually subtle, patience and attention to fine details will be required.

 

*  *  *

            One of my favorite hikes is through the Funks Grove Natural Area, just west of Interstate 55 in McLean County, Illinois.  It is an old-growth tract of forest, with portions protected as part of the Illinois Nature Preserves System.  Every time I visit this site, I hear the words “forest primeval” in my mind.  Some of the oak trees are the largest I have ever seen, and the forest interior is quintessentially dark and quiet.  At first glance, it epitomizes stability.

            But even this forest is changing, although the change is not usually discernible from year to year.  Giant red oak, bur oak, and sugar maple trees may still form the forest canopy, but seedling and sapling oaks are nearly absent.  There are, however, an abundance of pawpaw trees and sugar maple trees in the forest’s sub-canopy.  These species create deeply shaded conditions that can prevent oak seedlings from surviving.  What will happen when the mature oaks die of old age?  This forest primeval is changing.  The Funks Grove Natural Area may be protected by state law from direct destruction, but the state law cannot change the laws of nature.  Another Botkin quote, from his book Strange Encounters, may help to inform our expectations of the natural world, though the quote may not exactly bring comfort, and it doesn’t make me feel young again:  “Ideas about our relationship with nature…[are] confused by wish, want-to-be, and imaginary worlds that have never existed.”

 

Dead canopy oak with understory sugar maples, Funk’s Grove Natural Area

 

            Many years ago, well before I entered the natural resources field, it pleased me to view natural areas as places where nature was left unhindered to follow its own course, wherever that may have led.  So when I first became aware of the notion of “managing” a natural area, I was quite taken aback:  No, such a view could not possibly be right!  How arrogant, I thought, for people to think they could maintain a natural area better than the natural processes that allowed it to form in the first place.  But those ideas I have left far behind, mainly as a result of studying the science of ecology in detail and corroborating what I learned with my own observations.  For others, though, I wonder if one of the reasons folks in general so easily expect stability in nature is because our increasingly urbanized, computerized population has learned to compartmentalize the natural world; it is a place to visit for a time, much like a museum, that can be left behind and later returned to with the expectation that nothing will have changed in the interim.  Meanwhile, the real world, where the serious business of living occurs, is unreliable, chaotic, stressful, and noisy, offering little in terms of comfort and peace.

            In fact, if a common public perception of an undisturbed, old-growth forest is of stability, then the opposite would have to be along the advancing front of a growing suburban area.  Here subdivisions gobble up the farms, fields, forests, and wetlands faster than one can keep track; nothing is sacred and everything has a price that reliably and inexorably rises with time and more development.  After the wave of intense change passes, there is usually little of the previous landscape left behind:  perhaps only the shape of the land itself as rolling hills and basic drainage patterns, but not much else; a protected nature preserve may remain and be completely surrounded by buildings, roads, and concrete.  In such an environment, the human hand is a tornado, an agent of rapid change and complete transformation.  Who with a love of nature would not prefer an imaginary world of wish and want-to-be?

 

*  *  *

            Along the central Illinois River valley in May, it is worthwhile to take a good look at the landscape of forested bluffs with deep hollows, steep hills, and complex ravine systems.  The forest has an unmistakable patchiness of white against the deep green of new growth from trees such as sugar maple, white oak, shagbark hickory, and hackberry.  This patchiness is caused by the white flowers of black locust trees, which can occur as single trees or small groups.

            Only at this time of year do these trees stand out from the rest of the green, and show just how pervasive black locust has become.  The flowering black locusts add a subtle texture and beauty to the forests as seen from afar.  Yet I find the widespread distribution of this tree troublesome, because black locust trees are fast-growing and spread rapidly.  Black locust is, in fact, increasing at the expense of native trees such as the oaks and hickories, spreading not only by seed, but also by underground runners; a small patch may actually be a single organism, connected together by the root system. 

            Black locust, a member of the pea family, did not originally inhabit central or northern Illinois.  Its natural distribution is mostly south of Illinois, extending into the state only in the southern counties.  It was purposely brought elsewhere mainly for its utility as fence posts, railroad ties, firewood, and erosion control.  But by bringing this invasive species into areas where it normally did not occur, we have changed our forests apparently forever.

            But why should this matter?  Leaving the ecological effects on the forest aside, it is really a question of what we decide to label as natural, which is by default judged as good and desirable, or unnatural, which is usually thought of as undesirable.  Unnatural, with its negative connotation, also implies a human-mediated situation.  But is this really what we want, a dark cloud over ourselves?  Do these labels truly reflect reality?  Why not cultivate a view of nature that also includes human influences?

            Ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson suggests that human-nature interactions be considered from the perspective of a continuum, where complete use and destruction of nature is at one extreme (clearcutting, bulldozing, and then paving over an area) while pure wilderness (no human influence) is at the other extreme.  An area could then be evaluated not simply as natural or unnatural; but rather, its evaluation could be based on where the site places on the human-nature interaction continuum.  The judgement, then, of whether a human influence is good or bad loses its meaning.  And the question of what is natural also loses its meaning.  For example, it makes little sense to suggest that the prairies of central Illinois maintained by Native American burning for thousands of years were any less natural than the changing climate that allowed the same plot of ground in central Illinois to support Arctic tundra during the Ice Age, then deciduous forest, and finally tallgrass prairie.  Each of these natural communities while they prevailed probably would have seemed stable, though, because changes noticeable at the plant community level would have more than likely occurred over time spans much greater than a human lifetime.

 

*  *  *

            Noticing gradual change over the long term and observing events in nature without bias are difficult tasks.  Sometimes I’ll think about this when crossing the Spoon River’s route 97/78 bridge, west of Havana in Fulton County, Illinois.  The river’s channel is constrained by the bridge, but elsewhere it is active, changing its course ever so slightly with each year.  I know this is happening, even though I can’t actually see it in progress.  The changes are subtle.  It is our poor ability to notice gradual change in nature that enables us to expect stability, especially wherever human influences are absent or minimal.  People speak of “the balance of nature.”  In his book Our Natural History, Botkin wrote about this phenomenon when he stated that “In our minds, we have an idea of nature undisturbed by human influences as constant, fixed, and permanent.”  In other words, “in balance.” 

            Botkin points out that a natural river is an example of how something may be constantly changing, and yet still seem the same, giving the illusion of stability.  A river will be continually changing its course over its floodplain in a very gradual way as it slowly, over periods of years, meanders over the landscape, randomly forming curves, sand bars, pools, and islands.  Channels are eventually abandoned even as new ones form.  View a particular stretch of a river from one day to the next and, barring catastrophes, nothing may seem different; but see the same scene after ten years, and it will be obvious how much has changed, though the same types of features will likely be there as before.  Of course, not all rivers are equally active.  Still, in general, a meandering river epitomizes how changes tend to occur in nature.

            I have noticed this phenomenon along many rivers, but at no better site than the Salt Creek in Mason County, Illinois.  Salt Creek has been channelized over most of its length.  But at Barton-Sommer’s Woodland Nature Preserve, in the far southeastern corner of the county, Salt Creek meanders like a natural river.  I wrote about this site in my book  Side Channels:  “…there is…evidence of previously shifting stream channels [at this preserve]:  curved undulations of the ground that fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  The meander scars in the ground show that over the long-term, the floodplain is a dynamic environment, altering its shape as the stream slowly moves across the land….”

 

Salt Creek at Barton-Sommer’s Woodland Nature Preserve

 

            Our view of how nature works—static versus dynamic—is important because, as Botkin noted, again from Our Natural History:  “…when we sit down to work out how the environment should be, when we set down plans to manage and conserve nature, we get ourselves into trouble because we forget about the naturalness of change…and we revert to our belief in the constancy of the environment.”  Since this is our natural inclination and it provides a feeling of security and comfort, I am not surprised, within the context presented above, to find a group such as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seeking in recent years to prevent no less than the earth’s climate from deviating away from some apparent optimum—dare I suggest, “stability.”  The notion causes me a certain degree of uneasiness.  Because, with all due respect, it has been my experience that our understanding of nature is not complete—computer wizardry (modeling) notwithstanding—which makes predicting future conditions, especially on a global scale, problematical, let alone determining cause and effect.  For example, I would contend that even small systems like remnant native prairies are not understood well enough in order that they can be adequately managed and not continue to fade away.  How well have we done at managing larger ecosystems such as the Great Lakes, referred to by author William Ashworth as the “late Great Lakes”?  Are we ready to tackle the entire biosphere in its unimaginable physical and biological complexity?  Is that even possible?    

            In spite of this, I am still optimistic that progress will continue to be made at improving our understanding of nature and at least properly addressing our environmental problems—as long as we see things as they are and remain inquisitive and bold enough to challenge favored ideas that fail alongside of unbiased observations.  For as Albert Einstein said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”  And that is a comfort.

 

Selected References

Anderson, M.K.  1996.  Tending the wilderness.  Restoration and Management Notes 14(2):154-166.

Ashworth, W.  1987.  The late, Great Lakes:  an environmental history.  Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan.

Botkin, D.B.  1990.  Discordant harmonies:  a new ecology for the twenty-first century.  Oxford University Press, New York.

Botkin, D.B.  1995.  Our natural history:  lessons of Lewis and Clark.  G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.

Botkin, D.B.  2003. Strange encounters:  adventures of a renegade naturalist.  Jeremy P. Tharcher/Penguin, New York.

Clark, R.W.  1971.  Albert Einstein:  the life and times.  The World Publishing Company, New York and Cleveland.

Illinois Natural Areas Preservation Act.  http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=1739&ChapterID=44 referenced on 15 February 2015.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm referenced on 16 February 2015.

King, J.E.  1981.  Late Quaternary vegetational history of Illinois.  Ecological Monographs 51 (1):  43-62.

Lerczak, T.V.  2011.  Side channels:  A collection of nature writing and memoir.  Mill City Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Pirtle, C.  2000.  Escape betwixt two sons:  a true tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois.  Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois.

Steinbeck, J.  1939.  The grapes of wrath.  P.F. Collier and Son Corporation, New York.

Taylor, C.A., J.B. Taft, and C.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.  Illinois Natural History Survey, Champaign, Illinois.

 

[NOTE:  A pdf file of this essay is available by clicking on Download Change and Comfort in Nature-with columns.] 

 

[This essay first appeared in Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley Volume 16.1 (2016) published by Southeast Missouri State University Press.]

Record Count of Overwintering Red-headed Woodpeckers

In the fall of 2003, I began a long-term survey of the winter bird community at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve in Mason County, Illinois, as part of a baseline survey for National Audubon’s Important Bird Area program for Illinois.  I was specifically interested in the preserve’s overwintering red-headed woodpeckers, a species known to be experiencing a steady population decline in many areas of its range.

Except for 2008, I have since completed one to four counts per winter season. Background information for this survey is summarized in an article entitled The Missing Red-headed Woodpeckers of Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, which can be located on this blog by clicking on this link.  An updated chart is shown below with data from the latest count on 2 December 2014.

 

 

The numbers of red-headed woodpeckers that may be found overwintering in a given area are known to be correlated with the amount of mast available, usually oak. While I had not collected information on mast during this study, to my regret, during the fall of 2014 I did notice numerous acorns beneath all oak trees that I checked at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve and at other areas in Mason County.   So I was expecting at least an average count of red-headed woodpeckers as I completed my winter 2014-15 count.  The count was, in fact, a record high for this particular survey.  The count of blue jays, a species that competes with red-headed woodpeckers for oak mast, was also a record high.

For an update, see this link.    

Red-headed Woodpecker Count Plummets

On December 9, 2015 I completed my yearly count of overwintering birds at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve in Mason County, Illinois, with a focus on the red-headed woodpecker.  One year earlier, I counted the highest number of red-headed woodpeckers at this site since I began this survey in 2003; so I was surprised on this latest count to have detected zero.  At the same time, I try to have few expectations each year, as the number of overwintering red-headed woodpeckers tends to vary quite a bit from year to year.  It is also noteworthy that counts of blue jays declined since last year.  For insight on why this might have happened, please see previous posts on this topic beginning with this link.

Click on image to enlarge.

Other bird data from Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve can be found at www.ebird.org.  
 

Another Old Oak Done Gone

          After only a few years standing dead, the hackberry tree finally fell, blocking the driveway to our cabin on the Illinois River bluffs.  So I hired Big Jim’s Tree Service to remove the snag and, while he was at it, an old dead black oak that would surely be the next to fall over the driveway.  After Big Jim finished, I counted the tree rings on the stump and was astonished to find the 23-inch diameter tree around 200 years old.  This knowledge caused me to step back and pause.

 

Black oak stump at the cabin, November 11, 2015

 

          At that moment, I became overwhelmed by the amount of history and change that had taken place since the tree was a seedling; it was almost too much to contemplate.  But at once, I thought of the Lewis and Clark expedition up and back down the Missouri River from 1804 to 1806, the 1809 birth of Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky, the War of 1812, Illinois becoming a state in 1818, undisturbed sand prairie and savanna communities dominating the central Illinois landscape where I now reside, and our cabin built in 1950 as a summer weekend getaway.  And I thought about the advance of science and technology since that time.  Later I would sit typing at my computer—the world, through the Internet, at my fingertips—a cell phone on my hip, and recall watching a high-flying jet airplane streaking across the Illinois skies, barely visible thousands of feet overhead.  In 1815, most travel was still at the pace of a slow-moving beast of burden, the wind, or a gently flowing river.  At that time, the steamboat was cutting-edge technology.  And for the last 70 years, we’ve tapped into the power of the atom, the ultimate consequences of which may be to our peril.

          Of course, the list goes on.  And I am by far not the first to contemplate such things.  In fact, Aldo Leopold covered this ground very well in Sand County Almanac (1949) in a chapter called “Good Oak,” in which he describes his saw cutting through the growth rings of a dead oak, recounting history along with each cut.

          In recent years, I’ve noticed the death of quite a few old oaks, each at least 200 years old by my estimates.  Oaks, though, are really not long-lived trees, compared, for example, with California’s redwoods; a typical oak life span might be measured only in the hundreds of years at most, it seems, before disease, insect damage, heart rot, wind, drought, or fire take their tolls.  One suggestion I’ve heard is that recent drought years, such as occurred in 2012, were too severe for some of the oldest oaks.  Perhaps.  But these same old oaks, at the very least, survived the drought decade of the 1930s and the very severe drought of 1988.  The ultimate cause must be something else, or a combination of factors including drought.

 

This white oak (the "Gudgel Oak") near Athens, Illinois

began life in the 1750s.  The photo was taken in January

2014.  The tree has since died.

 

          It seems strange and unfortunate, though, to have more than a few old oaks dying within the space of a decade, as far as my recollections are accurate.  This is especially so because oak trees seem to be having a difficult time reproducing under current ecological conditions.  In the landscape where our oak got its start, fires regularly moved across the prairies and into the adjacent woodlands, keeping them open, letting in the abundant sunlight that is necessary for oak seedlings eventually to make it into the canopy.  Our oak, in fact, has a fire scar deep within its heartwood, a tell-tale sign of a different world.  Most of our modern Illinois forests, with fire long removed as an abiotic influence, have thick understories and closed canopies, where whatever acorns manage to germinate in the dim light never make it even to the sapling stage.  But while showing my wife the narrow growth rings on our old oak’s stump, we discovered a black oak seedling several feet away.  We will be closely keeping track of this small tree over the next several decades, and make sure that it survives.

 

A recently dead ancient oak at T. Stubblefield Grove

Nature Preserve in McLean County.  Sugar maples,

not oaks, will eventually fill in the canopy gap.

 

*  *  *

One day before too long, I plan to cut up at least part of our fallen oak, so that it can be used to heat our cabin.  We’ll then work its ashes into the soil of our vegetable garden.  And eventually all of its elements will be incorporated into something else and all of its stored energy from two centuries will dissipate, as entropy inevitably increases.  It’s the law, after all.

 

[Note  1.  A story from the State Journal Register about the recent death of a 400-year-old white oak tree at Carpenter Park Nature Preserve in Springfield, Illinois, can be found by clicking on this link.]

[Note 2.  Chapter 23 of my book Side Channels is called “Eulogy for an Oak.”  It is about a white oak tree along one of my favorite hiking trails in the Cook County Forest Preserves near Chicago.  To download a pdf file of chapter 23, click on Download Eulogy for an Oak-Chapter 23.]

For more information on Side Channels, please click on my Amazon Author page. 

Woody Vegetation Regrowth Following Fire

          The vegetation assemblage that I call "Sand Hill Savanna" is about an acre and a half of tallgrass prairie vegetation (a variety of forbs, otherwise known as wildflowers, and grasses) and scattered trees, mostly oaks and hickories, located near my home on the west half of the property, near Havana, Illinois.  I planted the first small patch of prairie about fifteen years ago, enlarging it to its present size about eight years ago, while occasionally adding species as opportunities arose.  Fire is the main tool used to maintain the prairie and keep the always encroaching woody vegetation in check.  It is well known that given Illinois' overall climate, without fire, prairie can rapidly be overtaken by trees and shrubs (White 2001; Taft, Anderson, and Iverson 2009; Betz 2011).

          Even with periodic fires burning off all of the above-ground grasses and forbs and top-killing small trees and shrubs, everything resprouts again from root systems the following year.  This process of trees and shrubs resprouting from the intact root systems that are undamaged by fires is normal and, in fact, has long been noted, as ecologist John White illustrated when quoting from an 1836 guidebook for immigrants to Illinois (White 2001):

 

"When the fires are stopped, these barrens produce timber...Dwarfish shrubs and small trees of oak and hickory are scattered over the surface, where for years they have contended with the fires for a precarious existence, while a mass of roots, sufficient for the support of large trees, have accumulated in the earth.  As soon as they are protected from the ravages of the annual fires, the more thrifty sprouts shoot forth...." 

 

          This process has drawn my special attention because it brings the human influence into the equation, not just on my prairie-savanna restoration, but within the context of the grassland ecosystem that once covered millions of acres in North American for thousands of years.  That is because this ecosystem was maintained by fire caused by either lightning strikes or purposely set by the Native Americans.

          Just how important were these fires in keeping trees and shrubs from overtaking the prairie is illustrated by how rapidly and easily the top-killed woody plants resprout after a fire.  To see this effect, I photographed selected woody plants on my prairie-savanna as the resprouts first appeared in spring, following a fire the previous fall, and then later in the growing season when regrowth had mostly reached the final state for the season. 

          The following photographs show the same plants on April 21, 2015 and August 8, 2015 (click on each photograph to enlarge). 

 

Figure 1.  Black oak, April 21, 2015.

 

 

Figure 2.  Black oak, August 21, 2015. 

 

Figure 3.  Black walnut, April 21, 2015.

 

Figure 4.  Black walnut, August 8, 2015.

 

Figure 5.  Hazelnut, April 21, 2015.

 

Figure 6.  Hazelnut, August 8, 2015.

 

Figure 7.  Pignut hickory, April 21, 2015.

 

Figure 8.  Pignut hickory, August 8, 2015.

 

Figure 9.  Smooth sumac, April 21, 2015.

 

Figure 10.  Smooth sumac, August 8, 2015.

 

Figure 11.  American elm, April 21, 2015.

 

Figure 12.  American elm, August 8, 2015.  Of all the species illustrated above, elm is the most sensitive to fire.  While elm trees can be found in a variety of habitats, historically, elms, tolerant of flooding, were most common on floodplains or other moist environments (Adams and Anderson 1980), where landscape-scale fires were probably rare events.

 

          Sand Hill Savanna is small and surrounded by woods that support several aggressive species (non-native black locust, Siberian elm, white mulberry, and bush honeysuckle; native sassafras and black walnut) that would be problematic in any case even if it were not for the high perimeter-to-area ratio that ensures the savanna is easily invaded from the outside.  It is clear that with any relaxation on my part, as far as controlled fires, the prairie vegetation would soon lose out to woody invasion.  This illustrates one of the challenges involved in maintaining or restoring prairie and savanna habitats in Illinois. 

 

Selected References

Adams, D.E. and Anderson, R.C.  1980.  Species responses to a moisture gradient in central Illinois forests.  American Journal of Botany  67(3):  381-392.

Betz, Robert F.  2011.  The prairie of the Illinois Country. DPM Ink, Westmont, Illinois. 

Taft, J.B., R.C. Anderson, and L.R. Iverson.  2009.  Vegetation ecology and change in terrestrial ecosystems.  Pages 35-72 in C.A. Taylor, J.B. Taft, and C. E. Warwick, editors.  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, Illinois. 

White, J.  2001.  A survey of native vegetation in the Big Rivers Blufflands of Calhoun, Greene, and Jersey counties with recommendations for protection, restoration, and management.  Report to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.  Ecological Services, Urbana, Illinois.

 

Note:  Additional background on Sand Hill Savanna can be found by following this link and this link.

    

The Call of the Frog: A Search for Illinois Chorus Frogs

“Oh the night life, ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” – Willie Nelson

           It was nearing midnight, and I was standing alone on the edge of a remote Mason County road intently listening.  The mid-April night was so quiet that I could hear barking dogs miles away and the slight breezes passing through newly leafed-out trees.  But I tried to filter out all other sounds in order to focus on the breeding calls of the rare Illinois chorus frog, of which I heard none.

Illinois Chorus Frog (Photo credit:  Missouri Department of Conservation)

          So after the required five minutes of listening, I jumped into my Chevy Trail Blazer and dashed to the next stop on my 65-mile chorus frog survey route.  When I arrived and shut down my vehicle lights, I became engulfed in the pure darkness of a moonless sky.  From where I stood, I could see lights from several home sites miles away and the blinking lights from an airplane; but otherwise I stared into clear skies that opened to the universe.  By starlight I again listened for the high-pitched, squeaky-wheel-sounding Illinois chorus frog.  And heard nothing for five minutes.  Not even a barred owl, which I did hear earlier in the evening just after sunset.  And certainly no frogs, which did not surprise me since the area I was sampling, chosen at random, held no standing water.  Without water I have learned not to expect frogs.  So I proceeded on, quite a bit less energetically than the first stop of the night, 13 miles to the Illinois River bluffs and the final square-mile section of the survey route.

          At well past midnight, far from any town, I was the only car on the road.  I fought to stay alert and ready to avert the occasional white-tailed deer, raccoon, or rabbit that might dart in front of my vehicle at the last second.  Driving the back roads at night required a constant awareness of where I happened to be at any given moment.  Once disoriented, precious time could be lost finding my way again.  So I paid close attention to the trip meter, county road map, key intersections, and whatever landmarks I could make out in the darkness.

          After finishing the last of the survey stops, I had still not heard any Illinois chorus frogs.  I knew, however, that my survey run was not wasted effort.  This was only the first year in a ten-year survey conducted by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), and my sample route was one of nine being conducted by other IDNR staff in southern and central Illinois, from Alexander County on the south to Tazewell County on the north.  My data would feed into the larger analyses conducted by the IDNR.  In addition, because the Illinois chorus frog is state-threatened (if populations fall, it could become state-endangered or even extirpated), any information on its abundance, distribution, and behavior is valuable.

          Gaining insight into the habitat needs of such a secretive species, I’m sure, has not been easy.  Because except for the brief spring breeding season, the Illinois chorus frog spends all it its life buried underground, where it survives on small invertebrates.  Its forelegs are highly adapted for digging in pure sand, which is why it is only found in areas with open sand, in only 10 of Illinois’ 102 counties; the Mason County sand area, about 25 miles northwest of Springfield, with wind-blown sand dunes, native sand prairie, and ephemeral wetlands (lacking fish that prey upon tadpoles), is of special importance to the Illinois chorus frog.

 Sand Lake, Mason County, in 1993, along Route 97

           As it turned out, I did finally hear Illinois chorus frogs during the second run of my midnight frog surveys a few days later; on this second run, though, I heard Illinois chorus frogs at only two listening stops:  a good number calling at the nearly dry Sand Lake, just south of Havana, and one calling frog at a listening stop near the Illinois River.  But calling whip-poor-wills at several stops—sometimes western chorus frogs, gray tree frogs, and American toads—made up for the lack of the missing target species.

           Following my last stop at one o’clock in the morning, with a slight tension behind the eyes, I wearily headed for home.  Staying up late is not as easy as it was decades ago.  I was not meant for the night life, and I expected my biorhythms to be out of kilter for days.  But I eagerly looked forward to next year’s survey, and the next eight years after that.  Being part of something larger makes it all worth the effort.  So the night life can, indeed, be a good life.

[The Illinois Department of Natural Resources published an expanded version of this essay (@ORC Issue #40), with graphics, side bars, and more photographs.  It is available as a download by clicking Download @ORC Issue #40 Lerczak ICF Article.]

The Acorn Year

By Thomas V. Lerczak

    The day I moved into the first house I ever owned in rural central Illinois, I planted a few bur oak acorns and three small seedlings.  Much of the 3.7-acre property was mowed lawn.  But there were some woods around the edges and several large trees, including the biggest, most massive hickory I had ever seen.  I arrived with my final few possessions in the back of my car and the bur oaks.  I remember a new feeling of satisfaction at owning my own home and land, the fulfillment, I believe, of a natural human desire.

    Immediately, though, I saw the need for brushy vegetation around the property’s boundaries; for I could see without obstruction to the neighbor’s house across the road.  If that was what I had wanted, I never would have left the Chicago area many years before.  So I planted the acorns and seedlings, collected from near my former rental house on the Illinois River bluffs, toward the front edge of the property.  With each year, they grew almost imperceptibly in height and width, struggling in the sandy, nutrient- and water-poor soils.  But after seven years, they had far exceeded my height; and one of the oaks, originally planted as a seedling, even provided a fine photo backdrop on my wedding day.  

    The bur oaks, in fact, have become a benchmark in time, never failing to bring me back to that first day when I became a landowner at age forty-two:  from a renter, subject to the rules of others, to the owner and decision maker.  I recall standing beneath the big hickory, thinking that it was likely to have been a contemporary of Lincoln, and now it was my tree.  And it did not escape from me that I was privileged to live in a nation of freedom, where anyone could own their land and home if they chose to do so and work hard toward achieving that goal.  At that moment I finally understood and felt in sympathy with the emotion behind private property rights and the right to live my life as I saw fit.

 

***

    On about one acre surrounding the oaks I have set up conditions for a competition of sorts.  It is not a commercial or sporting event, but rather, may be viewed as a natural interplay between one particular assemblage of plants (prairie) and another (forest).   A few years after planting the oaks, following a time of “letting nature take its course,” I cleared most of the area, leaving only a few oaks, hickories, and red cedars; then I burned off the area and scattered thousands of seeds from a variety of native prairie wildflowers (forbs) and grasses, along with nuts from black oaks and American hazelnut shrubs.  With germination, the competition began.

    As the vegetation has grown, the habitat has become more diversified.  So where once the buzz cut land appealed to few bird species, it increasingly has provided a more complex structure, and more species find what they need to survive.  Robins, for example, still prefer the mowed lawn around the house for foraging, but large saplings now provide a proper structure for nesting.  The taller prairie grasses and low shrubs appeal to nesting field sparrows and song sparrows.   Foraging lark sparrows use the bare sand between bunches of little bluestem grass and sand love grass.  And red cedars, growing from seed that I had haphazardly thrown in the air years before, contribute structural diversity to the habitat, with at least one suitable for a brown thrasher’s nest.  Gray catbirds, northern mockingbirds, indigo buntings, bobwhite quail, and eastern towhees all find the shrubby landscape more appealing for nesting habitat than its crew-cut past.  There are more birds around over the winter too; my record keeping shows that the number of species observed each year is on an upward trend.  In addition to the birds, I have been astounded by the different types of bees and butterflies drawn to the prairie wildflowers, with different species blooming at different periods throughout the growing season, following a natural cycle. 

    The lesson of diversity is clear and needs little elaboration on my part.  Still I know that at first glance, many would continue to think I have simply let the property go.  The former owners once asked if they could dig up and remove some of the flower bulbs they had left behind, concluding that I "didn’t care for flowers."  One neighbor from far down the road once belligerently asked, “Hey! When are you going to cut your grass?”  I simply answered that it was not in the management plan.  I had no idea where to begin to offer a real explanation.  My newlywed wife initially smiled politely as I proudly showed her around the property.  She, knowing me quite well, needed no explanation.  Since then, with an artist’s and Master Gardener’s touch, she has taught me how to maintain a neater, more orderly appearance immediately around our house, while at the same time not diminishing the wildlife values elsewhere.  She maintains, however, that it is a work in progress.  And the sand prairie and savanna, shrub thickets, and woods along the property boundaries continue to reflect a certain natural randomness, controlled by the laws of nature, where competition is a driving force; it is this aspect, in fact, that I find most appealing.

    If I did nothing at all but watch the plants grow, given the present Illinois climate, without a doubt, forest would win the competition over prairie; because for the longest time, perhaps thousands of years, temperature and precipitation cycles in Illinois have strongly tipped the environmental “balance,” for want of a better term, in favor of forest, even on rather dry, nutrient-poor, sandy soils.  To push the balance on my land in the direction toward prairie, I have used fire as a tool.  And once prairie grasses became established, fires have burned more intensely, further pushing the community toward prairie.   The controlled fires burn off all of the prairie plants above ground, and tree saplings that are always encroaching are top killed.  Although during the following growing seasons, all will re-sprout, I am confident that repeated fires over many years will greatly discourage the trees, which have to expend much of their stored energy reserves from the previous year to completely regrow from their undamaged root systems.  The more fire-tolerant oaks and hickories, especially the larger, more established individuals, usually survive the fires little worse off for the experience.    

    This mixture of prairie and forest plants has thus taken on the characteristics of a vegetational tension zone, sometimes called a “savanna,” that is capable of wavering back and forth, albeit over a period of years, toward either of the two main plant communities.  An increase in fire and drought should result in the prairie assemblage thriving at the expense of tree cover; more reliable precipitation and cooler conditions with less fire may give trees an edge and allow them to encroach more successfully upon the prairie.  In the old Illinois landscape, before the Europeans arrived, this was the natural dynamic equilibrium, and this is what I am trying to re-create on my little plot of ground.

    On a much larger scale, topography and soils also once played more important roles on the Illinois landscape.  In areas with mature stream systems and rougher topography, fires moved less easily across the land.  The result was that, in general, flat table lands and the gently rolling lands of central Illinois, once covered by ice age glaciers thousands of years ago, supported prairie, while river valleys and complex ravine and bluff systems supported forest.  Savanna then existed between true forest and prairie in a complex shifting mosaic shaped by climatic conditions, which, over the long term, also changed and continue to change.  In 1820, the benchmark year that ecologists use to separate pre-European-settlement times from modern, just over half of Illinois was prairie, while much of the rest was wooded, although it is unclear exactly how much of this was savanna and how much was true forest.

    If it was just a matter of planting the appropriate species and setting fires frequently, restoring an Illinois savanna might be rather straightforward.  But today, we must contend with a variety of plants not native to Illinois and some not even native to the Western Hemisphere.  On my land, the most competitive non-native trees are white mulberry, black locust, and Siberian elm, which surround the partially restored savanna.  Native black walnut, sassafras, and hackberry trees, though, can be just as invasive.  With any relaxation in the controlled fire regime on my part, these trees will immediately begin taking over.  In fact, even with frequent fire, it has continually become necessary for me to cut seedlings and saplings by hand and apply a strong herbicide to the cut stumps to prevent vigorous re-sprouting.  So even with all of the cutting, herbicide, and fire, the prairie-savanna is only just about able to hold its own.

    So one may ask some legitimate questions: With all of this manipulation, is what I have created natural or are my efforts just a different kind of backyard gardening and not really anything natural at all?  Am I kidding myself by naming what I have planted, and fight to maintain, a “savanna”?  If it was natural when I left the property to its own devices, have my manipulations made it less natural?  I put the plants there, true; but I did not, of course, create the plants.  Each one survives as an individual just as individuals of each species have always done, surviving or dying according to chance circumstances; but each also exists as a member of a plant community, where survival is moderated by some of the same types of interactions with other individuals and external influences as there always have been.  Native Americans purposely set fires to manipulate the landscape, and no one called that unnatural; instead, many like to say, whether true or not, that they lived in harmony with nature.  Cannot I engage in a similar activity with the addition of a few newer tools?  What really is natural or unnatural after all?  How much of these labels are really only in our own minds as we try to categorize and understand our world?  As I saunter along the trails through this work-in-progress prairie-savanna restoration, I am at no loss for unanswered questions.

 

***

    As a child, when others were more interested in baseball or basketball, I was drawn to the far boundaries of our local city park in Chicago, a narrow strip of woods left alone by the park staff that served as a buffer between the park and railroad yard beyond.  These woods and other vegetation grew according to no one’s mandates.  And something about that notion fascinated me.  Perhaps it appealed to the natural rebelliousness of youth that I was starting to feel:  a clean-cut lawn was tame and under control; the woods were wild.  Later in life, I would seek out wilderness areas throughout the country, from Maine to Washington, Arizona, and the Midwest, for places that I imagined were little touched by human hands.  I found value in the idea that very specific types of plants and animals could somehow come together on their own, in a recognizable way, so that someone someday could define that assemblage, or community, and give it a name.  Tallgrass prairie, floodplain forest, bur oak savanna, oak-hickory forest, and marsh are examples of such natural communities in Illinois.

    Coming upon a remnant natural community is like finding gold.  About thirty-five miles northeast of my home, there is a small prairie on the Illinois River bluffs in the village of Creve Coeur.  This prairie is only about a half-acre or so and surrounded by dense upland oak-hickory forests, but studies have indicated that it is a true remnant of the original Illinois prairies.  No one planted the Creve Coeur prairie; it has been there a long time; in fact, perhaps thousands of years, reaching backward in time to when prairie was at its maximum extent in Illinois.  When I gaze upon something so old with so much history, I feel like an insignificant upstart.

    The Creve Coeur prairie will endure because others have placed a value in protecting these types of natural communities.  In fact, it is protected “in perpetuity” within the boundaries of the Crevecoeur Nature Preserve as part of the Illinois Nature Preserves System, codified by state law in the Natural Areas Preservation Act of 1963.  The System currently contains 372 dedicated Illinois Nature Preserves totaling 56,631 acres within a state of 36 million acres.  It is a repository of a small portion of Illinois’ original biological diversity, representing a time when all of the natural communities were thought to be fully functioning and when no species were threatened with extinction – if that concept even occurred to anyone in the early 1800s.  These are special places, indeed, more than just being un-manicured landscapes.  The roots of their appeal to me can be traced back to those childhood days in Chicago.  And while knowing this has helped in understanding where my current perspectives and obsessions had originated, it does little to address the old and new questions that continue to occupy my thoughts as I walk through my own prairie-savanna restoration.  In the end, though, perhaps the answers are not really very important.

 

***

    Occasionally I imagine myself as an old man in his late eighties, sometimes visiting the natural areas he helped maintain over the years and daily passing the bur oaks he once planted years before, knowing the personal history of each tree as friends on the landscape.  Daily walks are a tradition that I began with planting the prairie-savanna, when I also laid out the trail system to the four corners of my land.  Within a shaded, wooded area, I placed a bench, which has given me a final destination before heading back to the house.  It is a place where I have grown accustomed to quietly sitting and observing, a place especially for contemplating meanings and connections; it is where I sometimes imagine the multiple generations that have let the big hickory tree grow, and how many more might continue this tradition and perhaps add the bur oaks and prairie-savanna to their sphere of protection…long after I am gone.

    But I take no comfort in thinking about a time when I may no longer exist.  Such thoughts rarely have entered my sometimes self-indulgent mind.  It is only in the last several years, as I have shockingly come to realize that I have more years behind than may be ahead, that I have given much energy toward thoughts of inescapable mortality.  Indeed, I’m at an age when contemplating the span of my own life is actually possible in an understandable way.  And the years seem to be passing faster than when I was young:  an hour is still an hour; a day is still twenty-four hours; and yet, when in the context of over fifty years of memories, time seems shorter.  It’s true, as singer-songwriter John Prine once sang, that “the years flow by like a broken down dam.”

    Once while at the bench, a black-capped chick-a-dee called from a craggy mulberry tree.  I recalled that a chick-a-dee certainly has a fleeting life, a few years at most.  How many generations of chick-a-dees, I wondered, have there been during my life time?  They are a successful species, and they get along well with backyard habitats; so I think there will always be chick-a-dees near my home.  And what of the other bird species as short-lived as the chick-a-dees?  In five to ten years I may see an entirely new set of individuals flying among the prairie and woods.  Yet as long as each particular species survives, the bird community will provide continuity into the future.  The same chirps and songs that surround me today, someone else will hear as well a thousand years from now, just as they were heard a thousand years ago.  I find such thoughts are a way of reaching across time, touching the past and future simultaneously.

    On the way to the bench, there are many sapling hickories struggling each year in the hot sun and soil, sometimes having to completely regrow from the occasional fire.  But it is my desire that at least one of these will carry on after the patriarch tree eventually dies and then falls, for nothing lives forever.  As for the bur oaks that I planted, they have had enough to contend with merely surviving certain recent years with extreme drought and heat; acorn production I had not expected for many years.  And so, because I am usually focused on newly emergent spring wildflowers and migrating birds, I completely missed during a recent spring when two of the bur oaks, both around twenty feet tall, had briefly flowered. 

    Later in the same year, as I slowly made my way to the bench, I was stopped cold by a large, shaggy-capped bur oak acorn lying in my path.  Soon I found several more.  Two I quickly planted within the sand prairie far from any other trees; two I planted in pots to nurture them to the seedling stage every step of the way; the rest I left for wildlife or whatever fate chance might dictate.

 

Bur oak acorns and leaves

 

    Now I know for certain that there will eventually be more bur oaks on the land than I originally planted, and one day I may even have to limit their numbers, lest they begin shading out the prairie vegetation.  Perhaps one day folks will refer to this property as “that old farmhouse with the prairie and all those big bur oaks.”   But I guess it is just as likely that the mowed lawn will return with the next owners.  I’ll never know, of course, but it surely will be their decision.

 

Selected References

Taylor, Christopher A., John. B. Taft, and Charles Warwick (editors).  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:  Illinois Natural History Survey, 2009.

McFall, Don. and Jean Karnes (editors).  A Directory of Illinois Nature Preserves, Volume 2.  Springfield:  Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 1995.

 

 [This essay was originally published in Big Muddy:  A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, 2015, Volume 14.2, pages 18-25.] 

 

Download a pdf file of The Acorn Year by clicking Download The Acorn Year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Protecting Hopewell Hill Prairies, Marshall County, Illinois

A recent article of mine, "Protecting Hopewell Hill Prairies," which originally appeared in Illinois Audubon magazine (Fall 2013 Issue, pages 22-23), has been re-printed in the in-house newsletter, @ORC, through the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Office of Resource Conservation.

The re-print is now available here:  Download @ORC Issue #8 - Lerczak Hopewell Hill Prairies.

Recently, Hopewell Hill Prairies Nature Preserve has been added to the Illinois Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary system.  An article describing the site (with directions) along with the nearby Fern Ridge Nature Preserve has been published in the Summer 2019 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine, which is available as a pdf download here:  Download IAS Hopewell Article Summer 2019 Issue.

 

  Hopewell Hill Prairies Nature Preserve, June 17, 2010 

 

Hopewell Hill Prairies Nature Preserve, June 17, 2010

 

Hopewell Hill Prairies Nature Preserve, March 23, 2010,

following a prescribed fire.

 

Additional links with more information on Hopewell Hill Prairies Nature Preserve can be found on this weblog here.

Red-headed Woodpecker Update - Winter 2013-2014

In 2003, I began a winter bird survey at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve in Mason County, Illinois.  The purpose of this survey was to collect information on overwintering red-headed woodpeckers for Audubon's Important Bird Areas program in Illinois.  Other than 2008, I have continued to do these counts at least once every winter season.  Results of the first summary, called "The Missing Red-headed Woodpeckers of Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve," were published here on this blog and in the Summer 2010 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine.  I posted the first update to this survey on this blog on June 1, 2011.  Here is another update.

Click on image to enlarge.

Other data from the site are at www.ebird.org.

 

For those interested in reading more about red-headed woodpeckers and Sand Praire-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, please download Chapter 13 ( Download Side Channels Chapter 13), Dead Trees, Distrubance, and Illinois' Red-headed Woodpeckers, from my book Side Channels.

 

To purchase a copy of Side Channels, please go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Bird Memories: Caspian Tern

        The other day I was sitting outside our cabin overlooking Quiver Lake, stretching out the last few minutes until I would have to head for the office and begin my workday, when a Caspian tern flew past.  For me, it was the first Caspian tern of the season.

        Sometimes seeing certain bird species can bring back a flood of memories about a particular place or circumstance.  So for a few moments, as the tern flew past, I was transported backward in time and distance, nineteen years to North Manito Island in northern Lake Michigan.  The National Park Service manages most of the 14,973-acre North Manito Island as a wilderness area.  I went there to backpack into the wilderness, away from the campground near the boat dock, away from civilization and everyone.

        The tern that I saw at Quiver Lake brought everything back.  I remembered arriving on the ferry, wasting no time before hiking away with my heavy frame backpack on one of the island’s few trails.  And then I left the trail and set up my base camp on the top of a remote forested dune, where I stayed for the next two days.  I spent the evenings at the base camp, reading by flashlight, and hiked to other parts of the island during the day.

        On one of those hikes, I went to the island’s northern boundary, and saw Caspian terns flying at eye level as I sat at the edge of a forested dune high above Lake Michigan’s cold waters, with blue skies and clear blue waters stretching to the horizon.  I sat there for a long time, as I recall, my feet over the side of the steep dune, watching the terns flying back and forth, sometimes dropping to the water for a fish.  The only sounds were the wind in the trees and the terns occasionally calling, so high above the water was I that the noise of crashing waves was swallowed up in the distance.

 

North Manitou Island and Lake Michigan, 1993

 

        A lot has happened since that day.  And it is remarkable how vividly and quickly the scenes appeared in my mind’s eye, just because a bird flew past when I happened to be watching. 

 [Note:  This essay originally appeared at the Pekin Daily Times online, August 11, 2012.]

 

Merwin Savanna: Side Channels Illustration, Page 84

Mackinaw River at Merwin Savanna Nature Preserve, Illinois

A small hill prairie and savanna restoration is located at the Merwin Savanna Nature Preserve, which is within the ParkLands Foundation's Merwin Nature Preserve in McLean County, along the bluffs overlooking the Mackinaw River.  The preserve has a nice trail system which can be accessed from the north- and west-side parking areas.   

The Flood Aster

So far this year, the pattern of water levels and flow in the Illinois River—that is, the river’s hydrology—has resembled what might be expected for a typical Midwestern river like the Illinois.  This is the case insofar as the pattern, in a general way, consists of an extended spring flood followed by relatively stable, low water in the summer.

During the spring flood, fish have access to backwater areas for spawning, and plant seeds are distributed in the flood waters for later growth when the waters recede.  If the water stays low after the flood, lush wetland plant communities will develop on the low-lying floodplain, producing a nutritious seed crop in the fall for migrating waterfowl.  This is the pattern that has been established for thousands of years, a pattern to which the plants and animals that use the river’s floodplain have been especially adapted.

Quiver Lake wetlands, July 2012

One such species is a plant called the decurrent false aster.  It is a rare species; in fact, it can be found only along the Illinois River valley and a few nearby sites.  During years when the river follows its normal historical pattern, the decurrent false aster may do very well, and it may be easy to find this plant along the river’s edge and in dried out floodplain lakes and sloughs.

Decurrent false aster among other wetland plants 

The decurrent false aster produces flowers from August through September.  So yesterday (August 17), when I walked down the bluff to get a closer look at Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, and what may now be called the “Quiver Lake wetlands,” I was especially looking for decurrent false aster flowers.  Last year I was disappointed and did not find any, and so I was not hopeful.

When conditions are favorable, though, as they are this year, the decurrent false aster may grow up to 6 feet tall as single individuals or in large patches.  So I carefully scanned the thick growth of sedges, smartweeds, and cockleburs looking for an aster-like plant towering above the rest.  I even looked far out into the wetlands with my binoculars.  And none did I find.  So I started thinking that perhaps it was still a bit too early in the season.  But when I turned around to walk back to my cabin on the bluff top, there it was, right in front of me:  a single decurrent false aster in full flower!

 

Originally Posted at “A View of Nature,” blog, on the Pekin Daily Times online, August 19, 2012

The Midwestern Drought of 2012

Posted in “A View of Nature,” Pekin Daily Times Online Blog, June 24, 2012

             The evidence has been clear for some time now:  a large portion of central Illinois is experiencing a severe drought, of a kind normally seen only once in ten years.  Streams are running low or dry; and from crops to natural areas, vegetation is visibly suffering.

           And nowhere is this drought more evident than in the pure sand hills of Mason County.  Sand has a poor ability to retain water or nutrients even under favorable conditions, and when a drought hits in the sandy areas of Mason County, conditions can be almost desert-like.

            During such conditions, gardens and croplands must be watered without fail.  In the odd corners of corn fields not reached by the irrigation rigs, for example, leaves are discolored and curled, an adaptation of the plant to minimize water loss and its exposure to full sunlight.  The plant does this to survive, but the ultimate result will be poorer crop yields.     

           Grabbing a deep handful of sandy soil shows that the soil has no moisture.  The infrequent, short periods of rain so far this season have had little effect.  Unless the current pattern changes, the crops will suffer even worse.

           In contrast, natural areas have fared better.  The sand prairie and savanna restoration in my backyard seem only slightly affected by the drought.  Species such as black oak, pignut hickory, hazelnut, little bluestem grass, sand lovegrass, purple prairie clover, and white wild indigo are well adapted to dry, nutrient-poor conditions.  These species, in fact, are survivors from the original prairies of Illinois that persisted for thousands of years against droughts and fires of magnitudes unimaginable in our current climate and domesticated landscape.

          Yes, this year’s drought is bad, but it merely hints at the possibilities.  Imagine a drought that could turn a forest into grassland.

 

Focus on Illinois' Hill Prairies

Lately there has been a great interest in restoring and protecting Illinois’ remaining hill prairies.  Chapter 24 of my book, Side Channels, includes some of my thoughts concerning hill prairies, which I have made available as a download (Drawn to Antiquity-Chapter 24-Side Channels).  Interested readers may also wish to link to the post “An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire” on this weblog as well as view the Hill Prairie Photo Gallery.

For more information about Side Channels, please visit my Amazon author page.

Hiking and Birding the Spoon River Bottoms

Birding the Spoon River bottomlands is not something that can be counted upon without fail.  At one extreme, the river is quite likely to be at some level of flood, sometimes with no dry land in sight; or at the other extreme, it may be so low that the backwaters have dried out completely, leaving little habitat for waterbirds.  But so far this winter, river levels and backwaters were at their perfect levels:  water enough for migrating waterfowl with ample dry land for hiking.  And so, hike I did, following a long favorite route through the oxbow area at the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, where the Spoon River flows into the Illinois River.

 

Walking was easy over the extremely flat ground.  And at no time at all, I reached my first stop of the morning:  on a natural levee bordering one of the oxbow lakes, formed long ago when the oxbow was actually part of the Spoon River itself.  Several years ago, in this very spot, I sat for a long time watching great blue herons feeding on Asian carp, an experience detailed in Chapter 3 of my book Side Channels (http://www.side-channels.com/).  On this day, I saw only one heron, but the lake was filled with waterfowl, and the trees with hundreds of noisy red-winged blackbirds and grackles.  I used an old punky log as a seat cushion and a silver maple tree as a backrest, and I was comfortable and warm for the time being, surrounded by wildlife, forests, and wetlands.  Then from the direction of Havana, a trail whistle blew, reminding me that I was only a few miles, not thousands of miles, from home.  Green-winged teal called from all directions around the lake.  They flew around the refuge in small close-knit flocks, along with hundreds of mallards, and lesser numbers of northern pintails, ring-necked ducks, and northern shovelers.  Far on the other side of the lake, three buffleheads bobbed heads and flapped wings in the throes of courtship.

 

But after only a short time, the winds began increasing, and I realized that it was probably around mid-morning.  The bright sun shined through cloudless skies, but it provided little warmth on this early March day.  And my rotten log sofa was not as dry as it looked; through my pants I could feel the cold dampness.  It was time to generate some heat.  And so I walked on.

 

My path over the soft alluvial ground eventually led to the Spoon River, which I followed to its end.  Here I found a tree leaning at just the right angle, where I planted myself for a late breakfast sandwich and reading.  But this time, I used my backpack as protection against the cold, damp soil of the forest floor, and I stayed warm and comfortable.  There were whitecaps on the river and the strong winds tossed around one of the first turkey vultures of the year like an autumn leaf.

 

Though I could have stayed in that place all day, my original plans were to hike along the Illinois River to the Thompson Lake levee, which forms the northern boundary of the refuge, for a view of the Thompson-Flag Lakes bottomlands beyond the refuge boundaries.  But it was late morning, and little Charlie the dog had been in his “pen” for over four hours; he would need to be let out soon, or I would face the consequences.  So I gathered up my backpack and slowly meandered back to the parking lot, fine with my decision.  Thompson-Flag Lakes would be there for another day.

 

Bird List, Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, March 10, 2012

 

Canada Goose                         Blue Jay

Wood Duck                              Black-capped Chickadee

Mallard                                   White-breasted Nuthatch

Northern Shoveler                   Brown Creeper

Northern Pintail                      Carolina Wren

Green-winged Teal                  American Robin

Ring-necked Duck                    American Tree Sparrow

Bufflehead                              Song Sparrow

Great Blue Heron                    Dark-eyed Junco

Turkey Vulture                        Northern Cardinal

American Coot                        Red-winged Blackbird

Ring-billed Gull                       Common Grackle

Mourning Dove                        American Goldfinch

Downy Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Red-bellied Woodpecker

 

Map of Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, Fulton County, Illinois

(Click to enlarge)

Mouth of the Spoon River: Side Channels Illustration

This photograph was used by Patti Malmborg Reilly to create the illustration on the title page of Part 1, River Life in Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir.  I took this shot from my canoe in April 2008 on the Spoon River, just before the trees leafed out. 

The far tree line, across the Illinois River, is a small peninsula called "Bellrose Island."  The Havana Park District maintains this as a natural area.  The riverbank on the left side of the photograph is part of the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge.

Marshes Again Among the Sand Hills of Central Illinois

            Our home was built probably 80 to 90 years ago on the top of a small sand hill that rises perhaps 5 to 10 feet above the surrounding fields, woods, and farms of Mason County, Illinois.  The original owners undoubtedly picked this high-ground location for their farmstead to avoid flooding.  Yet in most normal years, one would hardly ever think of flood waters; the nearest stream, the Illinois River, is about four miles away, and even its highest floods would never be able to reach the height of the river valley’s bluff tops and then spread over the uplands.  No, the floods they were concerned with came not from the river, but from the seemingly dry ground below.

            When I first moved to Mason County in 1991, I could not help but notice that the land’s outstanding characteristic was its dryness.  Its natural areas reminded me of a desert-like landscape with prickly pear cactus common in sand prairies dominated by bunch grasses such as sand love grass and little bluestem; in savannas and woodlands, blackjack oak, a gnarly tree species that seems the quintessential dryland species every bit as much as mesquite in an Arizona canyonland, is common.  On a hot summer day on the prairies, there is not a drop of water to be found, and survival for plants and animals must be a greater struggle than usual.

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, Mason Co. 

            But in 1993 my perspective on the sand areas of Mason County was turned upside down.  For it was the year of the great flood on the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries.  Though many blamed human modifications of the river and its watershed for the flood, an idea deserving of some serious investigations, the fact is that it rained a lot over the Midwest in 1993.  It rained so much that the land was saturated with water; aquifers rose in consequence, and even some lands far above the river’s highest possible flood level saw flooding; certain lands could hold no more water.  Western Mason County was one of those areas.  While the sand hills remained dry, in some cases surrounding lower lying areas turned into shallow lakes and marshes; the water to fill these depressions came from either more precipitation or from a rising aquifer surfacing from water pressures beneath.  Eventually the wetlands grew characteristic vegetation such as cattails, rushes, arrowhead, and smartweed, among other species; and their fishless waters, not being fed by any inlet streams, were havens for a variety of frogs and toads that appeared in astronomical numbers seemingly from nowhere.  Many varieties of wetland birds were also attracted to these sandy-bottomed aquatic habitats.

County Road 1500N, south of Havana, Il, 1993  

            Sand, though, holds water very poorly.  And after precipitation returned to normal and the aquifer lowered, the sand marshes soon disappeared.  By the late 1990s, corn, soybeans, or winter wheat were once again being harvested from the dry, flat, low-lying grounds that I knew would one day again become marshes and open water.

            When it was time to purchase my first home in 1999, I remembered which areas had flooded from the rising aquifer six years earlier.  And so I knew the old farmhouse on the sand hill was safe.  And I remembered how the surrounding lands were covered in water in 1993 and county roads that were closed from water that had nowhere to go.  So in the early spring of 2011, I am able to sit high and dry, even though the last two or three years have seen exceptional precipitation, and the aquifer has been full to overflowing for over a year; the farm fields to the north and south of my home have been wet or under permanent water for about as long.  Amphibian choruses are loud and nearly constant; there must be many thousands of frogs and toads in just the flooded acreage north of my home.  I have even heard the rare Illinois chorus frog.  Wood duck pairs fly here and there looking for appropriate nest trees.

            This is all good, but the water also means loss of planting opportunities for affected farmers.  And although many flood-damaged homes were removed after 1993, some folks stayed, possibly looking upon 1993 as an anomaly.  I know of at least one very unfortunate family about an eight of a mile down the road who are now in a desperate, daily battle against the aquifer’s high waters to save their home.  And I am sure that they look upon the wetlands to the north and south of our sand hill very differently than I do.

County Road 1500N, south of Havana, Il, Jan. 2010. 

            But the spring of 2011 has only just begun.  With the usual spring rains yet to come, it would seem to be a given that Mason County’s sand marshes and small lakes may be a regular feature on the landscape for some time to come; that is, until the inevitable dry periods return, and the cycle begins anew.

On Becoming Our Surroundings

At the Peace of Earth Lodge, in Schuyler County, Illinois, my wife and I stood at a forested ravine’s edge, the below-freezing northwest winds at our backs. As our trail continued down a slippery, snow-covered slope to the deep ravine bottom, we briefly paused to consider how sensible it would be to attempt such a trail, and what we would do if one of us should fall and become injured. The winter scene offered much for our minds to process, and I unsuccessfully tried to take everything in at a glance. Then as we slowly moved forward, my attention was, by necessity, focused on the icy, leaf-covered trail and my handy walking stick, which provided stability and needed confidence.

Though preoccupied with the trail, it was not difficult to notice that because of the many bird feeders at the nearby lodge, forest birds were quite drawn to this stretch of ravine. Black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches were seemingly in constant motion traveling back and forth from the feeders to trees in the surrounding forest. Both downy and hairy woodpeckers were common, with an occasional red-bellied woodpecker. The feeders also attracted gray squirrels from their preferred deep-forest habitats. As we descended, I listened carefully for pileated woodpeckers, quite sure they were somewhere in the forest ahead.

After safely reaching the ravine bottom, feeling deep within the earth itself, we became enveloped within a quiet calmness, and my mind began to drift. The outside world and its many problems seemed far away in distance as well as time. I imagined the tablelands beyond the boundaries of our ravine covered in tallgrass prairies and savanna rather than harvested farm fields. It was not hard to see, in my mind’s eye, this part of Illinois as a mosaic of such natural communities, with forests occupying areas of rougher topography, such as the ravine where we stood, with prairies on the flat uplands. Steep rock outcrops along the ravine bottom provided remnants of a much more ancient landscape.

Photograph by Pat and Tim Sullivan

Soon the trail led to a stream crossing, and our walking sticks once again were very useful in helping us to skip from rock to rock and across areas where a slower current had allowed ice to form. Here at the ravine bottom, overwintering territories of several red-headed woodpeckers could be accurately located on either side of the ravine. With oak mast quite abundant this year, the ravine forest was able to support more red-heads, which feed on the mast, than in years with poor mast production. I knew that each red-head stored acorns in a cache within a tree hole, and protected its cache and a small surrounding area from other birds, especially marauding blue jays. There was quite a drama of survival in this ravine forest, and I wondered what other stories there were that I was missing completely. Each animal footprint in the snow had its own story: where each was heading and for what purpose; how its small life might end abruptly, red in tooth and claw; one moment alive and alert, the next resigned to its fate. As always at such times, I feel somewhat overwhelmed with so much to comprehend and so many questions left unanswered; and I try to think of a way to encompass in some way all that surrounds me, so that I might, in effect, carry it with me, and make it my own.

And then we saw the hammock at the stream edge across from a massive rock outcropping. How it contrasted with the natural surroundings, and yet how appropriate it seemed, especially at that moment. "Let’s lie on it," I said. And so, we carefully but awkwardly placed ourselves on the hammock, and then remained silent. I looked upward into the forest canopy swaying in the wintry prairie winds, and saw wisps of clouds moving high overhead. But in the hammock, the bright sun warmed my face in the cold, still air; and I heard every sound from up and down the ravine, as if the gurgle of flowing water, the rustle of each leaf, and the call of each bird were amplified in volume and clarity. Then I shut my eyes and forgot about myself for a time; when I finally opened them, I became confronted by the reality of my surroundings, feeling no longer as the outsider looking in. Such moments, delicate as gossamer, are rare and fleeting, and it is usually not long before the inevitable intrusion. So I made a special effort to be attentive for as long as possible, before again becoming the outsider and separating myself from my surroundings, which I knew was a requirement before we could leave on our hike back to the lodge. And we left when we were ready, but not one moment before.

 

 
Peace of Earth website: www.PeaceofEarth.net

An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire

For prairies to persist in Illinois, with a climate that has long favored wooded habitats over grassland, periodic fire is a requirement. Later in the spring, a burned-off prairie will revive from its extensive underground root system, and prairie wildflowers and grasses may gain a competitive advantage over always encroaching shrubs and trees.

Of Illinois’ few remaining original prairies, hill prairies are some of the best examples. They occur on southwestern-facing bluff tops bordering river valleys, places that are too steep or rugged for farming. This photo essay shows the burning of a small glacial drift hill prairie at Crevecoeur Nature Preserve (Fort Crevecoeur Park) in Tazewell County, Illinois, on March 30, 2010.

 

* * *

At 11:15 AM, relative humidity was 41%, air temperature 56 ^oF, and wind was blowing 8 to 10 miles per hour from the south-southeast – in Photo 1, essentially from left to right, directly across the hill prairie ridge. The Illinois River is visible through the trees on the right-hand side of the photograph.

Photo 1.

 

* * *

To avoid a wild fire, controlled burns usually begin by lighting a back fire (Photo 2), which moves slowly against the wind. Later, a head fire (i.e., with the wind) will be lit, and the two will meet and burn each other out.

Photo 2.

 

* * *

In Photo 3, the back fire is being lit just inside of the tree line, beyond and around the base of the ridge. At this point, the back fire will turn into the head fire (Photo 4). Meanwhile, the back fire has been gradually moving up the slope, creating a wider burned off area that will prevent the head fire from further advancing. Note in Photo 5 the blackened area visible in the foreground, a result of the back fire reaching this point on the ridge top.

Photo 3.

Photo 4.

Photo 5.

 

* * *

Flames, burning debris, and ash from the head fire are being whipped across the ridge by brisk winds (Photo 6). In seconds, the back and head fires will meet. The main fire is out (Photo 7 and Photo 8), and only smoke is being swiftly carried across the ridge. Blackened ground and smoldering embers of woody debris and bunch grasses are all that remain. But before too much time passes, green shoots of prairie plants will begin emerging from the black; without the previous year’s interfering thatch, the growing plants will receive greater amounts of sunlight than in years without fire.

 
Photo 6.

Photo 7.

Photo 8.

 

* * *

The Context of Burning. There are seemingly hundreds of details, large and small, to keep track of when planning a safe, controlled fire: writing a detailed burn plan, constructing fire breaks and other labor-intensive site preparations, notification of neighbors and local fire departments, checking and repairing equipment, obtaining weather forecasts, and assembling a crew (one does not burn alone), to name only a few. Still, the evening before the scheduled burn, uncertainty about the weather remains. How accurate is the forecast? Could it change at the last minute? Will it be too wet, too dry, too humid, too hot, not hot enough, too windy, wind from the wrong direction? Should the burn crew be notified to assemble the next day as planned or should the burn be called off?

The responsibilities weigh heavily upon the burn leader; anxiety levels run high. The night before a burn, dreams are filled with visions of fire, sleep is fitful, the mind races.

After the burn crew has been mobilized and de-briefed and equipment is in place, the back fire may be lit; later, the head fire. Sometimes the flames of the head fire quickly rise to a roar, like an uncaged lion, and go charging off. The cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s Box has been opened. But if the burn has been well planned, and that better be the case, there is nothing to fear: the fire will burn out of its own accord as planned.

It is only then, after the fire is out, that there is time enough to recall the context in which we are burning: unleashing a force upon the land in a similar way, though on a smaller scale, as Native Americans had done for thousands of years. Were it not for their burning, it is unlikely that prairies would have survived in Illinois, from encroachments of forests, to greet the first European explorers. But when the Europeans finally did arrive, they saw an untrammeled Illinois wilderness; though to the Native Americans, that same scene was home and a landscape highly influenced by their activities.

Such thoughts might be briefly reflected upon immediately after a burn, but there is still much more work to be done; though one may be weary from smoke and stress, control lines must be checked again to ensure that the fire is truly out and everything is secure. If that is the case, fire control equipment will then be gathered and the burn crew released.

Returning to the burn scene the following day is a good idea, to walk the fire breaks again and more closely inspect the burn results, checking whether or not the fire had lived up to expectations. Did it help set back woody encroachment? Was it a complete burn or a mosaic of burned and unburned areas? Will another burn be required next year or should it wait a few years. Lack of evaluation would be almost as bad as not burning at all. Once begun, the work never ends.

[NOTE:  This article has been published in the Fall 2010 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine, pages 17-19.  See www.illinoisaudubon.com.] 

One Muddy Walk at Spoon River Bottoms

March 14, 2010

Though the past winter had not been so bad in central Illinois, not even one crippling snow storm or day with a high temperature below zero, I still felt a bit weary from too many gray, indoor days. So even on a damp, dismal Sunday, with occasional light drizzle, I left home for a hike along the Spoon River to where it empties into the Illinois River at the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge. Because of frequent flooding and ice cover, I had not been to this location for months. And so I did not know exactly what to expect – except, following several days of rain, extremely muddy conditions. But mud is what I always expect on the river bottoms. In fact , it’s part of the general experience.

Flooded Spoon River Bottoms, Emiquon NWR.

The small gravel parking area just east of state route 78 was covered in a thin layer of slippery silt deposited from flood waters that had only recently receded. Other vehicles that had strayed from the gravel left behind deep ruts in the mud as a warning. I briefly questioned whether my plan for the morning was a good idea, but quickly dismissed such apprehensions, grabbed my backpack, and headed toward the nearby Spoon River.

Most of the bottomlands were still flooded, but along the Spoon River’s banks there is a natural levee, or higher ground, that was still about 2 feet above the fast-moving river with its light brown, powerfully moving flood waters. Two immature bald eagles took flight as I approached the river, and then circled low overhead as I began my mile-long hike to the Illinois River. In the oxbow lakes and flooded forests I saw ring-necked ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. Paired-up wood ducks flew overhead, the females calling out in alarm. And I heard distant songs of Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, and black-capped chickadees. These were good signs, even as the spitting drizzle alternately came and went.

Most everything I touched seemed to be either slightly damp or wet and slippery; leaves that had fallen last year had the consistency of wet tissue paper. And I could not venture too far from the Spoon River without the ground becoming soft and mushy, so I stayed fairly close to its banks. At a gentle bend in the river, I could see far up- and downstream; I searched in vain for a belted kingfisher or great blue heron. And then I first truly noticed how water-saturated and unstable were the river’s banks, appearing to be nearly on the verge of collapse, perhaps just at the angle of repose. Would another 200 pounds make a difference, I wondered? Most of the riparian trees leaned over the river precariously low, and there was clear evidence of recently collapsing banks. But this is the natural process, after all, by which rivers meander, and how the refuge’s oxbow lakes were gradually formed. I walked onward, stepping lightly.

Finally at the Illinois River, I found a tree leaning at just the right angle to make for a nice backrest. I unpacked my lunch and took in my surroundings. Ring-billed gulls flew up and down the river, and nearby a pileated woodpecker called, though the bird itself remained hidden. I heard gurgling sounds from the Spoon River as its water rushed over tree branches and roots protruding from the riverbanks. The Spoon River injected its woody debris into the slower moving Illinois River, the debris then slowly passing by the town of Havana, visible across the river. I was reminded of the many times over the past winter I had sat in my vehicle at the Riverfront Park, gazing in the direction of the inaccessible Spoon River bottoms. For the moment, no one at the park that I could see looked back in my direction.

Mouth of the Spoon River.

As my binocular’s field of view followed a red-tailed hawk flying over the Illinois River, the upper branches of tall silver maple trees came into focus. Their branches displayed a subtle reddish hue from many small wind-pollinated flowers. The season was progressing, despite present conditions. But the cold, damp winds off the river were a stronger cue, one indicating that it was probably time to leave. In the direction of the Spoon River, there was a large splash that sounded like part of the bank collapsing, forcing me to recall foreboding thoughts from earlier in the morning.

Knowing that better days were ahead, I walked more deliberately back to the parking lot than on the way out, intent on not being caught in heavy rains should conditions worsen. Only once, among all of the gray and subdued browns of the bare forests, did I delay my progress: to view the bright yellow caps of two diminutive, highly energetic golden-crowned kinglets which stood out in contrast against the background of color and mood of the day more than anything I had seen so far. Their feathers were so clean, crisp, and bright compared to the sky, forests, and myself with mud on every piece of clothing. Clean: good; dirt: bad. I made a strong mental note regarding my mud-encased shoes: remove them before entering the house – a clear indication of a husband whose domestic education is quite complete.

The Missing Red-headed Woodpeckers of Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve is a 1,460-acre site located in Mason County a few miles east of the Illinois River. The site is mostly oak-hickory woodland and savanna, but sand prairie also occupies a large percentage of the area. I have been a regular visitor to this preserve since 1991. It was during one of my early visitations that I first noticed an unusual number of overwintering red-headed woodpeckers in the preserve’s mature black oak woodlands; with leaves gone from the vegetation, the woodlands are much more open, and it is possible to see quite a distance through the trees and learn the contours of the land. So even at a distance, the red-headed woodpeckers stood out against the dominant dull grays and browns of the trees. And if I missed the actual appearance of a woodpecker, it would not be too long before I would hear their distinctive calls, sometimes from several directions at once. Their bright colors and energetic defenses of small winter territories, with caches of acorns, were a welcome contrast to the silent woods and cold, forbidding winds.

Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve

        Each year thereafter I looked forward to seeing the overwintering red-headed woodpeckers of Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve. And I often thought of taking counts of their numbers, but was usually too preoccupied with simply enjoying the wild landscape and finding my way; the preserve has no trails, and so on my first forays I relied heavily upon the sun, or compass on cloudy days, to find my way. I also was not sure what I would do with the data if I did make counts. So I did not have a great motivation for counting.

        But then in 2003 I bought a computer and discovered eBird, an Internet database managed by Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology. The eBird database is used not only to store bird count data of all types and from all types of individuals, but it is used as a source of data for scientists to analyze and discover patterns and long-term trends in bird populations. For me, eBird gave a purpose to counting birds. After becoming aware of eBird, I found it difficult to visit Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve and not count birds. And rather than hiking with no particular destination in mind, I began to follow a standard route over a similar time span so that my counts would not be overly biased by the amount of effort I expended. And so beginning in the fall of 2003, I made a point of systematically counting birds whenever I visited Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve during the overwintering months. And I dutifully entered all of my counts into the eBird database (http://ebird.org/content/ebird/).

        For the first few years, my counts of red-headed woodpeckers were fairly consistent (see accompanying figure), even given an inherent and unknown degree of variability. Then on January 7, 2007, I counted an all-time high number of red-headed woodpeckers, about twice the number (40) that I usually counted (an average of 21 per count up to October 14, 2006). But by the fall of 2007, the counts dramatically declined to a new low (13). I missed counting in 2008. And when I returned in the spring of 2009, I had trouble finding even the one red-headed woodpecker that I did record; on the February 1, 2010 count, I found none.

 

        Of course, it has long been known that populations of overwintering red-headed woodpeckers vary with oak mast (acorns) production. They gather acorns, store them in tree holes, much of the time in standing dead trees, and then live off their acorn caches over the winter months. Years when mast is abundant tend to have higher numbers of overwintering red-headed woodpeckers in a given area than years with poor mast production, when the migrating woodpeckers fly to areas with more abundant mast. Although I made no attempt over the years to assess the availability of oak and hickory mast at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve, I would be surprised if mast production since I began counting birds at the preserve did not follow along with red-headed woodpecker numbers.

        Blue jays also have a strong affinity for acorns. The figure of data shows that although blue jay counts do not perfectly mirror red-headed woodpecker counts – and I would not really expect this, given the unknown complexities usually associated with counting anything in the wild – the high count of blue jays occurred on the same date as the high count of red-headed woodpeckers (January 7, 2007), and then both declined. And this is exactly what I would expect if both species were responding to mast production.

        Of course, assigning a definitive cause for a given observation is a difficult task, even when it appears to be obvious, as in this case. If I had quantitative information on mast production from 2003 to 2010, I would be in a better position to examine the possible causes behind the changes in red-headed woodpecker and blue jay counts. And there might be other factors. What, for example, about the effects of weather? Or white-tailed deer populations, a species also known to consume mast? How would these or other factors affect red-headed woodpecker populations?

        What I do know for sure, and this is even borne out in my red-headed woodpecker and blue jay counts, is that the natural world is dynamic, and change is always occurring, sometimes quickly so that we notice (a crash in red-headed woodpecker populations) and sometimes so slowly that a long-term perspective is necessary and only sensitive scientific instruments may be capable of detecting the change (continental drift). This latter type of change (slow over a long time) has helped give rise to the idea that an undisturbed natural world is in a stable and balanced condition, an idea that has been profoundly discredited (for an excellent account of this charge, see the book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, by Daniel B. Botkin, published by Oxford University Press in 1990). In fact, expectations of stability, even or especially on a global scale, are sure to be disappointed when change is finally noticed. This is especially the case when we begin counting and measuring events or organisms, where it is inevitable that change over time is what we find. And as the scale of what is being examined increases, determining the cause for change becomes orders of magnitude more difficult and less certain.

        I have no idea if the year 2010 will or will not be a mast year at Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve. But I will be there next fall, looking for the missing red-headed woodpeckers to return. I am quite confident that they will eventually return, but during which year, I cannot say; anymore than seven years ago I could have predicted that they would fall to low numbers during the winter of 2009-2010.

[This article has appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine (pages 11 and 12), which is published by the Illinois Audubon Society (www.illinoisaudubon.org).]

 

NOTE:  Here is a link to a recent post (February 2021) about Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve:  A 30-Year Perspective on Meanings and Change. 

A Tale of Two Floodplain Lakes

– November 27, 2009 –

A panoramic view of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge opened before me as I stood on the observation platform at the bluff edge. Looking directly west, expanses of open water, floodplain forests, and blue skies dominated my view; the Illinois River was obscured by the intervening forests, and beyond the river was another large floodplain lake called "Thompson Lake." Since it has been my experience from previous years that the waters of Lake Chautauqua in late autumn would be teeming with waterfowl, with my binoculars I took a quick sweep of the wide view. But surprisingly, except for a small group of mallards, I saw few waterfowl. This I found to be strange indeed, especially in late November; and so, I decided to sit on a nearby bench for a while, and hope that other birds might show up.

Eagle Bluff Access in summer, Chautauqua Refuge.

After five or ten minutes, a small group of greater white-fronted geese flew over the refuge and continued onward to the northeast. Soon a few Bonapart’s gulls passed, alternately flying and diving into the water. But during my observation period, other than one fast-moving group of five common goldeneyes, a single bufflehead, two American black ducks, and twenty Canada geese, this large waterfowl refuge continued to seem rather empty of waterfowl. But it made me wonder what might be happening at Thompson Lake. Was the waterfowl migration simply in a regional slump, with few ducks anywhere, or was there a difference between bird use of these two floodplain lakes. Of course, the only way to find the answers would be to immediately travel to Thompson Lake.

Though Thompson Lake was about three miles away from Chautauqua Refuge’s headquarters by line of sight, to reach it I first had to drive six miles south to Havana, cross the Illinois River, and then drive another two or three miles northward on state route 78, before finding a place to pull off of the two-lane levee road, just beyond reach of the rather constant highway traffic. I did not say "safe place to pull off" because there really is no such thing on SR 78. The busy highway traffic on the levee road seems to be mostly composed of folks engaged in serious travel, not slow-moving wildlife watchers looking for rare birds. So just before reaching one of several steep exit lanes that abruptly lead, at right angles, off of the highway levee, I quickly checked my rearview mirror, to make sure I was not being tailgated by a massive semi truck, and turned off the road. The exit ramp was muddy, soft, and steep; and even with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I was not confident that I could make the climb back up the levee. So I stayed parked near the top, just beyond the highway pavement. (It should be noted that wildlife viewing on Thompson Lake can also be accomplished at the boat launching area a bit further north on SR 78.)

But what I saw next almost allowed me to forget all about automobiles, loud pickup trucks, loud motorcycles, and semi trucks. Thompson Lake, nearly two miles wide and three or four miles long, seemed to be literally bank to bank full of waterfowl! There were thousands of waterbirds in view in every direction, as far as I could see. American coots were overwhelmingly the most abundant species. Ruddy ducks and ring-necked ducks were also quite numerous, though much less so than the coots. Northern shoveler, gadwall, canvasback, lesser scaup, pied-billed grebe, and horned grebe were also present. The contrast with Lake Chautauqua could not have been greater.

Later, as I waited for a break in the fast-moving vehicles so that I could safely enter the stream of highway traffic, I began to think more in depth about what I had just witnessed. Why was Chautauqua Refuge so little used compared with Thompson Lake? I felt certain the answer involved factors such as habitat quality, habitat structure, and food availability, or a certain combination of these and perhaps other factors. Of course, one major factor, the "elephant in the room," is the Illinois River itself. Thompson Lake is protected from the river’s degrading influences¹ by a massive levee, while Chautauqua Refuge is frequently connected to the river through a system of spillways and gates. At any rate, because these two floodplain lakes are part of my regular route for making natural history observations, I hoped to  answer my own questions one day soon.

Illinois River (left), levee, Thompson Lake (right), in 2009.

Chautauqua Refuge spillway with flooding river, in 2007.

¹ For more information on the Illinois River, see the "River Reading List" in the "Categories" section on The River Landing’s home page (left panel).

An Illinois River Bluff Hike and Turning 52

I rolled out of bed the morning of my 52^nd birthday feeling the usual familiar pains in my left foot and lower backside. But I truly felt no older than I had felt the year before, and actually felt quite younger than those first shocking moments of turning 50 – which really was not so bad after all. Folks decades older, I am sure, would think of such thoughts as ridiculous folly. For my birthday gift, I chose a hike with my wife Julie on the Illinois River bluffs at Forest Park South Nature Preserve.

As I dressed, in my mind’s eye I contrasted the view from the back door of our Mason County home, a rather flat to gently rolling countryside, with the rugged bluffs at Peoria that abruptly rise some 200 feet above the river; the bluffs more resemble foothills of the Missouri Ozarks than central Illinois’ agricultural landscape. From Havana, we followed the river bluffs in a northeasterly direction just beyond Peoria to the Forest Park Nature Center. Then without delay, we began our hike to the bluff tops; it was a steep hike at times, and I had to favor my right knee, for a moment feeling older than my years, lest I cause aggravation of an old injury. Just as we entered the woods, I heard a white-breasted nuthatch, tufted titmouse, and black-capped chick-a-dee, and I knew that we were in the midst of a mixed-species flock of birds foraging their way through the forest, looking for insects in crevices of tree bark or snapping up an occasional seed or berry. In a moment, there was a brown creeper and downy woodpecker, all part of the diffuse flock.

Part way to the top of the bluff we sat and rested upon a large boulder, listening and watching the birds moving onward. The boulder was certainly a hard seat, but it reminded me that the river bluffs were actually formed thousands of years ago at the edge of a great glacier that grinded across the land from the top of the world, that reached all the way around the earth’s northern hemisphere to Siberia. The glacier ended at Peoria where it melted at the same rate as it moved forward for thousands of years, dropping rocks, boulders, gravel, and sand onto a terminal moraine like a giant conveyor belt. The boulder we rested on, in fact, was once probably in Canada.

After a few minutes, we continued our hike to the bluff top. Once reaching the ridge, the trail was more level and the hike was easier. I recalled from a previous hike on this trail encountering an elderly gentleman walking with a cane, and I thought that if I could do the same in a few decades, I would feel satisfied, to say nothing of feeling extremely fortunate.

We enjoyed walking through the mature oak-hickory forest, noticing signs of its struggle against being overtaken by sugar maple and ironwood trees. Some of the oldest oak trees have experienced heart rot, a typical condition for old trees, and have fallen or lost large branches in recent wind and ice storms. The fallen trees were old before I was born, but as long as their seedlings survive to reach the canopy, future forests will be maintained with the same species assemblage and resemble today’s forest, though the actual canopy trees will likely be different individuals.

Prairie opening at Forest Park South Nature Preserve.

Eventually the trail entered an open area, part woodland and part prairie, that may be termed a savanna or barrens. The prairie opening follows the ridge line, especially on the south- and southwestern-facing slopes. Here I expected to see red-headed woodpeckers, who thrive in such habitats, but the woodpeckers were elusive or absent. From out vantage point at the prairie, we had an unobstructed view of a portion of upper Peoria Lake, which fills the river valley. Even with the beautiful view, I found it impossible to look upon the lake and not recall its many intractable environmental problems, not the least of which is the lake’s loss of depth due to siltation from watershed erosion. With recent heavy and frequent rains, the tributaries were all running high and muddy, and Peoria Lake has less volume with every passing day. How long this may continue, I do not know, but I hope that the day may not come within my lifetime for the lake to be shallow enough for black willow trees to survive, vanguards of a floodplain forest, where now there is only open water.

Barrens at Forest Park South Nature Preserve.

At the edge of the prairie opening, Julie and I sat on our favorite bench for a few minutes and watched a soaring red-tailed hawk. Several homes along Grandview Drive were visible from the bench, and I thought that any of those houses may not be a bad place to live; I wondered if we were being watched.

Before too long, we took the distant approach of two hikers as a signal to leave, and began our return hike. At our last view of the barrens opening, I stopped to look backward, to fix the view upon my mind, thinking about when I might return – hopefully many times over many healthful years. And I turned to Julie who said, "The hike felt good." Indeed, it did.

Looking for Signs at Sand Hill Savanna

Today I thought to look for signs of the deepening fall season, remnants of summer, and the impending winter. The Illinois River is always my first thought for such activities, but I am lazy on this cool, early October Saturday morning, not up for a drive of even the few miles it would take to get to the river. With breakfast under my belt, I opt for a simple walk around our rural homestead – perhaps to see some migrating birds such as sharp-shinned hawks and boreal forest warblers, the kinds of species that generate nostalgic thoughts of the north woods of upper Michigan, scenes of so many favorite times.

On the edge of our woods, I can see for a mile across the light tans of still unharvested corn crops and the yellowish-greens of soybean fields. Harvests are already underway elsewhere around Mason County, and the bounties of summer will soon be trucked away and stored in vast grain bins along the river, then transported downstream on fleets of towboat-barges to points unknown, perhaps even exotic destinations on strange foreign shores.

Sand Hill Savanna with bur oaks, hazelnut, and prairie grasses.

At the portion of our property that we have named "Sand Hill Savanna," hazelnut leaves show signs of orange; heath aster still blooms; only a few purple asters still are with flowers; the showy goldenrod is nearly finished; and the prairie grasses are in their final stages. Bees are concentrated on the few goldenrods still with bright yellow flowers, lethargically gathering as much pollen as they are able, before it is all gone; they move slowly and unenthusiastically, their actions appropriately in tune with the gray skies and with me as I drag myself back to the house for another cup of coffee.

Later as I tilt my head backward to sip the dark, warm liquid, I hear a slight, thin sound of a bird calling from our withered mulberry tree, and catch a fleeting glimpse of a ruby-crowned kinglet – just passing through, perhaps from Isle Royale in Lake Superior on its way to the Texas coast. In a few seconds, the bird is gone, and I soon notice a close-knit group of six northern flickers poking around in the mowed grass near the vegetable garden, which still shows a bit of red from ripe tomatoes yet to be picked.

Showy goldenrod with bees, Sand Hill Savanna, 2009.

It may be surprising that I am looking forward to the coming winter. But I find the diversity of seasons here in central Illinois interesting, though I am sure that such thoughts are a luxury not shared by the birds that I watch.