In the heart of Midewin National Tallgrass
Prairie is a fine stream that's about to get better. This
photo, taken toward the end of winter, shows the clean
water, the bedrock bottom, and the troublesome invasive
plants already beginning to green up.
Prairie Creek's 21 miles once flowed
mostly through open grassland. Today, the skinny young
trees along its banks — elms and ashes and buckthorns
— are what happen in the absence of fire. Many of
the birds that drank from Prairie Creek no longer live
here — sandhill and whooping cranes, short-eared
and barn owls, harriers. They can't live in brush.
There was a grove of savanna and open
woods, 250 acres of it, along the lower mile of the creek,
just above where it empties into the Kankakee River. Barn
owls surely nested in the big old hollow oaks and cottonwoods;
they hunted voles in both the nearby grassland and those
open woods. But the habitat was gradually clogged with
brush or denuded by farming. Not a single pair of barn
owls nests anywhere in the northern two-thirds of Illinois
today. Habitat restoration can bring them back.
"We'll cut that brush off the
prairie. We'll thin those elms and ashes in the oak woods,"
says biologist Bill Glass, who's helping to plan the restoration
of Midewin's 19,000 acres. When asked about the possible
return of the cranes and the owls, he responds with a
wistful confidence. "Sure. It's just a matter of
time for all of them. I hope we'll all be around to see
it."
It's one of today's challenges for
conservationists. To see and love what survives of nature
here — and at the same time to see and love what
could be — restoring whole ecosystems to full health.
