23 Photos and 4 Ideas

A not-highly-organized Photo Essay:

Images and Thoughts from late June and early July 2021

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” 

                                                                                                Aldo Leopold

                                                                                                A Sand County Almanac

Beauty? Do we stewards have to be concerned about our love affair with color?

Yes and no. These colors suggest health and quality because they came together by their own agency as part of the healing process. Beauty sometimes indicates health. But there will be a lot more to say about this.

(Since people always ask for flower names: the plants most obvious here are butterfly milkweed (orange), wild bergamot (lavender), and narrow-leaved mountain mint (white). But there are at least a dozen other species easily identifiable if you "know your plants.")

And what if we tip the camera up and show the background also? Why are so many trees dead?

Are dead trees ugly?

Or do you even notice them, with all that early July color in the foreground?

The simple quick answer is that the dead trees are mostly invaders. Sooner or later trees always die, but in this case, ash disease and controlled fire killed most of them. 

Since we also burn the invasive trees we cut in the winter, we end up with bonfire pile 'burn scars' - like the one the edge of which is shown below.

The plant is Bicknell's geranium - recognized as an Endangered species in Illinois. It's the only plant of its species we've found at Somme so far this year. We hope there's another one, and the pollen grains from those hypothetical two can find their ways to each other's ovaries. 

We only see Bicknell's geranium where a hot wood fire has sterilized the soil. That's its habitat. Its role in the ecosystem is to begin the recycling of burned soil. A brush pile burn is the modern counterpart to a great dead tree falling and burning in a lightning- or Potawatomi-ignited fire. This geranium and many species here in many ways have an evolving relationship with fire going back millions of years. 

The photo below illustrates a different, oblique relationship with fire.

Here, under invasive trees until two winters ago, the bare dirt and lack of diversity seem to result from an invasion of woodland sunflower - now dominant and apparently excluding most other vegetation. Fires in this preserve depend on two major fuel types - warm-season grasses and oak leaves. This area has neither, as woodland sunflower is poor fuel. Here, as shown in the foreground, we are scything the sunflowers as an experiment to see whether we can restore diverse fuel species to this area - and whethr such an approach could in time lead to sustainable biodiversity conservation.

If you walk the trails, you may notice that a great many experiments under way at the Somme preserves. In this case a prairie lily peeks out of a deer-exclusion cage. Prairie lily is a rare and highly conservative plant.

The prairie lily (in contrast to the Michigan lily) is generally found only in very-high-quality prairies and savannas. For decades, fewer than half a dozen bloomed each year in Somme Prairie - and none at all in Somme Prairie Grove. Then we began protecting them from deer and voles with cages. Now scores of them bloom annually in both Nature Preserves. 

(The much-commoner Michigan lily does not have those proud, upward facing flowers. The equally beautiful and commoner Michigan lily has petals that arch around nearly into a circle and flower stems that gracefully arch over so the flower faces downward.) 

On the other hand, recovery of ecosystem diversity and health is not a straight line. The Somme preserves were subjected to a severe drought for the first half of the 2021 growing season. The tall exclusion cage (above) was constructed for the height this lily attained last year. In 2021, it's a third of that height. Natural ecosystems have evolved to weather diverse stresses - within gradually-changing parameters. We expect the recovery to go through twists and turns. 

For the lily, we hope that, as with some other species, there may someday be sufficiently many (and perhaps more predation and fewer deer) that we can dispense with the cages. 

Deer sometimes like to eat purple milkweed, a characteristic savanna species. This uncommon plant increased dramatically under the influence of prescribed burns, as the seed from a few plants blew about the preserve. (We did little or nothing special to help them. That's true for most of the 490 species in this savanna. Others (especially some of the high conservatives that will one day be the core of the ecosystem) need various kinds of intensive care, at least for a while.  

This fairly rich area has an unusual abundance of black-eyed Susans. All the other species we see here are long-lived perennials. But black-eyed Susans live for just two years. Like the Bicknell's geranium, this is a species that helps heal ecosystem wounds. Two years ago something happened that left bare ground. The Susans colonized that space but (like all biennials) did not bloom. This year they're dramatically colorful and will set seeds ... and die. Then those seeds will wait for another opportunity. In high-quality grasslands, the Susans are regular, but just here and there, helping to heal this and that. Here, something happened (as shown in the photo below) that resulted in a lot of opportunities for new plant establishment. These happy blooms therefore remind us that this would likely be a good place to plant some of our rare conservative seed this fall. 

Other species in the photo above: The big white flower clusters are wild quinine. The little white ones are fleabane (another disturbance-healing biennial like black-eyed Susan). The big leaves (not blooming yet and likely to wait until next year) are prairie dock. The big clumps of dense, fine grass are prairie dropseed, the most conservative of our warm-season grasses. In the background are masses of the whitish leaves and purple flowers of leadplant. 

The dead stem above, and shriveled leaves at its base, were a top-killed-by-fire but then re-sprouting buckthorn. We sprayed herbicide on the re-sprouts. Note that the surrounding vegetation seems little impacted by the herbicide. 

Hairstreak butterfly. The work here is as much about animals as plants. As is typical, the rare plants here support an even larger number of rare animals. Burning as often as we can safely manage is probably best for most of the savanna plant species. Too much burning may harm some of the animal species, so we try always to maintain some unburned habitats. 

Except in special cases, we take photos from the paths, to avoid trampling. 

The burn scar here is a minor problem. It will be well into its natural successional process in a year or two. But the woodland sunflower and tall goldenrod around it concern us. They resist fire. Areas that don't burn will revert to woody invaders before long.

Step forward a few paces and you can see stumps of two of the large trees that were cut here and burned in that pile. These unnatural trees stood over impoverished vegetation. After the burn though, two aggressive species were taking over. We will scythe them wholesale for a couple of years while seeding to promote more diversity. We get the sense that under some circumstances this approach restores a sustainable plant community ... and under other circumstances it does not. The various approaches are being studied by the Somme Team ( in part coordinated by Karen Glennemeier with a grant from the Illinois Native Plant Society). We learn and report. 

This is a somewhat similar area. But here, quality plants are mixed with the aggressive ones. In this case, we will surgically scythe the woodland sunflower and tall goldenrod while protecting the other species. the results are shown below.

This is the same scene, after scything (and removing the scythed material for this photo, so it's easier to see what is left). From the foliage, we can identify cream gentian, wild quinine, golden Alexanders, wild strawberry, rattlesnake master, prairie dock, pale Indian plantain, Culver's root, agrimony, pasture thistle, early goldenrod, Virginia anemone, and others including semi-suppressed grasses and sedges that may make a critical component of the fuel for the fires that may foster increasing quality of this area over the long haul.  

In an even shadier area, with lots of oaks and sedges, there's plenty of fuel for fire to repel invaders. The blue flowers belong to heart-leaved skullcap.  Those lines arching across this photo are sedges whose long flower stalks seem to be reaching out to plant the seeds just a bit farther away from the mother plant. 

Here, in the very open savanna, the fires maintain impressively increasing diversity, but perhaps do it too well for some species? Those clumps of shrubby growths here and there are bur and scarlet oak re-sprouts. They have burned off and stayed small for more than forty years now. The prairie species are doing great! In this former savanna, the "in between" species (not too dark and not too bright) would thrive better if some of the oaks were allowed to grow bigger. For some years now, we've begun working to promote oak reproduction in some areas, as shown below:

Above, two young bur oaks are protected from deer and rabbits in cages. 

We had protected this young bur oak from deer and fire - but then bucks started scraping the bark off the trunk with their antlers. So an additional cage was added to discourage that. It worked. On the other hand, there's a downside to this tree's growing success. Soon it will begin to shade out some of the full-sun dependent species, that we worked so hard to restore here. But the higher goal is to restore the full savanna community, so we'll now work to restore the species of the "in between" - neither full sun nor shade. 

Among the species that seem to do better in dappled light than in the open prairie is Canada milk vetch, the yellow-flowered plant here. At Somme it seems to fade out of the full sun areas as they recover conservative quality, but they and many other species are expected to increase near growing trees. 

In the photo below, the three stages of the drama are visible. In the distance is the completely treeless Somme Prairie. In the foreground is high-quality grassland, former savanna, with bur and scarlet oaks starting to "grow up to be real trees." Here, the "in between" species will increase at the expense of the species more typical of the prairie. In the middle distance are stands of mixed oaks and invasive trees.

In that middle distance, the oaks will be saved here and there, most invaders removed, and the mix of prairie and savanna species seeded in as needed. Savanna restoration is new. There is no place like this on the planet. It's a pleasure and an honor for so many of us to participate in this recovery. 

Thanks for joining us for images and thoughts of late June and early July 2021.

This post also is a friendly invitation to you to come, learn, and enjoy.

More participants, leaders, and experimenters are always welcome on the Somme Team.