Reading Pictures

Visible and Invisible

The loop footpath at Bluff Spring Fen is an hour-long adventure in the seen and unseen. You have to be in touch with the unseen to fully appreciate it.

There’s the ancient history: you are walking on kames, an esker, and peat that represent thousands of years of geological drama. Complex hydrology helped create the fens, spring runs, and marl flats — each with their distinctive rare and endangered plants. Here you walk through some of the highest quality natural communities in Chicago Wilderness. But the high ground owes its richness to more recent miracles.

From this hilltop, where pale purple coneflowers now blow in the wind, volunteers cleaned off 13 truckloads of vandal-dumped trash in the 1980s. This photo looks out over the largest fen from a kame that had been grazed so badly that no prairie then seemed to survive. A prescribed burn reinvigorated purple prairie clover and little bluestem grass, but most plant diversity was long gone.

Stewards Leon Halloran and Doug Taron found a gravel prairie remnant about a mile east of this spot. Surviving coneflowers and other rare plants — protected on the edge of a fenced railroad right-of way — provided seeds. Spread on this south-facing slope, those seeds after six or seven years produced the coneflowers and many other restored species that now bloom every June. The unprotected donor sites are mostly gone now, but their seeds yielded the richness of restored upland prairie that now blends with the wetter prairie of the fen.

The long hill, visible on the right in the distance, represents another drama. This is the heroically “moved” Healy Road Prairie. One step ahead of the bulldozers, a fleet of trucks, front-end loaders, and more than 400 volunteers made this new hill and moved the whole prairie — as much as humanly and mechanically possible — during one weekend in 1990. (That story is well told by Stephenson Swanson in Chicago Days, a pictorial history published by the Chicago Tribune.) All the plant species of that high-quality prairie survived the move and now thrive impressively on the new hill.

The brownish patches in the fen are shrub copses that were top-killed by the most recent controlled burn. Under dedicated care by its stewards, nature is knitting back seamlessly together here. But knowing where those seams once were somehow makes the experience of this great place all the greater.

Photo by Mike MacDonald/ChicagoNature.com. Bluff Spring Fen was permanently dedicated as an
Illinois Nature Preserve by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago,
which recently transferred ownership to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.
Words by Stephen Packard.