You can just buy some land and build a forest. We can do it. Chicago can do anything. –Richard M. Daley, December 4, 1991
What would we lose if they did bulldoze these lands out of existence? Twenty years ago, when I first got seriously interested in birding, I used to go to Eggers Woods pretty regularly. Part of it is a low, wet woods, and part of it is an open marsh. Birders have been visiting it for generations, particularly in early May, when the songbird migration hits its peak. I saw my first Kentucky warbler– an uncommon bird in the Chicago area–at Eggers. I saw my first Wilson’s phalarope at Burnham Woods. The marsh gave me my first and only least bittern and my first yellow-headed blackbird and black tern, all three of which are on the endangered list in Illinois.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But the value of this site goes far beyond its importance as a migratory stopover or a nesting ground for rare birds. Part of the preserve is an artificial body of water called Powder Horn Lake that was originally excavated to provide fill for the Calumet Skyway. The Forest Preserve District stocks the lake with fish. The banks are manicured and mowed, and picnic tables are scattered about. The lake provides recreation; it has little natural value. But adjoining the lake is Powder Horn Prairie, one of the finest prairie remnants in the state. In the late 70s, the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory surveyed every bit of our state’s remaining natural landscape. Out of all the land examined, only about seven-hundredths of 1 percent of Illinois’ 55,000 square miles were determined to be high quality natural areas, places where healthy native ecosystems still survived. Powder Horn Prairie was one of those sites.
It’s easy to understand the value of the area’s flora if you consider Plants of the Chicago Region, a book by Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm of the Morton Arboretum in which the authors provide a scale for classifying native plants. The scale runs from zero for species that are “nearly or quite ubiquitous under a broad set of synecological conditions” to ten for plants that “typify stable or near-climax conditions” and grow only in certain well-defined communities. Using this scale, two of the species so far discovered at Powder Horn are so extremely rare that they’d probably rate a 15.
Looking for a professional opinion on the subject, I called Gerould Wilhelm at the Morton Arboretum. In addition to being coauthor of Plants of the Chicago Region, Wilhelm has carried out studies of the plant communities of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and has been involved in restoration work on wetlands and prairies. I asked him if the mayor could build a new forest to replace the preserves destroyed by the airport.
