- I am pleased to welcome Pam Holy,
who is the President
of the Chiwaukee Prairie Preservation Fund.
She was born in Kenosha, and when she grew up,
she moved away, and she has now come back.
When she was a kid, she played in the prairie
as a little girl, and she's now back.
She has taken over preservation of it.
She's here with us to share this ecological jewel.
So, without further ado, Pam Holy.
(Applause)
- She left out the part where Chiwaukee Prairie
is my passion, so I'm more of a passionate prairie-lover
than a public speaker, so maybe you'll cut me
some slack on that one.
It is an ecological jewel, Chiwaukee Prairie.
That is what it is.
It is also a State Natural Area
as opposed to a State Recreation Area like Bong,
where they have all kinds of motorized activities
and dog training, etc., etc.,
as opposed to a state park where they have a lot of camping
and fires, and stuff like that.
In a State Natural Area, you have photography,
hiking, enjoying the ecology: the plants, the animals.
So there isn't really a lot of active motorized things,
no horses, we don't have any horses at Chiwaukee.
That was a joke, folks, but it's true.
That's a State Natural Area.
Wisconsin has approximately 560 State Natural Areas,
the last time I got a count of State Natural Areas.
Previously, they were called State Scientific Areas,
which gives you an idea of what they for.
They were under the Endangered Resources Bureau,
so it's places that have very special natural components,
ecology, so they are pretty much all ecological gems.
Chiwaukee is quite special in that category, however,
and that's why it is also
a Federal National Natural Landmark.
Not all Areas get that designation.
As of September of last year, Chiwaukee Prairie
is part of a designation
as a Wetland of International Importance.
This is a real feather in the cap of the people
who have been trying for 50 years to preserve this prairie.
It's a recognition of how special it is.
Some of the reasons that it's special,
are that it is a rare remnant Lake Plain Prairie.
What does that mean?
When the lake receded, probably 4000 years ago,
that was the beginning of the plant life
at Chiwaukee Prairie.
It left in stages, and it left swales and ridges,
and also a topography that ran from the last lake edge
down to the present lake edge.
You've got differences in water levels,
you've got differences in soil, you've got a lot
of micro-communities, so we have a sedge prairie.
Sedges of course, have edges, they're not grasses,
do we all know what sedges are?
You don't have a lot of sedges in your gardens, do you, no.
Anyhow, we have sedge prairie,
we have calcareous fen, which means that it's going
to only have certain kinds of plants in it,
because it's very alkaline.
There are wet areas, wet mesic areas, mesic areas,
dry mesic, and dry areas, so you get a real combination
of little eco-climates and soil conditions,
so that we wind up with 400 species of native plants.
In addition to the plant material, the plants of course,
attract the insects and the birds.
I think this count is low, but this is the only one
that's published, is 125 species
of nesting and migratory birds.
It has the highest conservation significance
for a Wisconsin Legacy Place.
Wisconsin Legacy Places are different
then State Natural Areas.
They're fewer and more special than even
the State Natural Areas.
It's also been designated
by the Wisconsin Wetland Association as a Wetland Gem,
a Wisconsin Wetland Gem, we got that designation
a couple of years ago.
Chiwaukee Prairie is a key component in the Natural Area
stretching from the city limits of Kenosha
where the dunes are, all the way
to the Waukegan Power Plant.
I know a lot of you are from Racine,
so you may not be all that familiar with the area.
It's a stretch of about 13 miles.
It is what is called the Chiwaukee Prairie Illinois Beach
Lake Plain, and that is where we got
our Wetland of International Importance designation.
Ramsar certifies areas in the whole world
that are important as wetlands.
In Wisconsin, we have two, one's up in Door County.
Chiwaukee is part of the Chiwaukee Illinois Beach
Lake Plain, which is also a Ramsar-designated area.
It just confirms that what is here, is very very special.
For the volunteers that have been working to preserve
Chiwaukee Prairie for 50 years, this is really
a landmark thing, because it tells the whole world,
not just Wisconsin, not just the country,
but the whole world, that this is really a special place.
I don't know if you can read up there,
I will give you some of these facts
as soon as I put my reading glasses on.
It's over 3900 acres in it.
Up at the top is the Kenosha Dunes.
The line that runs mostly long is the railroad
that runs from Wisconsin into Illinois,
I guess it's the Metro now.
It was called something different when I was a kid.
These are the dunes that I played in as a child too.
At that time, we're talking about in the 1950s,
it was just before the really terrible erosion
from Lake Michigan, and the dunes at that time
had cliffs by the shore that were as tall as this room,
and Cliff Swallows dug their holes in and laid their eggs
and nested in there in every year.
Come the 50s, that changed, so the dunes are
quite a bit different then what they were when I was a kid.
There were wild strawberries and a variety of plants there.
So you've got 13 miles of coastal wetland plain
that go all the way down to the bottom here,
is the Waukegan Power Plant.
In Wisconsin, everything north of the line
is Chiwaukee Prairie now.
The original Chiwaukee Prairie was the southern-most end,
but this is also North Chiwaukee Prairie,
all the way up through the dunes.
The whole thing is the State Natural Area.
It's a little unusual for a State Natural Area,
because those of you that know Carol Beach know
that there are a lot of homes down there,
and a lot of roads and things like that.
There's an awful lot of prairie in there too,
as I discovered this year when I had to mow trails
that were in the back areas.
More than I thought, because most of our time
for our organization and the volunteers, have been spent
in South Chiwaukee Prairie, which is the last mile
before the Illinois-Wisconsin state border.
Just south of the border is Spring Bluff.
This is a Lake County Forest Preserve District property,
and we're very lucky that it's there,
because both the Ramsar designation
and several Federal grants that the Lake Plain has had
in the past several years, are the result of work
that started with a restoration ecologist
from the Lake County Forest Preserve District, Deb Maller.
She has organized the land-owning partners and managers
across the state line, and if anybody knows about
working across state lines, it can be a tough thing to do.
She did that, and then she also spear-headed
getting the Ramsar designation for the whole Lake Plain.
That's where Chiwaukee-- I keep losing my arrow.
That's where Chiwaukee Prairie is the northern half of this,
and quite important to it.
You have 13 miles of Lake Michigan coastline here,
and federally endangered bird species,
but it also provides habitat for 63 state, that's
Wisconsin or Illinois, listed species.
This is endangered, threatened, or of concern.
Also, 930 native plants.
Our book has some 400 in it, but we have not been able
to do thorough search of Chiwaukee Prairie,
and I'm sure it would be higher.
These are some of the things that got the designation
as a Ramsar site, an international site.
300 animal species, please, everybody knows
that animals don't end with the furry ones
and the feathery ones, they also include all of the insects,
the butterflies, the dragonflies, the spiders,
and the crayfish, and everything else that goes with it.
There are many more animals in this area than 300.
They have 300 that have been listed.
310 migratory birds, lots of hawks.
We have hawk-banding,
and hawk monitoring at Chiwaukee Prairie every fall.
This fall we had 110 got banded, and that included,
do we have Hoy people here?
It included Northern Harriers, four species of hawks,
Merlins, Peregrine Falcons, and I'm not a bird person
so I can't remember the others but I could give
anyone interested the list.
Those are some of the migratory birds,
so this is the reason that this is
really an important thing,
all the way, the whole stretch of it here.
The federal grants that we have received in the last
six years, three of them, sustain our Great Lakes grants,
cover the whole territory, working the whole territory
to restore it, to get rid of invasives mostly.
This is just Chiwaukee Prairie.
Here we have the state line down at the bottom.
Sheridan Road, which goes all the way up to Racine
so I know everybody knows it,
don't want that.
This last mile from 116th down to the state line,
you can see is a rather big stretch that's 300 acres
of South Chiwaukee Prairie.
Then from 116th Street all the way up to the dunes,
is North Chiwaukee Prairie.
It wasn't always Chiwaukee Prairie,
but we'll get to that too.
This now is the State Natural Area, from the dunes
all the way down to the state line.
Chiwaukee North, which was originally Carol Beach Prairie,
is 450 acres from the Kenosha Dunes to 116th,
and it is being acquired and managed
by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources since 1985.
They came to the game late.
Chiwaukee South, which is where Chiwaukee Prairie
gets its name from, that was the original Chiwaukee area,
is 300 acres from 116th to the state line,
it's a mile, and it was acquired and managed
by the Nature Conservancy and the Chiwaukee Prairie
Preservation Fund and volunteer committees prior
to our fund being incorporated.
That started in 1965, so we've been at this
for 50 years, this was our 50th anniversary in 2015.
It's still going on.
The south end that the Nature Conservancy owned,
was transferred recently to the DNR.
Some people weren't happy with that.
The problem with the Nature Conservancy managing it
and owning it, is that they're in Madison,
and they had difficulty bringing resources
to this far corner of the state.
Often what they do with their properties,
particularly if they're smaller, is transfer them
to a local entity that can handle it.
Because DNR was buying land in North Chiwaukee,
they were the logical organization
to have the land transferred to.
There's also probably, what's a quarter of 300?
What's a quarter of 300?
A quarter of the South Chiwaukee Prairie
is actually owned by University of Wisconsin-Parkside,
and the Nature Conservancy deeded that to them
for research and education purposes.
The Nature Conservancy always had management of it,
and DNR now is working on a Memorandum of Understanding
to manage that part of the prairie too.
So South Chiwaukee is basically
now being handled by the DNR.
This sign is rather old, this is right at the corner
of 116th and First Court.
And you can see it was called a Nature Preserve
way back when, and that it was called
a State Scientific Area, all of which became
State Natural Areas later on,
and the National Natural Landmark.
But before it was Chiwaukee Prairie, it was something else.
We're going way back now.
In the beginning, it was called Weyhe Prairie,
and it became Chiwaukee Prairie by a combination
of Chicago and Milwaukee.
Those are both Indian names, right.
I have no idea what Milwaukee means,
Chicago was supposedly a misunderstanding
of the word for Nodding Onion, something like
shikaakwa, or shi-kaa-gu.
So it is sort of a modified Indian name.
Weyhe was a farmer that lived in the area
and owned some of the land previously.
This is a 1929 map, but the plan started in 1925
by a fella named Penny and his sons.
The idea was to take some of the business away
from Lake Geneva, and set up a really expensive
resort area on Lake Michigan for people from Chicago
and Milwaukee, if there were any in Milwaukee,
they really thought they would all come from Chicago though.
This might be hard for the arrow to see,
if you can see, down here there was going to be
a train station right at 122nd, so that people
could just ride the train down, and then of course,
they would have bus service into the very expensive
and large homes that would be built along the lake shore.
This is just from Tobin Road, which is 116th,
this only goes a half-mile down to 122nd.
122nd was the main entrance.
There was no connection to Tobin Road,
there was no connection across the state line.
The only entrance would have been at 122nd...
to the exclusive area.
This larger lots along the lake,
and the ones that bordered the north end
of the golf course, 18-hole golf course going in,
were 100 by 400 feet.
That's a pretty good sized lot.
Most of the ones along the lake shore
are half in the lake, at this point.
This is now First Court on the backside of these lots,
and a good part of Lakeshore Drive is in the lake
at this point.
It would be 271 lots were originally platted
around the golf course and down along the lake shore.
They had planned this 18-hole golf course and a hotel,
and guess what happened in 1929.
I think most everybody in this room learned about it.
I didn't say you were there, I said you learned about it,
came the crash in '29, put an end to development.
At that point, nothing had been built but five houses
along the lake shore, right along here.
This one is still there.
It's got a big bunker built around it, but it's still there.
This part of Lakeshore Drive is in the drink, is gone.
First Court runs along what would have been
the golf course, down here.
This is the remnant of the nine-hole golf course
that was built in the prairie before the crash.
The interesting thing about this slide though,
is you can see in the whole area, the ridge and swale
topography in the light and dark as it goes through here.
This little pond was to be in the north nine holes
of the golf course, didn't happen.
It's gone, I don't know what happened to it.
The golf course itself was, even by this point,
you have a hard time, I tried and tried to figure out
where the fairways were, in the south end
of the golf course.
But I couldn't figure it out because they're all
mixed up with the swales from the prairie.
At this point, the prairie has pretty much taken it over,
even though there were disturbances later on.
From 1925 to 1965, you got nine soggy holes.
It's a wetland. It's a wetland.
Platting this out and selling these properties
was just a boondoggle.
It's as bad as property in the Everglades.
The crash put an end to the development,
and now we're just talking south of 116th Street.
That was Chiwaukee on the lake,
that's where the name comes from.
North of 116th Street, this is where people get confused.
I've seen articles in the paper
and in our village newsletter.
Edith Rockefeller McCormick had a lot of money.
In the 20s, she went in and she bought everything
up to the city limits of Kenosha from 116th Street,
and from Sheridan Road to the lake.
She was going to do the same thing,
she was going to put in shops, and a hotel,
and properties and everything.
She got a little bit of a later start, did straighten out
one creek unfortunately, but the Depression
put an end to her development also.
In 1936, okay, here's a chance for the state of Wisconsin
to take all of that land, which is now in foreclosure.
Nobody's paying taxes on any of it after the Depression hit.
They could have purchased everything from the city limits
of Kenosha to the state line
for a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a state park.
Can anyone guess why they didn't do it?
It wasn't money.
They didn't want people from Illinois to use it.
They'd figured those would be the people what would use it,
so why build a state park for people from Illinois.
Guess who moved into Carol Beach, people from Illinois.
(laughter)
Okay, in '36, it didn't happen.
Now come the 40s, after the war, there's a boom.
People are looking for places to live.
A fellow named Shaffron bought
Edith Rockefeller McCormick's land.
He got it at a fire sale, actually it was a sheriff's sale,
and he bought the whole thing.
He started Carol Beach, named for his daughter
who was born the day he sealed the land purchase.
It became Carol Beach Estates, and it's several units,
and it's also wetland.
In the beginning, they let people even put basements
in this area.
You know what you do when you put a box in water?
It kind of floats.
It was a bad idea, development up there was a bad idea.
They've had a lot of problems with water in that area
because of the buildings that gone on.
Back down to the south end to Chiwaukee Prairie,
in the 40s, they re-platted the golf course.
They wound up with a total, this is the last mile,
now there are 633 parcels of land
just south--
Just in the last mile there from the railroad to the lake.
The lake erosion had nailed some of the stuff
along the lake, but in the early 60s,
people were really beginning to recognize the natural value,
what an ecological jewel this was.
They were out there, they were taking pictures,
they were going through and seeing the plants,
they had a 1912 plant list that they were working off of,
and they were finding these things.
It was like, wow, this place is fabulous.
DNR was asked if they wanted to take it on,
now we're back in 1965.
Do you want to take on buying this,
it's a natural jewel, it's terrific.
Well, no, it would be too costly and too difficult.
Remember now, they got involved in 1985,
buying the north end, so they waited 20 years
to get into the game.
DNR backed out.
In 1965 a development called Pompeii on the Lake
was going to put a marina in the far southeast corner.
1000 boat slips into the prairie, dig up the prairie
and put 1000 slips in there.
Put in a large motel and resurrect the golf course,
which was a soggy thing to begin with.
This is a plat map from 116th up here
down to the Wisconsin-Illinois state line.
This is the railroad over here.
Now you can see this little strip of land
that runs all the way, the whole mile,
from 116th all the way down
to the Illinois-Wisconsin border.
This by the way, is the golf course that got re-platted
into an additional 300 and some lots,
much smaller than the original lots from the 20s.
So the Pompeii on the Lake went to the county board.
It was a meeting in winter, it was snowing like crazy.
Hugh Iltis, I don't know if any of you know the name,
he was a botanist, a pre-eminent botanist.
Hugh is still alive, Chris studied with him in Madison.
He came down in the snow storm to plead with the county
to not allow this development to go in,
it would destroy the prairie, and to save the prairie.
Well, tax dollars were at risk here,
so of course the county board goes,
okay, we like this development, this will be great,
this'll be terrific for Kenosha.
Let 'em try building,
anyhow, so they okayed it.
There were a group of people, a lot from Racine,
several from Kenosha, who went out in the hall.
Louise, oh, her son had a trucking company,
I can't remember her last name,
she got a piece of paper out, and she said,
I want to start taking names, this isn't gonna happen.
Al Krampert and Phil Sander, Phil Sander has a park
named after him out on Highway 50 just before
you get to Woodman's.
Phil charted every Indian mound in Kenosha County,
he was terrific.
He and Al Krampert had been out there,
they had seen what the prairie was.
They were among the early people who got together.
They were trying to figure out how to stop this thing.
They started looking at plat maps and saw that little strip
of land, that went the whole length of Chiwaukee Prairie
from 116th down.
The Prairie Patriots, I named them that, because boy,
that's what this people were, they were courageous.
You're looking at now, 633 lots that they want
to start buying up for prairie.
Can anybody imagine getting involved
in something like that, wow.
So Phil and Al had surveyed it.
Gen Crema, and I know there are some people, Mark is here,
Four Seasons Garden Club.
Gen was also one of the founders
of the Four Seasons Garden Club in Kenosha.
Jim Olson was the botany professor out at the extension
at that time, it wasn't Parkside, it was the extension
that I went to, which is now Bradford High School.
Many many others got together outside of there,
and they went to the Nature Conservancy,
because DNR was not interested in buying this land,
too costly, too difficult.
They got a loan from the Nature Conservancy
to buy out that mile-long strip of land,
which basically did to Pompeii on the Lake,
what happened to Pompeii in...
(laughter)
They blew it up, the plan fizzled, they gave it up,
they quit trying to do it.
They began buying back an area which, in agreement
with the village, which had been reduced from the 633
to over 500 lots, so that was already a great savings.
They were buying them one at a time for two decades.
They would raise funds,
they would just go everywhere,
they had art sales.
I don't know if anybody remembers Mary Ellis...
Mary Ellis did artwork for 'em,
I think her husband was mayor once.
- What is it? - [Voiceover] Hammond? - Hammond,
Mary Ellis Hammond.
If you get our newsletter, if you look at our newsletter,
I think her artwork is still on the back of it.
We're running out of her artwork,
we may have to start re-publishing old pieces of artwork.
They had art fairs, and they had bake sales,
and they gave talks at churches, and they did everything
they could to raise funds to start buying back these lots.
They did that for two decades.
In 1967, after they had decided, they called it
Chiwaukee Prairie based on that early land development.
It became a State Scientific Area, which was a boon.
That helped a lot, that got a lot
of credit going with everyone.
In the same year it became the National Natural Landmark.
This is two years after they started buying it up.
The recognition was there for what an ecological gem it was.
The village of Pleasant Prairie rezoned the study area,
which is the area that was going to be prairie,
for conservation, which made it easier to buy lots.
It also perturbed a lot of people, who had bought some
of these early lots in the hopes
of having their summer home by the lake.
I do know one family that built a summer home,
pretty much in the interior of South Chiwaukee Prairie,
it was off of what was called Third Avenue.
He had to truck in dozens of truck-loads of soil,
to make it high enough to put in just a little cottage.
It's still out there, it's one of our historic sites.
The foundation was concrete block.
And I think the whole thing was 20 by 15,
that was the size of the cottage.
But he had to truck in all this soil to make the area
high enough to build a cottage.
This is what everyone who bought land out there
was up against for the most part.
There were some higher areas.
This is the problem that they had.
People were upset that they bought land
that was now conservation-zoned, and they weren't going
to get their cottage that they wanted.
Still two generations, in some cases, were working,
but the third generation of owner, they are still upset
with the fact that this was zoned conservation.
Some of them are coming to us,
they don't have the same antipathy towards the prairie
that the early purchasers did, and they want to sell.
But others are hanging in there, so it's going to be awhile.
We have, at this point, there are still 50 lots
in the South Chiwaukee Prairie to be purchased,
to be bought back, and at this point,
we have a number of willing sellers.
We're hoping DNR gets its acquisition plan going very soon.
1985 approached,
the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission
did a whole plan.
They looked at the area, they looked at the plants,
they looked at the animals, they looked at everything,
and they decided that there should
indeed be Carol Beach Prairie
and the Chiwaukee Prairie, should be preserved.
That's when DNR got involved, buying the north end.
At that time, it was still Carol Beach Prairie.
What the result was that they zoned it,
this was not an uncontested thing,
but they zoned 52% of it for preservation,
which was terrific, just great.
The DNR began buying the land north,
and Trident Marina, which was a much-reduced version
of Pompeii on the Lake, and had a little marina
in the far corner, filed for bankruptcy.
A marina in that southeast corner of the state,
you've got the lake and you've got the Illinois border.
Illinois put up a breakwater.
You know what happens when you have something like this,
and sand coming down the lake?
The sand goes right into the marina.
One of the reasons that they filed for bankruptcy
is because the boat slips were always full of sand,
and if you want to park your boat up high, that's great.
But if you want to get it in and out, it's not gonna work.
Also in 1985, these are two Racine folks,
who as young women, or little girls,
Donna saw the prairie for the first time
when she was taking a train ride past the prairie.
She saw it and thought it was wonderful
and she always wondered what it was.
Joan Rohan's father took her for a ride down there,
when she was a young girl.
So they were aware of the prairie, and they had been
involved with the TNC committee that had been working
to buy back lots and that.
They were approached by someone in the committee
who was ill and had to give it up,
and said, look, we really need something more stable
than an ad-hoc committee of the Nature Conservancy,
to make sure that this prairie is preserved.
So they established the Chiwaukee Prairie
Preservation Fund, and filed for a 501(c)(3)
with the help of the lawyers from Johnson Wax.
They helped them file this.
For the next 22 years, they worked at land acquisition,
restoration, fund-raising, community outreach continued.
In 1985 alone, I can't imagine this because I give
one or two of these a year, and that's about it.
They gave 37 slide show presentations to raise funds
in the first year that they were incorporated.
The mission statement of our organization is simple.
Acquire, restore, preserve, manage prairie lands
in Chiwaukee Prairie, and in 1985, it was still
the Carol Beach Prairie,
so also in the Carol Beach area of Kenosha County.
They were basically working in South Chiwaukee,
but because the mission statement, and the bylaws,
and the articles of incorporation include
the Carol Beach area, we're free to acquire and work
up there with DNR.
As well as promote conservation education of its members,
well, some of you are members,
and the general public.
I consider you a special segment of the general public
because of your attachment to the earth
and what grows in it.
How do we do it?
Donations, we don't do bake sales anymore.
We do have the newsletter, which is up there,
and that is our one outreach for donations a year,
comes out in December, because we don't spend a lot of money
on things besides land acquisition and land management.
So we have one newsletter that we send out a year.
Then we have monthly email notices.
There's a sign-up sheet up there if anyone wants to get those.
The donations go for land acquisitions
or land management only, and the donors can designate
if they only want it to go for acquisition, that's fine.
If they give us the discretion to use it
for acquisition or land management, that's great,
because in recent years, land management has become
a whole lot more important, because of the influx
of invasive and exotic species into the prairie.
We've had to do more and more management.
We've had stewardship grants from the state.
We've had small grants, one from Root-Pike WIN,
I'm sure lot of you know Root-Pike WIN,
that was for our rare-plant monitoring program.
We've had sponsors for our prairie Port-a-Potty,
this is important for volunteers out there.
This is something that we try to get a contractor
or someone else to sponsor, and equipment.
We had some good friends at We Energies
for a long time, and they gave us our trailer
in 2001, I think.
We're still using that trailer to haul equipment around.
Volunteer hours, we couldn't do it without volunteers.
Everybody who's ever been involved with the prairie
through the committee, through our organization,
through the people who come
to work days, were all volunteers.
Those hours in the prairie are used as a match for grants.
We've had three Sustain Our Great Lakes federal grants
that apply to the whole lakeshore.
We have pledged acquisition funds to the first one,
because we bought a big lot
between First Court and Lakeshore Drive.
It was big bucks, and we provided half
of the match for that grant.
The next two grants, we pledged $30000 in volunteer hours.
That's a lot of volunteer hours, so we really need
volunteers to help us out.
Always with grants, this is what we do, we pledge
our volunteer hours.
Four Seasons restoration volunteers,
this is one of the earlier pictures.
In the red jacket, you can see Lenny Wiess,
he's a master gardener.
I think probably everybody's heard a joke from Lenny Wiess.
Some of our other people,
this fellow here, Don Schneider, he's from Menominee Falls.
He came down every month throughout the year
from Menominee Falls to work as a volunteer
on our third Saturdays.
John Harbeck came all the way from Cedarburg,
down every month to work, and John is still doing it.
Eric Hall, if any of you are in Hoy Audubon,
Eric was past President of Hoy Audubon,
he's our treasurer, couldn't live without him.
Heather Patty just moved back to North Carolina,
but in the meantime, she was on our board.
She was an employee of the Nature Conservancy
and came to our work days.
Then she went off into natural landscaping company
and did some contractor work for us.
It's a family thing.
Anyhow, all four seasons we do it.
What do they do?
Invasive and exotic species control, at this point in time,
is probably our biggest task.
We have a list of 85 exotic or invasive species.
Why do I make the distinction?
Because some native species can be invasive in a prairie.
Cottonwood, green ash, those are native trees.
They don't belong in a prairie,
and if we had the right amount of fire,
they wouldn't be there.
But exotic species can be extremely troublesome,
because they can out-compete our natives.
They green up earlier, the seed production,
we don't see 'em before they get going,
which is why we have people scouting for invasive species.
We mow trails out there so people can get around
more easily, and fire breaks in the fall
for the hoped-for prescribed fires.
We track land acquisitions, we keep track
who still owns what, we talk to them, send letters.
We're going to do of that under DNR.
Trash patrol, we have a board member and his wife
who live right on 116th, and they do trash patrol
around Prairie all the time.
Seed collection and distribution, this is something
that's going to be much more important in the near future.
Where the golf course was and where all those extra roads
got platted, there was disturbance.
It wasn't plowed, but where they were going to put roads in,
they didn't pave 'em, but they heaped up the dirt
where the golf course was, they knocked back that.
It didn't kill the seed bank.
You can go through those areas and you can find
tons of natives.
More diversity is what we would like,
so in the future we would collect seed and distribute it
to areas that could use a little more diversity.
Neighbor notifications, we have to notify the neighbors
when we're going to have prescribed fire.
We also have a Neighbor Day so they can come and talk to us,
learn a little more about the history
if they're new to the area, share with us what they've seen.
Boy, we've had some animal sightings.
We had one fella, he saw a river otter.
He was sure it was a river otter.
Anybody seen any river otters? It was a mink.
We have lots of mink, and it was a mink.
Mink like to flap around in the water too.
So Neighbor Days, neighbor notifications.
We need historical research, we haven't been able
to put anybody on that one, that's a volunteer effort
that we would really like to fulfill.
Frog monitoring, we have a wonderful woman
who is an Executive Director and a naturalist
at a place on Milwaukee Avenue in Illinois,
and I can't remember the name of it,
but Sue Holt is going to handle frog monitoring
and training anyone who wants to do frog monitoring
out at Chiwaukee.
It's a fun thing to do,
you learn the different
noises that they make.
Youth projects, we have Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts,
Boy Scouts, Eagle Scouts, but it's not a regular thing.
We're starting to hook into the Cub Scouts
at the Prairie Lane Elementary School in Pleasant Prairie,
which is where the prairie is,
the village of Pleasant Prairie.
We're going to get the Cub Scouts hooked in routinely,
so that as these kids grow up,
they come back to the prairie repeatedly.
We, as you all know, we need to replace ourselves,
it's got to start with the kids, getting them out there.
Bird surveys, we did five years of bird surveys,
we haven't done the last couple of years,
we're going to have to start that again.
If you do it one day a year, and it's a rainy day,
or crappy weather, or nobody shows up to do every area,
you don't get the right counts, so we need to do that again.
Board of Directors, that's a fabulous group of volunteers.
They put it out, and we couldn't do what we do
without the wonderful people on our board.
Work days aren't all that bad.
This is our Queen Anne's Lace gathering.
I made it sound nice so people would come to it.
They had just worked for three hours in pretty warm weather,
that truckload has been pushed down and pushed down
and pushed down, they worked for three hours
pulling Queen Anne's Lace on that Labor Day.
They still look pretty happy, I think that's pretty good.
Now, we have another volunteer, a non-human volunteer.
I think it's the next slide. Yes, here he is.
Or she, or whatever.
This is the caterpillar of a Narrow-winged Orbit Moth.
I think I've got that right. Magusa divaricata.
This little moth migrates up from the south.
Apparently it's not finding enough buckthorn to eat
in the south, because it's coming up here to eat buckthorn,
can you imagine?
It is a native moth, native.
This is what they do to buckthorn, can you see them,
I think you can see 'em up there.
(Laughter and applause)
Yes, yes, let's hear it for Magusa.
They start at the top of the shrub,
and they just eat it down completely.
If you were to touch one of these, we tried collecting some,
and we had to learn fast, if you touch a branch at all,
they all drop to the ground.
They are not going to be eaten by birds.
They all drop to the ground, and then they come back up
and eat some more.
They did such a terrific job, not this past year,
not in 2015, because if you remember, we had a really cold
beginning of the summer.
If it's a migratory thing, they have to have the right
conditions to come up, so they didn't join us.
We have the welcome wagon out for them this year,
and we're hoping that they make a reappearance.
Our best management tool is fire, prescribed burns.
In the early years of the prairie,
and you'll see some scenes that were taken in the 70s, etc.
They burned a lot more often.
The railroad would burn, they would flip a flare
into the prairie when they were going by,
and the whole thing would burn.
It was great for years, the prairie got burned.
More houses, the railroad doesn't do that anymore.
The last time they had an unexpected fire out there,
the fire trucks from Pleasant Prairie tooled out there,
this must have been 12 years ago or more,
they went out there and got stuck in the wet prairie.
Lucky their fire trucks didn't burn up.
So now it's prescribed fire, you have to have
the right weather conditions, you have to have
the right equipment, you have to have a tank pumper
to make sure there's enough water out there
to wet the sides down.
Everybody has to be certified to do it,
we have some volunteers that are burn-certified.
It's more difficult to do,
especially the weather conditions.
This fall they were going to burn several areas,
and they couldn't do it because it was too damp.
Prescribed fire is what keeps down
the brush, and a lot of the invasives
are very susceptible to fire.
If you have a fall burn, this is what
it looks like in winter.
It's really great, because you can see in the spring,
it's going to be black soil.
That sun's going to beat down
and it's going to get everything coming up great.
All the duff that was impeding the plants is gone.
Now we're going to take a look at some of the residents,
or visitors to the prairie.
This guy will be back next month.
This is the male Red-winged Blackbird.
He'll be out there singing his song,
and apparently every one of these guys has a different song,
although only the females can tell that.
They'll be staking out areas, they come a month or more
before the females ever come up,
so they'll be out in the prairie doing that.
This is one of our first flowers which will come out
in April, and the interesting thing around it,
that is all Narrow-leafed Cattail.
If you don't have fire and you can't burn the duff off,
it chokes out the natives.
The contractors have been very good,
on the Sustain Our Great Lakes contract,
getting rid of a lot of the Narrow-leafed Cattail,
which is exotic, and the hybrid cattail, which is
also exotic, because the only native cattail
is the Broad-leafed Cattail.
It doesn't grow in these dense patches
which have very little habitat value.
It grows scattered, you can see it in south Illinois Beach,
you can see some of it scattered.
You can also see big patches of the hybrid too,
and the Narrow-leaf.
This is our Marsh Marigolds, some of our first ones.
If you have a fire out there, the way they did last year,
this spring, the Shooting Stars are just phenomenal.
Pink, lavender, white, just really great.
This is the Shooting Star close up.
It's really a spectacular flower.
It's not that difficult to grow in gardens.
It grows in sunshine, it'll grow in part shade.
This is a very old shot of the prairie,
you can see very little brush.
You can see forever, and the yellow in the back here,
this is all Marsh Marigold growing in the wetter areas,
you can see a little water out here.
That's all Marsh Marigold out there in the early spring.
Up closer here, you have the Shooting Stars.
I apologize for the fuzziness.
This is a really delicious plant.
Ingrid tells me though, that I shouldn't tell you to try it.
When we were kids, we would pull a blossom off
and you can see they're nicely curved,
and suck the nectar out.
Really delicious.
Pollinators love this flower in the springtime.
This is a really wonderful thing: Cotton Grass.
It's not a grass, it's a sedge.
Sedges are the ones that have edges, and no joints.
We have a variety of sedges on the prairie.
We also have carex on the prairie,
26 species of carex which also have edges.
This little guy, you'll only find him in a wetland area.
He's the Sedge Wren.
Most sedges like damp areas, so in the wetter areas
of the prairie.
He looks so huge here, doesn't he.
He's a little critter.
You'll often see combinations of plants,
you see the Shooting Stars, they're all over.
There aren't that many spring flowers.
But when you get a variety of the plants coming up,
they'll be scattered, they won't be clustered so much,
they'll be scattered all over.
You'll see a little Hoary Puccoon one place.
All over as you walk, you'll see a lot of different things.
As you come to the prairie, week after week,
you'll see different things.
Come out in the spring, come in a summer month,
make several visits, you'll see
all different things blooming.
They don't bloom through the whole summer
like some of the garden plants.
You picked 'em because they're going to blooming
and nice in your gardens for a long period of time.
Prairie plants don't work that way very well.
They pretty much come into season and go out of season.
This is one of our red plants, the Indian Paintbrush,
we also have the Cardinal plant, lobelia cardinalis.
There aren't a lot of red natives.
This guy, called the Reverse Tuxedo, the Bobolink,
he is a grassland bird.
We're hoping they come back.
They were at Chiwaukee, brush came in
and reduced the grassland areas that are farther in.
We're getting them back in shape,
and we have seen him coming through.
He's been spotted at the prairie year after year,
but we haven't known them to nest there in recent years.
He's not eating the mugasa divaricata,
that's something else.
- Don't let him.
- No, no, no, they're not allowed to eat 'em.
Lupine, we transferred some seed
from the far west side of the prairie up near the railroad
over to First Court.
As you go down First Court up to 121st,
when the lupine are blooming, there's a whole field of lupine.
It is spectacular.
Just incredible, and I don't know if you know lupine.
When it's ready to give out its seed,
if you wanna collect seed,
you better be standing right there,
because it shoots them out, it's sort of like Jewelweed.
The Coreopsis, we have a couple of species
of Coreopsis, the lanceolate and the palmata.
This is a favorite garden plant, I think, for many people.
This little guy, my brother-in-law took this picture
this past summer.
I don't know what kind of butterfly it is.
We had a butterfly blitz in June of 2012.
In two hours, these people counted
34 different species of butterflies.
That's on one day for two hours, 34 species.
So you can imagine, there's probably
quite a few more out there.
Some of 'em are really unusual.
The Spiderwort, this is a big garden plant,
this'll bloom repeatedly through the summer.
The interesting thing about Spiderwort, which some of you
probably know, that blossom will be for one day.
It hopes to get pollinated because at the end
of the day, it's going to melt.
If you walk past Spiderwort in the prairie
late in the day, after those blossoms have closed,
you will wind up with blue streaks across your legs.
They literally do melt.
This is one of the more spectacular sights in the prairie,
the Michigan Lily, the Turk's Cap Lily.
Just a great thing.
I tried planting these in Chicago, I had a native garden
behind our house, and I tried planting them.
The squirrels really love them.
(Laughter)
Didn't work out.
This is another beauty.
The way to see the prairie is to walk slowly through it.
You come upon something like this, it is just so gorgeous,
you almost want to kneel next to it, and take
a really good look at it because it's just fabulous.
Prairie Coneflower, ratibida pinnata, that's how I say it.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not a native plant
specialist, I am an invasive plant specialist.
That's where I spend my time and effort,
and I have avoided showing you those
because I want you to fall in love with the prairie.
The Nodding Onion, this is where Chicago got it's name,
this is shikaakwa.
They are very easy to grow, I had a lot of 'em
in my yard in Chicago, I do now.
Butterfly Milkweed. I'm sure you've all seen it.
This is a good garden grower too.
Pollinators love it, monarchs of course,
are obliged to lay their eggs on Milkweed.
If they do not lay their eggs on Milkweed,
their eggs will not survive.
They have to be on Milkweed so the larvae
can take advantage of the Milkweed.
We have eight species of Milkweed that we invite
them to land on.
In 2001, they tagged monarchs in Chiwaukee Prairie,
and several months later, five of them were found in Mexico.
This is how monarchs do it, the flight down is all
one butterfly, there's no stopping off to propagate.
Coming up, they stop several times to propagate.
So we have eight species, at least two of which,
I think are on the heritage list.
Here's a Bronze Copper.
This picture was taken during the butterfly blitz in 2012.
Liatris, Prairie Blazingstar, that very first block
that has that big bronze sign in it
that's now very out-dated, is full of these
in season, which would be later summer.
We have four species of Liatris on the prairie.
These guys, these are really fun to watch fly around.
They're insect-eaters.
You get this white stripe on the tail, you can't miss 'em.
If you see a Kingbird, you know what it is.
Aren't they pretty. That's so soft looking.
Prairie Dock, one of the three Silphiums
that we have on the prairie.
This is probably not something you'd grow in your garden.
The leaves can be two feet tall and a foot wide.
This one is in a place in the prairie
where the plant material is all very dense.
Where it's not quite as dense, you can get Prairie Dock
growing this tall, which is another reason you'd probably
wouldn't want to put it in your garden,
but it's great in the prairie.
The other one is the Compass plant.
It has a cut leaf, and supposedly they turn
so that you can tell which direction is which,
because they follow the sun.
I've never used that to find my way around.
Rosinweed is the other Silphium that we have out there,
a lot of it.
Joe Pye Weed, in some areas of the prairie that are
a little more disturbed, we can get Joe Pye Weed.
It's tall, it's one of our Eupatoriums,
I think we have Boneset, Snakeroots, another kind
of Boneset, and Joe Pye Weed for Eupatoriums.
The Calico Pennant.
This picture was taken on that blitz,
but they weren't actually looking at dragonflies.
We would love to have someone come out
and look at the dragonflies.
There are times out there in the summer,
where the dragonflies are, you just can't take your eyes
off the sky because they're that thick,
taking care of the mosquitoes, isn't that great.
They're carnivorous.
They're so pretty, but they're carnivorous.
This is one of our smaller orchids,
it's only about this tall.
There's another Lady's Tresses that isn't Nodding,
and the way you tell the difference
between the two of 'em is by smell.
That let's me out.
I can't do it, but that's how the real aficionados do.
We have things out there besides plants and mammals.
This is one of the more beautiful spiders.
I have never seen one on the prairie,
somebody gave me this picture.
The insects that are there besides the butterflies
have never been really counted.
They do know they have the Silphium Borer out there,
which is an endangered insect.
Beyond that, we're not sure whatever else is out there.
We have things like land crayfish.
You can find them. They're easy to find.
You go into the wetter areas, and the grasses form hillocks,
and under that hillocks is a hold, and right in front of it,
is a bunch of snail shells crushed up.
You know that there's a crayfish in that hole.
Long about fall, some of our taller grasses,
and this is Turkey Foot, Big Bluestem.
You can see the turkey foot, I think, it's all of you
who have live turkeys.
No, okay.
And Indian Grass, which is another one of our tall grasses.
You can see the Liatris, the Prairie Blazingstar there
towards fall.
In the fall when the grasses like this are tall,
there are areas of the prairie, where if it's a windy day,
you want to walk through it.
It is magic.
I can't explain it to you.
The feel of the grasses, the sight, the sound of the wind
blowing through them.
Really, really wonderful.
In the fall, this next slide is something
that happens all over Wisconsin.
The Sandhill Cranes do their fall dance.
If you've ever seen it anywhere, we saw it up north once,
on a side road.
We were coming down, and they were dancing and yelling,
it was great.
This is not a picture from the prairie.
This, my brother-in-law took this summer,
this is a picture from the prairie.
I was driving out there, and I had
heard cranes out there.
I saw three brown lumps out in the prairie,
and I thought, "Oh dear, someone has gone all the way
out there to dump."
I sat there and watched for awhile.
One of these heads, the red head popped up,
and looked around, and went back down.
It was mom and dad, and a fledgling feeding.
They nested in South Chiwaukee Prairie last year,
they may have nested in North Chiwaukee,
but we're not sure.
The year before, they nested in Spring Bluff,
just south of the state line.
So we have Sandhill Cranes back.
This is because of the federal grant that allowed
contractors to come in and get rid of very large swathes
of the Narrow-leaf Cattail, so it provided the habitat
for the cranes to come back.
This is glorious.
You love cranes, I did it for the Cub Scouts,
should I do it? (imitates crane call)
(laughter)
Scared the heck out of 'em.
The cranes make a noise, those of you who've heard it,
you know it's a crane.
This fall, we were watching them fly over,
we were out there just figuring out
what to do for a work day,
must have been October.
No, it was December.
The cranes were flying by, they were late leaving,
it was just flock after flock of the cranes
flying over and making those wonderful sounds.
One of the last flowers that will bloom in the prairie
in the fall is the Gentian.
This color is spectacular.
When you see it in person, you do go down on your knees
to get a good look at it.
It's just fabulous.
We have four species of Gentians on the prairie.
This is probably the Lesser Fringed,
it has a little bit of a fringe.
There's the Fringed, which has more of a fringe,
and if you go to our website, the picture on it
is the Fringed Gentian.
Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.
Then there's the Downy Gentian, which has no fringe,
and there's the Bottle Gentian, which never opens.
How the heck does it get pollinated?
It gets pollinated because the bumblebee will come to it,
force its way in to get the nectar out
of that Bottle Gentian, and that's how it gets pollinated.
They just are tight-closed.
That is what's going on in the fall.
Then we have the sunset to end the day on the prairie.
I would ask you all, if you want more information,
go to our website, the Chiwaukee Prairie
Preservation Fund website.
If you would like to know what's going on on the prairie,
keep updated on it, we send out one email a month
to tell people what's going to go on in the work day,
and also what other activities are going on.
The next one, anyone interested in rare plant monitoring,
Kay McClellan will train you, it's not that difficult,
you love pretty flowers, these are some of the rarest
and most precious things on the prairie that we try
to monitor to see where they are and see how many we have.
Anybody who wants to help with that, Kay's phone number
and contact information are also on page two
of the newsletter up there.
Then we're on Facebook, so you can get some
of the same information off of Facebook,
if you don't want us to send you the monthly email.
I thank you all, this has been a pleasure for me
to be able to present my prairie to you.
(Applause)