Huge machines (and the corporations that own them) are clearing the last trees and brush from one of the finest and most important prairies in the region.
See video. As you watch, be impressed that for years we did this work with hand-saws and muscle:
But to plant all this newly bare ground ... with the rare seeds it needs for recovery ... we have to do that by hand. There's no other way.
Who can get the most done fastest? In this unusual contest both sides support each other. Let's be clear, the machines and the people both are working for the good of the prairie. Minds and bodies, powered by tofu and/or hamburgers, are joining forces with petroleum power.
For more than 40 years, we volunteers have been chipping away at brush and planting seed. The 70-acre Somme Prairie had less than two acres of high quality prairie, but that was some of the finest in the region. Prairie rightfully needed to be restored to the whole 70 acres - which indeed had been all prairie, for thousands of years, until invasive brush started eating away at it. Three years ago, half of this Illinois Nature Preserve and Cook County Forest Preserve was still tall or short brush.
But with good leadership from President Preckwinkle, the Forest Preserves found resources to hire private contractors to get rid of all that prairie-killing shade, fast. These are the same folks that clear brush to build a factory or a shopping center, so they know how to "Get 'er done!"
Now, forty acres are free of shade and waiting for seed. Unfortunately, if there isn't enough prairie seed, then nasty weeds get too much of a head start.
Blazing star seeds
Over the decades, volunteer seed gatherers have been able to harvest enough for the couple of acres a year that the volunteers have cleared. But now somehow, from somewhere, Somme Prairie has needed a vastly larger community of Hunter-Gatherers.
More people chip in. Stewards of nearby sites (see "Where does this seed come from?" - below) are devoting some of their time to gathering and giving some of their local seed to Somme Prairie. Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves are rose to the challenge and sponsored twice-weekly seed gathering, mostly at nearby Somme Prairie Grove, where there's a lot.
When you gather seeds, you're in the ecosystem, as a partner.
When the time comes to broadcast all those seeds, it's a celebration of rare new life.
Anyone with normally functioning hands, feet, and mind can learn to do it every summer and fall. Might you find it fun - to be a modern hunter-gatherer - to learn to recognize purple prairie clover, or dropseed grass, or sky-blue aster, or bottle gentian? Different species will be coming ripe each week in September and October.
Check out event dates at:
or
Endnote: Where does this seed come from?
The Illinois Nature Preserves Commission and the Forest Preserves of Cook County have established "seed provenance" guidelines for this preserve. Seed from plants that someone bought on line or got from a neighbor is not what's appropriate here. The conservation goal of this nature preserve is to maintain the genetics of plants that have been evolving with each other and the rest of the biota here for thousands of years. Somme Prairie Nature Preserve has accepted seeds from approved spontaneous populations within 15 miles of the North Branch Prairies. To restore the robustness of the genetics of the former unfragmented prairies here, these prairies share seed with each other and with other sites within that limit.
