Summer begins to slip away even as the sweat rolls down our faces. I began to notice the signs while at a cocktail party on Navy Pier the evening of July 25. Sipping rum and Coca-Cola, nibbling on prosciutto and melon or strips of smoked salmon wound around asparagus tips, savoring the loveliest of summer sunsets, I watched the gulls fly by. There are a lot of them, and many were clothed in very dark plumage, a mark of birds born this year. Already out of the nest and on their own, they are a sign that the rookery is breaking up, that the nesting season is over. The birds have begun the late-summer wandering that will culminate in the fall migration.
Shorebirds are in full flight from their tundra breeding grounds. A dozen species show up some days at Lake Calumet, whimbrels with long sickle bills among them. We can expect the first south-bound warblers any day.
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But then, the Cook County Forest Preserve District granted permission to a volunteer organization called the North Branch Prairie Project to manage the land, to restore the prairie and savanna communities that had existed before the land was turned to cow pasture and cornfield. For 13 years now the work has gone on, tens of thousands of hours of hard labor by more than a thousand volunteers. On hands and knees searching through the weeds to gather seeds from prairie and savanna plants on the site and on unprotected and endangered land nearby, doing stoop labor cutting invading brush–buckthorn and other miserable aliens–with lopping shears and handsaws, and then raking the native seeds into the cleared ground. They fought cold and damp in March and December, endured mosquitoes and heat in June, got rained on, snowed on, sleeted on, and never stopped. Week after week they came back. Spring and fall, they came out with drip torches to burn the land, to return fire to the place it had in this ecosystem before plows and pavement came to Illinois.
The shallow pond where Canada geese swam early this spring is filled with the pink blossoms of swamp milkweed, and on the low ground all around the pond are the delicate pinks of nodding wild onion. One story on the origin of the word “Chicago” says that it means “place where the nodding wild onions grow,” or something like that. Certainly this would have been a common plant on the wet prairies of the Chicago lake plain.
I happened to be there on an early spring workday when the process of cutting the buckthorn from the grove began. We started in from the north edge, cutting away these dense shrubs, and I remember how amazed I was to come upon an oak with a trunk so thick my outspread arms reached barely halfway around it.
