Where the Wild Ones Are

By Peter Friederici

Mention the words “Chicago” and “wilderness” in the same sentence, and chances are you’ll draw an incredulous stare from many listeners.

How can the nation’s third-largest city possibly exist in conjunction with wild places, let alone in conjunction with particular constellations of wild animals and plants that have practically ceased to exist anywhere else on Earth?

Yet that is precisely the case. The city and its suburbs support wild species and entire communities that have become rare—not just in northeastern Illinois, but globally. Threatened environments, including tallgrass prairies, oak savannas, and prairie marshes, survive in this region even within view of skyscrapers and shopping malls. And, unlikely as it may seem at first glance, those rare and increasingly cherished natural areas remain in reasonable health today precisely because of their proximity to the city.

This area was biologically rich long before European and American settlers arrived. “We are in the middle of a convergence of major biomes here,” says Tim Sullivan, a conservation biologist at Brookfield Zoo who has worked extensively with the Chicago Wilderness project. “It’s the eastern extent of the tallgrass prairie, the southern edge of the north woods, the western extent of the eastern deciduous forest. It’s also overlaid with a very complex geological history, especially recent glaciation, that has left a diversity of soil types, topography, and wetlands. That’s led to a high diversity of native species, especially plants. Fifteen hundred native plant species occur in the Chicago Wilderness region. That’s an enormous number.”

Studies have shown that Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, for instance, ranks seventh in biodiversity among all national parks—1,135 native plant species have been identified there as one measure—yet it is many times smaller than any of the parks that outrank it.

Early settlers in the region tended to think of this rich combination of grassland, forest, and wetland as the original Chicago wilderness. But it was not at all free of the marks of humanity, for the ecology of the continent, especially its coasts and the fertile midsection, had already been profoundly altered by its Native American inhabitants for millennia. They set fires that kept trees from encroaching on the prairies. They hunted bison and deer, elk and bear (some scholars think early Native Americans hunted many Ice Age-era animals to extinction). They collected wild plants and farmed crops, such as corn and squash, that were introduced from other areas. They influenced their surroundings and were influenced by them.

When American settlers arrived in the Midwest, they dealt with their surroundings in less subtle ways. They plowed the prairies, sawed down forests, drained marshes, channeled rivers. And the new city of Chicago, situated where land and water travel routes met, became the transportation nexus where resources from the north and south, east and west, changed hands. Immigrants flocked in. From skyscrapers to the blues, many of the distinctive qualities they eventually lent to the city can be traced back to the place’s particular juncture of geology, geography, and climate.

Some of the effects that Western civilization had on the area’s natural diversity—the way it wiped out many native animals, for example—are well known. The herds of bison that covered the prairies like a brown tide were hunted out almost entirely a century ago; they survive in Illinois only as a few captive animals. Cougars and wolves are unlikely to stalk the oak savannas again. And some former residents are gone forever. Passenger pigeons will never again darken the skies over the woods nor will Carolina parakeets appear on someone’s bird list. They, too, are extinct.

What is less obvious is that the swelling human population of the Chicago region was the key to retaining much of the area’s natural legacy. “What happened was a combination of historical accident and wisdom,” says Jerry Sullivan, author of Chicago Wilderness, An Atlas of Biodiversity. “Because it was an urban area from the beginning, a lot of places that would have been turned into farmland elsewhere were kept as open land for speculation.” Failed subdivisions, extensive estates, and other patches of land that were never developed on a large scale helped preserve many wild places. Other effects of urbanization were even more unpredictable. “On the south side of Chicago and in Lake Forest, fine prairies and savannas survived because mischievous kids burned them on Halloween,” says Stephen Packard, conservation biologist for The Nature Conservancy in Chicago.

Other patches on the outskirts of the city were retained in a wild state by virtue of the simple fact that Chicago residents missed wild places. They set aside an extensive network of preserves that became the forest preserve system in Cook and neighboring counties. Throughout most of the rest of the tallgrass prairie, by contrast, farmers eventually converted almost all available land to agriculture. In many rural counties fragments of original prairie exist today only in tiny patches in old cemeteries and along railroad rights-of-way.

Today 11 percent of Cook County consists of protected lands—a far larger proportion than in most counties in the prairie region. Now, in an impressive exercise in wisdom, a legion of professionals and volunteers is working to protect and restore the diversity of nature on public and private lands throughout the metropolitan area.

Part of the legacy of that accident and wisdom is this: a surprising number of rare creatures still live in the metro area. As a sort of index of that richness, consider just a few of the species whose presence in the area illustrates the importance of retaining and restoring Chicago’s diverse wildlands. Think of them as neighbors that represent many others:

Lakeside Daisy (Hymenoxys acaulis).This extremely rare species lives only on dolomite prairies. One of the two known populations in the world is in the Chicago area—re-established thanks to a restorationist/gardener who grew the flowers after the original patch was destroyed in 1981.

Leafy Prairie Clover (Petalos temum foliosum). The largest remaining populations in the world of this flower survive on dolomite prairies in the area; the only others known are in Tennessee and Alabama.

Eryngium Root-Borer Moth (Papaipema eryngii). Insects have suffered a substantial but generally unheralded loss of diversity with the loss of extensive prairies. This lovely species survives on only a few remnant patches in the Chicago area.

Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly (Somatochlora hineana). Named for its vivid eyes, this aerial predator is associated with a very particular geological formation, the dolomite rock of the Niagara Escarpment. In the Chicago area, that bedrock surfaces along the lower Des Plaines River, producing rugged cliffs and outcrops. Clean water seeping out between the rock and the glacial debris that overlies it supports marshes and wet meadows—and this globally endangered species, which elsewhere survives only in Door County, Wisconsin.

Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). In decline in many parts of North America, this woodland predator has come back nicely in restored woodlands in the Chicago area. It was recently taken off the state’s list of threatened and endangered species.

Kirtland’s Snake (Clonophis kirtlandii). Now absent from many former haunts throughout its range, this crayfish-eating snake requires high-quality wet savannas for hunting and wintering sites. The species is secretive and very difficult to monitor, but restoration efforts in the Chicago area are maintaining significant patches of its habitat.

Massasauga Rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus). These small rattlesnakes, rarely seen, prefer tallgrass prairies with scattered woody shrubs; in winter they hibernate in crayfish burrows in wet grasslands. Only three populations have been found in the Chicago area, and only a total of seven statewide. Because most populations are too widely scattered to allow for dispersal between them, they are threatened by a loss of genetic diversity through inbreeding.

It is less individual species, though, that make the Chicago area unique than its fine examples of rare communities of species. These communities—the tallgrass prairies and oak woodlands, the diverse wetlands and Lake Michigan duneslands—have survived to this day with more of their original integrity intact than is the case throughout most of the rest of the Midwest.

“I tend to think in terms of communities rather than individual species,” says Jerry Sullivan. “Oak savannas are extremely endangered as an entire ecosystem. Our prairies are extremely small, but very high quality in terms of the number of species present in them.” A few examples of these fine remnant communities include West Chicago Prairie in DuPage County, Wolf Road Prairie in Cook County, Middlefork Savanna in Lake County, Chiwaukee Prairie in southeastern Wisconsin, and the dunes of Illinois Beach State Park, among others. Sullivan points out that this region has many high-quality wetland communities—marshes, bogs, sedge meadows, and fens—as well.

All these environments are indeed far smaller than they once were. Prairies that once extended for miles or tens of miles have been reduced to a handful of acres today. “These are almost museum-sized pieces we’re working with here,” says Tim Sullivan. “They’re not continental-sized ecosystems anymore.” Still, in some places it may be possible to get a sense of what it was like for the first American settlers who encountered the endless waving prairies of Illinois and the open marshes that rang with the calls of ducks and swans and cranes.

The Midewin Tallgrass Prairie Preserve at the former Joliet Army Arsenal is the largest tallgrass prairie restoration effort in the world. Sandhill cranes, after decades of absence, are nesting again in the Chain O’ Lakes marshes and several other locations in Lake County. Deer and Canada geese populations have rebounded to the point that they are often considered nuisances.

These advances have been possible only because of the Chicago region’s other great natural resource—its people. In large numbers, they are collecting and replanting the seeds of native plants, removing invasive species from the forest preserves, setting controlled fires on the oak savannas, and conducting groundbreaking scientific research.

They are finding that doing so is more than an abstract exercise in ecology: it is also a matter of connecting to one’s surroundings, a matter of understanding what home means.

It is the people working to reshape the area’s landscape in accord with its long and rich heritage who are defining the term “Chicago Wilderness” to mean: wilderness with people.

Peter Friederici has written about nature for National Wildlife, Wild Earth, and the Chicago Reader.
He is the author of two books, The Suburban Wild and Nature’s Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation.

 

The Chicago region’s 300,000 acres of protected natural lands are places of untold drama and richness. Today, such biodiversity depends on human understanding and stewardship.

01 Rough-legged hawk. Willy Onarheim/AKM Images, Inc.

02 Hine’s emerald dragonfly. Dave Jagodzinski

03 Cooper’s hawk. Richard Day/Daybreak

04 Automeris io moth. Casey Galvin

05 Leafy prairie clover. Carol Freeman

06 Coyote. Dave Jagodzinski

07 Crab spider. Casey Galvin