Drive southwest from Chicago on I-55 and you pass through a microcosm of the midwest. You see endless flat fields that grow corn and soybeans in the summer but at this time of year are bare and black, their color revealing their prairie origins.
To the east is the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, a facility created early in World War II to make TNT and other ordnance for the military. The plant’s last big period of production was during the Vietnam war. Since then it has been mainly idle, and now it is on the list of Army facilities to be shut down and disposed of.
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You might think an ammunition plant wouldn’t qualify as a piece of primeval Illinois, but surrounding the ordnance works, serving as a buffer between it and the rest of us, is a very large piece of land. A total of 23,500 acres. The idea, apparently, was to locate ammunition plants in the middle of large tracts of land so if one of them blew up it wouldn’t take any civilians with it.
Many bird species are known to be sensitive to habitat fragmentation, and the 43 square miles of relatively unfragmented habitat supports many of them, including the Acadian flycatcher, American redstart, black-billed cuckoo, Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bobolink, grasshopper sparrow, and both eastern and western meadowlarks.
If that happens, the Illinois Department of Conservation will seek to develop a joint management plan with the Fish and Wildlife Service for the federal land and the Des Plaines Conservation Area just across the interstate. This could create a preserve with a total area of more than 30,000 acres. And this is where the big dreams really start.
Prairie Parklands is the provisional name for this visionary partnership. Part of the management plan would be to plant prairie species of grasses and wildflowers on open lands that are now weedy meadows or cornfields. “We can raise plants on a large enough scale to do that,” Harty says. “We understand the mechanisms now. And here we could do restoration on a landscape scale. This kind of opportunity is not likely to arise again.”
