Trip Report: Nachusa Grasslands
At 10:45 AM Sunday morning, three intrepid urbanites - Susan, Steve (amrikisalaami - he blogs about the Middle East while I blog about the Middle West!), and myself - set out on a miniature road trip out to the Nachusa Grassland in North-Central Illinois, about 20 miles west of Rochelle. This 2800 acre patch of tallgrass prairie and oak savannah has been painstakingly restored by volunteers and professionals of the Nature Conservancy from what few degraded remnants were there twenty years ago.
A thicket of american plums (Prunus americana) blend into the rolling prairie countryside as if they were just one more knobby hill in the series. According to our guides, the shade underneath these thickets of plum shrubs is so dense, and so little grows there, that when a fire passes over the prairie it does little more than singe the edges of the clump, since it can find no fuel underneath them.
A few weeks ago, I had a vivid dream about visiting some vast prairie preserve in western Illinois, in the company of a handful of friends. The rolling, browning hills of my dream, dotted with wide-spreading oaks and low-slung, brooding hawthorns, were very seductive. So, when I discovered the existence of the Nachusa Grassland whilst cruising the Nature Conservancy's website, and that on January 4th some volunteers who work there would be hosting a hiking tour of certain areas of the grassland - well, it became imperative that I head on out, and gather some like-minded folks to come with me.
Much of our time at Nachusa was spent, not on the open prairie itself, but rather in areas of black oak & bur oak savannah. Dendrophile that I am, I did not complain! Especially since some of the older bur oaks, such as this one here, were simply massive, easily much wider than they were tall.
Steve poses in front of a small sandstone bluff, right next to another, even wider, bur oak. Steve, it should be noted, displayed his mastery of the Stoic virtues, managing to enjoy himself even though he had just lost his gloves the day before. Poor Steve's hands!
Susan & myself in front of that same bluff. I look cold! Well, it was ~20º F out, with a right nasty wind coming from the west that made it feel perhaps 5-10º cooler on ridgetops and exposed terrain. Anyway, notice especially the still-green ferns drooping from the side of the bluff. I was truly shocked to see these little buggers hanging out in the middle of winter with as much nonchalance as a stereotypically snooty Parisian waiter. Unfortunately, no-one could identify them for me, so I can't praise them by name.
Steve displays his commitment to peace, brotherly leave, and all that other hippy-type bullshit as the party passes underneath the grasping, clawing, greedy arms of yet another mighty oak.
Okay, enough with the pretty pictures - at least for now! Let's get on to the real soy-based-meat-like-product and potatoes of this trip report. So, the Nachusa site is a fine example of the wet prairie which once dominated the so-called "prairie peninsula" of eastern Iowa, Illinois, and western Indiana. This "prairie peninsula" was a strange eastward extension of the tallgrass prairie into lands surrounded on all sides by more forested lands. The land here was wet enough to support forest growth, but a combination of poor drainage, heavy grazing by buffalo, and (most importantly!) regular fires served to keep the eastern, southern, and northern forests at bay. The result was an ecozone astonishing in its diversity of habitats and plant species. The Nachusa Grassland website gives a list of plant species running on for 15 pages.
This diversity is immediately visually apparent, too. It was truly stunning when we crested a small hill & caught our first glimpse of the preserve. The corn fields we had been driving through previously were pretty enough, to be sure; but they appeared retrospectively monotonous when compared with the particolored and subtle shades of brown, yellow, red, orange and gray that greeted us on the other side of the rise.
Listen, don't complain about all these pictures, folks. Given the usual exchange rate of 1 picture = 1,000 words, just imagine how impossibly long this entry would be if I tried to replace the photos with text! But anyway, in addition to the handsome black oak (Quercus velutina) on the left and the shadow-mottled opening dead center, please note the sunlit prairie in the background, and the dead american elm stripped of its bark to the right.
Again, much of Illinois' native landscape is classified as wet prairie, which of course implies that it had a large area of functional wetlands, with standing water most of the year. There was plenty of this evident at Nachusa: swaths of lands covered in sedges, rushes, cattails, and dramatic great angelicas (Angelica atropurpurea). One area we explored even featured some peat formation. Hank, one of our guides, demonstrated this by asking us all to gather 'round him. Once we had done so, he proceeded to do a little *jump*, causing the earth to shake noticeably underneath us. It was cool!
Apparently, the evergreen marsh plant coming out of the water is called "monkey cress". Y'know, like watercress, but with more monkeys. 'Cause everything's better with monkeys, don'cha know.
This was one of the coolest things there. It's a little spring, carrying groundwater that had flowed downhill from the sandstone knobs surrounding the peat marsh. Because it had been insulated by the protective earth before emerging, it is at a pretty much constant 10º C all year long. So, I was able to stick my hand in it without fear of my fingers freezing solid and breaking off like so many pieces of peanut brittle. It was a sandy, goopy, bubbling, non-Newtonian mess. Very cool!
Now, the ostensible point of this little hike was to see some red-headed woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) hanging out in the canopies of the preserve's many hickories and oaks. Of course, as our guides freely admitted, this was mostly just an excuse to get people to come out and take a hike around the place, to try and get some publicity for 'em. I cannot speak for the others, but I for one did not mind the deception a bit. One way or the other, though, we did get to see some woodpeckers! We saw at least three of them, and there may have been as many as five present that day. At least, there were five separate woodpecker encounters, and we saw three of them together at the same time. They even put on a bit of a show for us, flitting about here and there between a pair of shagbark hickories (Carya ovata) and a couple of small black oaks. They were quite fast, and very spectacular with their bright red heads and black-and-white tuxedo-suit bodies.
I wasn't able to get a really good picture of any of the woodpeckers, but if you'll look closely, you can see one sitting peaceably at the far end of one of this shagbark's branches. And even if you can't, I still flatter myself that it's a pretty good picture.
So, yeah. All in all, the miniature roadtrip was a rip-roaring success, and I strongly look forward to returning to Nachusa in the spring and summer, to see what it looks like when the chlorophyllous touch of fresh growth lies upon the land, and the sundry dragon- and butterflies are out doing their lovely "thing". Ah! I can hardly wait!
Looking forward to returning to Nachusa since 1986,
--mark
A thicket of american plums (Prunus americana) blend into the rolling prairie countryside as if they were just one more knobby hill in the series. According to our guides, the shade underneath these thickets of plum shrubs is so dense, and so little grows there, that when a fire passes over the prairie it does little more than singe the edges of the clump, since it can find no fuel underneath them.
A few weeks ago, I had a vivid dream about visiting some vast prairie preserve in western Illinois, in the company of a handful of friends. The rolling, browning hills of my dream, dotted with wide-spreading oaks and low-slung, brooding hawthorns, were very seductive. So, when I discovered the existence of the Nachusa Grassland whilst cruising the Nature Conservancy's website, and that on January 4th some volunteers who work there would be hosting a hiking tour of certain areas of the grassland - well, it became imperative that I head on out, and gather some like-minded folks to come with me.
Much of our time at Nachusa was spent, not on the open prairie itself, but rather in areas of black oak & bur oak savannah. Dendrophile that I am, I did not complain! Especially since some of the older bur oaks, such as this one here, were simply massive, easily much wider than they were tall.
Steve poses in front of a small sandstone bluff, right next to another, even wider, bur oak. Steve, it should be noted, displayed his mastery of the Stoic virtues, managing to enjoy himself even though he had just lost his gloves the day before. Poor Steve's hands!
Susan & myself in front of that same bluff. I look cold! Well, it was ~20º F out, with a right nasty wind coming from the west that made it feel perhaps 5-10º cooler on ridgetops and exposed terrain. Anyway, notice especially the still-green ferns drooping from the side of the bluff. I was truly shocked to see these little buggers hanging out in the middle of winter with as much nonchalance as a stereotypically snooty Parisian waiter. Unfortunately, no-one could identify them for me, so I can't praise them by name.
Steve displays his commitment to peace, brotherly leave, and all that other hippy-type bullshit as the party passes underneath the grasping, clawing, greedy arms of yet another mighty oak.
Okay, enough with the pretty pictures - at least for now! Let's get on to the real soy-based-meat-like-product and potatoes of this trip report. So, the Nachusa site is a fine example of the wet prairie which once dominated the so-called "prairie peninsula" of eastern Iowa, Illinois, and western Indiana. This "prairie peninsula" was a strange eastward extension of the tallgrass prairie into lands surrounded on all sides by more forested lands. The land here was wet enough to support forest growth, but a combination of poor drainage, heavy grazing by buffalo, and (most importantly!) regular fires served to keep the eastern, southern, and northern forests at bay. The result was an ecozone astonishing in its diversity of habitats and plant species. The Nachusa Grassland website gives a list of plant species running on for 15 pages.
This diversity is immediately visually apparent, too. It was truly stunning when we crested a small hill & caught our first glimpse of the preserve. The corn fields we had been driving through previously were pretty enough, to be sure; but they appeared retrospectively monotonous when compared with the particolored and subtle shades of brown, yellow, red, orange and gray that greeted us on the other side of the rise.
Listen, don't complain about all these pictures, folks. Given the usual exchange rate of 1 picture = 1,000 words, just imagine how impossibly long this entry would be if I tried to replace the photos with text! But anyway, in addition to the handsome black oak (Quercus velutina) on the left and the shadow-mottled opening dead center, please note the sunlit prairie in the background, and the dead american elm stripped of its bark to the right.
Again, much of Illinois' native landscape is classified as wet prairie, which of course implies that it had a large area of functional wetlands, with standing water most of the year. There was plenty of this evident at Nachusa: swaths of lands covered in sedges, rushes, cattails, and dramatic great angelicas (Angelica atropurpurea). One area we explored even featured some peat formation. Hank, one of our guides, demonstrated this by asking us all to gather 'round him. Once we had done so, he proceeded to do a little *jump*, causing the earth to shake noticeably underneath us. It was cool!
Apparently, the evergreen marsh plant coming out of the water is called "monkey cress". Y'know, like watercress, but with more monkeys. 'Cause everything's better with monkeys, don'cha know.
This was one of the coolest things there. It's a little spring, carrying groundwater that had flowed downhill from the sandstone knobs surrounding the peat marsh. Because it had been insulated by the protective earth before emerging, it is at a pretty much constant 10º C all year long. So, I was able to stick my hand in it without fear of my fingers freezing solid and breaking off like so many pieces of peanut brittle. It was a sandy, goopy, bubbling, non-Newtonian mess. Very cool!
Now, the ostensible point of this little hike was to see some red-headed woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) hanging out in the canopies of the preserve's many hickories and oaks. Of course, as our guides freely admitted, this was mostly just an excuse to get people to come out and take a hike around the place, to try and get some publicity for 'em. I cannot speak for the others, but I for one did not mind the deception a bit. One way or the other, though, we did get to see some woodpeckers! We saw at least three of them, and there may have been as many as five present that day. At least, there were five separate woodpecker encounters, and we saw three of them together at the same time. They even put on a bit of a show for us, flitting about here and there between a pair of shagbark hickories (Carya ovata) and a couple of small black oaks. They were quite fast, and very spectacular with their bright red heads and black-and-white tuxedo-suit bodies.
I wasn't able to get a really good picture of any of the woodpeckers, but if you'll look closely, you can see one sitting peaceably at the far end of one of this shagbark's branches. And even if you can't, I still flatter myself that it's a pretty good picture.
So, yeah. All in all, the miniature roadtrip was a rip-roaring success, and I strongly look forward to returning to Nachusa in the spring and summer, to see what it looks like when the chlorophyllous touch of fresh growth lies upon the land, and the sundry dragon- and butterflies are out doing their lovely "thing". Ah! I can hardly wait!
Looking forward to returning to Nachusa since 1986,
--mark