Winter 2001

Restoration has created new prairie, wetland and savanna communities

Kane County, Illinois

Campton Hills Park is a splendid 240-acre parcel in St. Charles owned — get this — by the Illinois Department of Corrections. Why? Because a youth home for male felons aged 9 to 18 is located here, surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence and security system. It has been a correctional facility of one sort or another since the turn of the century. But those facilities occupy only a few acres. Visitors turning onto the road for Campton Hills will see sprawling soccer and football fields on the left, and then pass the Youth Home. On the east side (following a veer to the right) is the first of the restored areas in Campton Hills Park.

The history of this land is as mixed as the topography. It was used for farming, mining, trapping, hunting, and dumping. Some of it is still farmed, but the other activities have ceased. The St. Charles Park District began renting part of it more than 15 years ago. At one time there was a proposal to develop a golf course here. But Carol Stevenson, a local activist, formed Friends of Campton Hills Park, and they fought to keep the land open and natural. And they won! Carol, as volunteer steward, and many volunteers worked with District Naturalist Mary Ochsenschlager to restore the landscape, creating prairie, wetland, and savanna communities.

Today, Campton Hills is a mosaic of restoration, and a veritable study in biodiversity. In just three miles of trail visitors can take in a sedge meadow, marshes, fens, savannas and a dry hill prairie. Acres of aggressive herbs, shrubs and trees (natives and non-natives) have been assiduously removed. Successful clearing has given way to a flowering of native plants and grasses, and a surge of frog and bird life.

The Carol Stevenson Wetlands (named for their greatest advocate) contains two fens bordered by a ridge. In summer the fens hold grass of parnassus, fringed and bottle gentian, flat-topped aster, and swamp thistle. In the trees and shrubs around the fen, look for nesting orioles and towhees in the summer months.

On the west side is another wetland complex with a fen, sedge meadow, and two pothole marshes. Look for swamp aster, angelica, and cardinal flowers, none of them common. A suite of frogs can be heard in the marshes starting in the spring: gray tree frogs, spring peepers, and western chorus frogs. Bluebirds and bobolinks sing out over the meadow. Savannas flank this area with walnut, shagbark and bitternut hickories, and bur, white, and chinquapin oaks.

Perhaps the prize of the day lies in the southwest corner of the park: a pristine dry hill prairie. Farmers, diggers, and dumpers never reached this area. Little bluestem, side oats grama, northern dropseed, and porcupine grass dominate. Rare prairie flowers include stiff aster, purple prairie clover, cream wild indigo, and Hill’s thistle.

In the fall, the marsh hopped with blackbirds and kinglets and a chorus frog (sounding like someone strumming a comb). The frog was "singing his last swan song," Ochsenschlager said, "before he’s submerged" for the winter.

This beautiful area needs volunteers. Workdays are the first Saturday of every month, 9:00 a.m.-noon, all year round. The next nature walk is scheduled for Saturday, March 31, 2001 from 10:00-11:30 a.m. To sign up for workdays or the walk, call Mary Ochsenschlager at (630) 513-3338. — Gail Goldberger