Spring 1999

Spring Bloom
Words and landscape photo by Stephen Packard. Oriole photo by Arthur Morris. Habitat courtesy of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.

In bloom: white and pink shooting stars, golden Alexanders, orange puccoon, hot pink phlox, cream false indigo. Apparently a fine little prairie. That big leaf is prairie dock. Indiangrass and prairie dropseed make the matrix. Lurking among the plants are hundreds of species of animals: the Acadian hairstreak butterfly, the smooth green snake and the swift brown fox. Beetles, snails, voles, toads, nematodes.

A rich prairie then? Most botanists would tell you so. Sticks of burned brush suggest the benefit of a recent burn. No weeds present — a dandelion could not compete here. Almost all the plants are rare.

What do the eyes of migrating prairie birds see as they pass over? The sad answer is, essentially nothing. Too small a site to register. The prairie bird ignores such a place and continues on, looking for home on land, lots of land, under sky with no trees. There's not much of that left. The tallgrass prairie birds are living on borrowed time, most often in temporary and degraded habitats.

But there are birds that love this little prairie, nestled among the trees. Oriole, bluebird, kestrel, goldfinch, kingbird — they all nest here. These birds need open woods or shrubland, and these habitats, too, are vanishing. Scrubby trees of native shrubland surround this prairie: wild plum, Iowa crab, hawthorn, sumac, dogwood. Good stewards might expand the grassland and shrubland for the animals and plants that need them. But some folks see a young "forest" in those trees, though neither plants nor animals of closed forest are present. If we try to manage this fine land just for the trees, we lose the species of shrubland and grassland, and that's most of what's here.

Just as we may admire a painting or a piece of music more deeply and truly if we've studied it, so conservationists study to see, not only through human eyes, but through the eyes of our fellow creatures. Like us, they need good habitat. If we can see it perceptively enough to protect and nurture it for them, then we can better taste the tonic of wildness for ourselves as well.

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