University Place

Reestablishing a Nourishing Relationship with Nature

– Barb Cattani: So I wanna start by introducing our keynote speaker, Stephen Packard. Stephen has led numerous efforts to restore high-quality prairies, savannas, woodlands, and wetlands. He initiated the North Branch Restoration Project, a volunteer-driven project to restore and protect ecosystems along the North Branch of the Chicago River, which was featured in the book Miracle Under the Oaks. His work led to careers as the director of science and stewardship with the Illinois Nature Conservancy, and a teaching position with Northwestern University. He was a founding board member of the Society for Ecological Restoration, which now has chapters throughout the world and is a preeminent organization in this flourishing field. Stephen currently collaborates with a wide variety of efforts to conserve natural areas and create a culture of conservation. Please join me in welcoming Stephen Packard. [audience applauding]

– Thank you, and thank you Wild Ones. Some of us in nature find magic and fun, lots of it. As Wild Ones, we build community. We the people educate and restore. Some of my friends ask sometimes, [audience laughing] “What are you doing puttering around in your garden “when the Earth faces such challenges?” But in fact, we are only beginning to understand and doing the early experiments of how to restore health to the planetary ecosystem. And I’ll tell you some stories and show you some experiments from that struggle, that struggle and that fun. In the case of shooting stars, we love beautiful flowers, but we care more about the seeds as we do ecosystem restoration. The seeds from these shooting stars, which had been a rare plant in our region, take 10 years from germination to flowering in the wild. But once you get them into the ecosystem, the ecosystem is on the way. This is Linda and my house, garden, little wilderness patches. All the wild plants we grow in our yards are there for providing seed. We need rare seed to restore ecosystems. We gather more than 200 species every year and we put them in more than a dozen different mixes and put them out into the woods, prairies, wetlands, fens, sedge meadows.

Many of the seeds you can’t get very well in the wild because they are way down below other plants by the time the seeds are set, and hard to find in large quantities. Or like this Bicknell’s geranium, they pop as soon as they’re ripe, and you have to be there at that moment or you don’t get the ripe seeds. So as we do this work, we get together, we think about it, we plan spring, summer, fall, winter. When the seed season is over starts our brush bash and bonfire burn season, and that goes all winter long. And we look forward to every season. We like winter. In winter, we do some of our most profound work. We think through the ecosystem, what needs to be cut out in order to provide the most health as we move forward. Our work events are social events. People bake delicious treats and bring them to these events.

Would we rather be inside watching TV? Oh, please. [audience laughing] Winter is also a great time to study history and broaden the planning. Most of Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois looked like this for thousands of years. Prairie to the west of rivers and other fire obstacles, savanna and woodland to the east. And we started with prairie. In fact, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison was the first place on the planet where people truly engaged with restoring health to a natural ecosystem: the prairie. It seemed so rare in the Midwest. Less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the original prairie survives. The Amazon Rainforest, 50% surviving. Very important, but there’s hardly anything left.

If we want to save the genetic resources of the temperate world for a thousand different reasons, we need to save the ecosystems of the temperate world. In this case, we started on sown prairie, two acres of high-quality prairie surviving in 100 acres of mostly brush and weeds. And over the last 40 years, we’ve done what I will describe to you throughout this talk so that now most of that hundred acres looks like this or is on the way to it. When we started out. . . [audience applauding] [Stephen laughing] Go ecosystem! [laughing] When we started out, much of the site I’m showing you looked like this. Fun in this case meant recreational vehicles, which people meant no harm by, they were having fun. Most of the site looked like this, mostly a few species, mostly not part of the native prairie ecosystem. One part looked like this.

This turned out to be one of the healthiest parts of the site because the kids had kept it open, it hadn’t shaded over, and endangered species survived around the edge where the brush hadn’t gotten too dark. But now, 40 years later, this exact place looks like this. [audience murmuring] It contains the endangered bearded wheat grass, it contains– not ’cause we planted it, but ’cause the seeds were blowing around the site from others we planted, the federal endangered prairie white-fringed orchid. A great many rare and endangered plants grew where kids once had a different kind of fun. Here’s what this recovering ecosystem looks like in early spring. Here’s what it looks like in summer. And much of what I’ll talk about takes place in what survives as the Midwest wilderness, but a lot of what I’ll talk about to my Wild Ones friends is in our little yard. Here it is, the one little patch of our yard where there’s enough sun to grow prairie. We don’t do a lot of prairie in our yard, but about six feet across, we have a bit of prairie. Just to the northwest of that, we have, or had, woodland ecosystem until the ash tree died.

You can see it mulched in the middle here there. How will these woodland plants, which we’re growing for seed, do in full sun for a while? Well, we’re letting some hazel bushes and hickory trees grow, and they’re doing reasonably well. The flora of the open woodland does okay in full sun for a while. Here, we’re looking at the whole front yard and both of our neighbors’ houses on either side. This is not a big lot, not a big house, it’s not a big yard, but here and there, there are the right conditions for most of the plants we want. If you look over to the left, you’ll see a little hophornbeam tree, and under that hophornbeam there is Robin’s plantain, Erigeron pulchellus, and a great many species that we really wanna get seed from. And on the very bottom on the left are the leaves of the endangered Liatris scariosa, savanna blazing star. We’ll hear more about that later, too. Here’s the backyard. It’s wild and woolly.

Some of the neighbors were a little nervous about it. When one neighbor was selling their house next door, the real estate agent came over and said, “Your lawn is. . . what?” And I said, “Oh, the lawn’s actually a little scraggly, “the lawn part, we’ll mow that right up. “But as for the rest of it. . . ” And I described it, and the real estate agent, and you can see the real estate mind is at work, said, “Oh, it’s not unkempt, it’s special. ” [audience laughing] “I have a feature for you, prospective owners.

“Your next house has a yard that’s special. ” [audience laughing] In this case, we did not have much purple Joe-Pye weed to gather seeds of early on. You can see it’s more than abundant here. When we planted the seeds out in hundreds of acres of open woodland ecosystem, we got more than we needed. It’s gone from our yard. We do a lot of gardening by subtraction. When we don’t need the seeds anymore, we cut it out and given that pressure, other stuff that we wanna grow does well. Some plants just don’t do well in our yard in difficult competition, so they grow a little patch beside our garage between a little walkway and. . .

We have many species of rare and endangered plants that thrive in here, and we get seeds of them year after year, put them out in the ecosystem, and pretty soon they’re off and running on their own. This is our neighbor Malcolm’s yard. You can see ours in the background. They have a very different look. But those little red flags here mark individual milkweed shoots. We gave Malcolm a couple of milkweed plants. He put ’em right in his lawn. He mows around them. But they become big ranging plants and are covered during the rest of the summer with monarch eggs. And we grow lots of monarchs.

Here they are, here’s two monarchs nectaring on the endangered savanna blazing star. They have a wonderful time together. The monarchs just love the savanna blazing star, spend a lot of time on it. We also grow a lot of shrubs. In the early days of restoration, there was a principle: the prairie is most threatened by woody plants, cut ’em out. We cut out a lot of native shrubs. We need to cut out a lot of native shrubs if the prairie’s gonna recover. Under modern conditions, you have to burn an awful lot to keep the shrubs down, and some of the invertebrates don’t wanna burn quite that often. On the other hand, in the savanna and in the oak woodland, we want a lot of shrubs in patches. Much of the savanna and woodland were open, too.

You could gallop a horse through the woodland, they said. But there were patches here and there which were critical that many species of birds, butterflies, and others. So this is American plum. In order to get it to germinate properly, we sacrifice by personally eating all the fruit. [audience laughing] And then some people have had trouble germinating this one. We just put it in dirt, put it in the refrigerator, let it stay there over the winter, and next spring they’ve all sprouted and we [coughs] plant them out. In a four foot across patch, weeded carefully, we can get hundreds of star grass bulbs, hypoxis, and violet wood-sorrel bulbs, and a number of species of violets, some of which are challenging to gather seed. We gather a lot, but we also take those bulbs, harvest them, dig them up, don’t eat them, put them out where they’ll be able to proliferate so that formerly very rare plants, we now have tens of thousands of yellow star grass and violet wood-sorrel plants blooming in our restored prairies and savannas nearby. In the case of some rare species, this one is purple prairie clover, the purple one down underneath the big compass plant, it doesn’t do very well in our yard and it doesn’t need to because we got it going early in the restored area, and we just gather the seed and spread it and gather the seed and spread it, and we have at least 100,000 plants of purple prairie clover. So that was my introduction.

Now five little experiments starring a couple of species of orchids, the quest for seed, Bicknell’s geranium, and plant Guantanamo. This is the small white lady-slipper. Had been endangered in Illinois until we put a lot of work into it, and now it’s doing well enough to be taken off the list. This one we found did well for us only when the seeds were planted in a very high-quality system. When I say did well, it was not immediate gratification. Having planted a few times in a few places and kept careful records, we find that this one pops up and blooms luxuriantly after 10 years or so. [audience laughing] It spends most of its early years underground, not putting up a single leaf. It forms a little conspiracy with a fungus and the orchid seed says, “Oh, fungus tendrils coming towards me, “please don’t infect my seed. “My seed is so small, it’s just a few cells. ” And then the fungus ties into it and then the orchid says, “Ha ha, I’m taking you over, and we’ll work together “to build a nice, big root “that after eight or ten years is ready to come up “and put up a flower,” the first year very often.

But we found this one only in a place that was being bulldozed. We found it at the last moment. We raced out, dodging people who thought we weren’t supposed to be there, and dug up these plants. We planted them in badly disturbed areas ’cause we didn’t wanna dig up high-quality areas, and they lived there, but they refused to reproduce. Later, we said “Let’s try, it’s making seed, “it’s not reproducing at all, “let’s just move the seed to the high-quality areas. ” And they came up by the hundreds, so that was a wonderful thing, except for one problem. They grow in these, now, in these little Guantanamo cages. The deer eat every one we don’t cage. Thank your hunters in areas where deer populations are imbalanced. These are not people of evil as they are portrayed in some cases.

But for now, generous people cage every lady-slipper every year, and they do great. This is the prairie white-fringed orchid. Another one deer like to eat. This one we found dwindling, tiny little populations, and what it needed most, it turned out, when we carefully watched it, was hand pollination. It was too rare for pollinators to find it, figure it out. Pollinators love it once they figure it out. Big hawk moths are the only ones that can pollinate it. But most weren’t setting seed, and so we learned how to hand-pollinate them. It’s quite a process. It’s a very intimate process.

It’s all sticky and you get that little pollinium on the end of a toothpick, and this toothpick had two pollinia on them and it pushed one up against this sticky, gooey surface, the stigma of the flower. And then it gets all stuck in that and you can see it sort of is this almost like elastic thing as you’re pulling back, and it’ll go back, “Sprong,” and then you go to the next flower. For the moth, there’s this feature where when the moth, if this is a moth tongue, and it sticks itself into the flower, the pollinium is in there and it gets stuck on the moth like this, and this is the part with all the pollen, and it flies to other flowers on that plant and gets its wonderful nectar. And then after just a minute or so, after there’s been time to get to the next plant, you can see this thing goes. . . And now the pollen is sticking forward, and it’s immoral of orchids to exchange pollen within the same plant. They wanna go to another plant. So that’s how they do it. So you learn these kinds of things in order to figure out how to save these wonderful species.

Here’s our graph of how many white-fringed orchids there were at Somme. You can see from this experiment that if you followed it for merely the first prothetic 20 years, it wouldn’t look like it was doing much. And we find many of our plants do this. It takes them a while to figure out the site. Maybe genes are exchanging and they’re finding combinations that work with our soils and our hydrology and our predators or whatever as a hypothesis. We see so many graphs like this. But now that there are 400 or 500 plants a year, this site has more white-fringed orchids than any other site on the planet or any, one or two depending on, who’s leading the charge that year. And this is just because of a few wonderful people like yourselves putting a lot of time into it and figuring it out. So seeds is a big part of what we do all year. All summer long, we’re gathering seeds, starting with the ones that ripen first, then middle, then early fall, then late fall.

Here we have seeds of cream gentian, a wonderful savanna species. The three part, otherwise spherical seeds in the middle are New Jersey tea. If you want that one to germinate, you need to pour boiling water over it. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what the literature says. And we trusted the literature, but we tried it both ways. No germination without the boiling water, full germination with the boiling water. Don’t boil it, just pour some over it. Then the seeds in that pod are of a species that pioneer children used to call sow and piglet. And you can see those little suckling baptisia seeds inside their pods. This one you chip with a knife in order to get a little coating off it if you wanted to germinate it right away.

If you don’t care so much about immediate gratification, just throw it out and the bacteria will eat away at that coating over the years, and someday it will germinate. When we gather seeds, all kinds of people take part. Little kids are sometimes very competitive and thoughtful and smart and learn, and a little kid can learn to say Eryngium yuccifolium before you can turn around. [audience chuckling] And we get vast numbers of seeds. We also find that for many people, seed collecting is a stress reducer, it’s meditative. We just do it. You pare, you’re thinking, you’re out with other people, you might wanna chat with them, then you might wanna get away from them for a while, and you’re in the ecosystem. One fellow during seed-picking expeditions used to come and hide in the bushes, we didn’t notice he had something under his jacket, and quietly played the flute [audience awws] while. . .

[laughs] So this is culture, this is building a culture. Once again, we’re thinking about how to get seeds and how some of them, when you find in the wild, you can get only a handful, and to be effective, you need to put tens of thousands or millions of seeds all over, ’cause many of them have to find just the right place. They bloom with the right friends, they bloom after the right conditions. And so one of the things we do is we take the rarest, most difficult, the seeds that we need the most of the most conservative plants, the most important ones to the ecosystem, we give them to the Chicago Botanic Garden and their propagators propagate them and they grow them in little pots like this and give them to us, and then we distribute them among Wild Ones and friendly gardeners who promise not to have any other species of that kind in their yards, ’cause we don’t want genes from, god forbid, Wisconsin or Nebraska to be mixing in. [audience laughing] We wanna save the local gene pool. And they grow these plants, and they love them, and they harvest the seeds when they’re ripe, they manage to keep an eye on them. If something is growing over them, they know to look under ’cause it’s in their garden and they’re watching it, and we get a tremendous amount of seed that way. There are many species that the propagators at the Botanic Garden were no good at growing, couldn’t get ’em, but one of the volunteers, Rob Sulski, said, “What’s the matter with these people? “I can do this, I’ll figure it out. ” And he tried a lot of different things, he did a lot of different research. One of his favorite things to do is get seeds and get a little soil from around the plants that the seeds came from, grow them with great pains until he’s got a healthy plant, and then he puts a funnel around it.

It goes into the pot. And then as the seeds pop or fall off or whatever they do, they all go down into the soil in that pot. And then he has maybe 100 little plants growing in that pot. And then he invites us all over and we tease those plants apart and put them in little new pots, and then we can plant those out into the ecosystem. These people who are laughing are having a profound conversation, looking down at the endangered Bicknell’s geranium. In our area, we find Bicknell geranium only in one situation: around the edges of brush pile burns. We don’t find it anywhere else. And at least for our ecotypes, a grass fire or a woodland leaf fire does not release the seeds. Maybe for us it grew where tree trunks fell over and caught on fire and sterilized the soil, and then there are lines of geraniums along the edge. But this is a plant that is in trouble.

We don’t have enough big, old, dead trees, and we’re not sure how long those seeds are gonna last in the soil. So we decided to try and figure out what to do with them. This is Bicknell’s geranium reaching out of its cage. We allow it to escape Guantanamo. When the plants get a little older, the deer eat ’em and kill ’em and pull ’em up by the roots when they’re young, and don’t so much go after them later. This is that splendid little flower. This is that sprong we saw earlier. You have to get ’em just before this stage. But then how do we plant them? And so we decided to do experiments of putting them in little fires, under the fire, on the edge of the fire, for different amounts of time. I encourage you to do experiments.

They’re fun. [audience laughing] But they’re a lot more fun if you keep careful notes. For many years, we thought, “Oh, this is so, “what we’re doing is so significant, we’ll surely “remember all the details. ” [audience laughing] Maybe others have had that experience. So we kept careful notes, we plotted, thought, we gave the Botanic Garden scientists our draft protocols. They made wonderful suggestions to improve them. We did all these many different tests, and we found that we basically learned nothing ’cause in every case that they germinated, we heated them for a short time, for a long time, right under the fire, at the side of the fire, just some coals put on ’em, heavy burning logs, they all germinated. But we learned that, and that was good. Here’s something we learned when we used oak trees in the savanna to mark corners of experiments. We wanted the experiments to be out in the open, so we’d find a seedling oak and we’d make a careful map and put in other features of the landscape, and then we’d seed within the rectangle or quadrangle or whatever.

If we could find three oaks, it was a triangle. That’s geometry. [audience laughing] And 40 years later, we happened to notice that these oaks that we used as markers were still a foot or two tall. What happens to those oaks if you watch them? Well, we burn them every year or two and the top burns off, but oaks are prodigious resprouters. They resprout with great energy, a great amount of protein and the deer love it, and the deer eat ’em down to nothing. And they barely get a foot or two tall before the next fire, and then we burn ’em off again. So we’ve started making little Guantanamos for our oak trees. This one kept it from the deer for a while. Now it’s hanging out, so some volunteer has to get to it and raise the cage if we want it to keep going and getting above deer height. But we now have substantial oaks that are off, they’ve been launched, and the cages can go and guard something else.

This is what our cages look like. We get this stuff at Home Depot. We have cage-making parties, they’re fun. And they go around a lot of different plants. Prairie gentian is one that we have quite a bit of on some sites, but we never seem to be able to get any seed. And for us, we found that the deer were eating them every time before the seed formed. So we put deer cages on them. And then we found that the voles were eating every one [audience laughing] before they were seeded, so we invented vole cages. These, they’re a little trickier to make, but those nice little things sticking up, when you put ’em down into the soil while it’s wet, when it hardens, they’re in there nice and solid. And the gentians survive all the way through seed season, at which time we found that caterpillars were eating most of the seeds.

[audience laughing] There’s a sawfly caterpillar that gets in. But we get some, and with the some we throw them around, and the seeds, once you get the seeds, they do great. We also use the vole cages on plum trees and oak trees so the rabbits and voles won’t eat the bark off during the winter. We use big cages in a few places. This is a spot where we didn’t think there was probably a major impact of the deer, but there was a small population of the endangered wood pea or cream vetchling, Lathyrus ochroleucus, almost gone from Illinois. So we put this fence around the whole patch and that turned out to be an experiment. Looks like the deer were having an impact on the large-flowered trillium. There it is, inside the cage. I emphasize this business with the deer not because we don’t like them, we love them. We like to see them, we like to eat them, we like them to be part of a balanced ecosystem.

So three gravest threats. It wouldn’t be right for me to give this talk without saying, in terms of conservation challenges and realities, there are really three very grave threats to our ecosystems these days. Invasive species, overpopulated deer, lack of fire. Those are the three, and we really need to think about them and we need to combat the problem. I’ll subject you to only one picture of invasive plants. Reed canary grass, teasel, purple loosestrife in this case. It’s very important to be on top of them when just the first few get there and get ’em out. The reed canary grass, we spray herbicide on it. We don’t know another way to get rid of it. We were too pure to use herbicide in our early years.

We didn’t paint the stumps with herbicide. Wonderful advisors told us, “We’ll advise you only if you don’t use herbicide,” and I said, “Well, you heard the mentors. ” Well, the mentors were wrong, and we found over the years, many people would come and say, “I’m interested, I’ll be a steward of a preserve, “but I won’t use herbicide,” and I’m not one for arguing with them. I would say, “Thank you, that’s wonderful, “use herbicide or don’t, “we can teach you if you wanna learn,” and we found, this is another experiment, that without exception, every such steward used herbicide or quit. In other words, it didn’t work. On an area large enough for conservation of substantial populations of plants and animals, you can’t do it without herbiciding the invasives under modern conditions. Maybe someone can prove it to be done. We’re eager to see their results. Same thing with deer, I’ll only show you one photo. They’re wonderful animals, they deserve our respect.

Hunting and hunters also deserves our respect, I think. And fire, it’s one of many celebratory, bright parts of the year. Every year we burn a part of the preserve, and here are some results. This is from 15 years of restoration, carefully monitoring according to a careful protocol within the restored areas and outside the restored areas and similar habitats. The bar on the left shows after restoration, the bar on the right counterintuitively shows before. The green is in the woodlands, the blue is in the grasslands, the orange is with all the different ecosystems put together. Four times the vegetation quality, four times the number of species per quadrant in the restored areas compared to the others. And initially we just did prairie. Later we discovered the savanna. Later we discovered the oak woodlands to be just as needy.

Here’s one of our oak woodlands when we started out. Those pole trees are invaders. They’re native to the region, but they’re invaders in the oak woods. They utterly prevent the oaks from reproducing. The understory is typically mostly buckthorn. The buckthorn and the pole trees kill off all the lower limbs of the oaks, which would tend to keep them in a natural open oak woodland or a savanna. And when time comes for the trees to meet their maker, there are no young oaks. In many cases, as in this one, there’s nothing left but buckthorn. So we started experiments. Our first experiment was we burned only.

We burned only for a couple of years, crawling around on the ground looking for seedlings. What’s gonna come up? Answer: Canada thistle, dandelion, [audience laughing] reed canary grass, there wasn’t much. So we started seeding, and we discovered that the seeds of the woods are quite different from the seeds of the prairie. Lots of fruits. I don’t know why, someone could research that. Fruits are animal-dispersed. Animals pick up big fruits and fly with them or walk around with them. And that place that you just saw looking so dismal with nothing but buckthorn, after a few years it looked like this, in early summer it looked like this, in late summer. It’s inspiring. Here’s a study that’s, this is a partial graph.

It’s now gone on since 1985. Every two years we sample the vegetation on a transect through this open woodland. The green line is quality species, ones that we would all love and cherish. The red line is hated weeds and aliens. There was mostly weeds and aliens when we started. This project thrived for a while, but then there was an explosion of deer, then both the village and the forest preserve district that owns the land started controlling them and it looked like the experiment was on a good track again. Then there was a big political mess and all restoration by staff and volunteers in three counties was closed down. But after time, that was straightened out. And look at that graph. I don’t have the more recent years, but the green line keeps going up and the red line keeps going down.

It’s inspiring, it’s wonderful, it’s still in early stages after 30-some years. It’s got a long way to go. It’s wonderful to watch. We were there at the beginning. I have every confidence that people will be watching it 50 years from now, and I can’t wait to read the paper. We don’t have the shrubs. There’s a lot that is going to become more complex about this ecosystem, but there’s a lot that we do have. Ron Panzer, a great entomologist, studied this site before we started and said, “I don’t think you’ve got much to work with. “It’s pretty far gone. “The Edwards’ hairstreak, “the commonest hairstreak of the savannas is not there.

” And four years later, he came back and repeated his study and said, “Packard, you’re a genius. “We’re finding white-fringed orchids all over the place “and the Edwards’ hairstreak “is the commonest hairstreak on the site. ” And of course we did nothing for the hairstreak, we just restored habitat. Oh, that’s the hairstreak. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s busy eating some New Jersey tea thanks to boiling water. We also did a before and after with breeding birds in the large oak woods where we got these numbers. Surveys on 2002, 2006 before the restoration started, we found a total of 15 birds on the transect of eight species. In 2016, 2017 after restoration was well underway, we found 88 birds of 26 species. And the species we found were species of conservation concern.

The red-headed woodpecker, the northern flicker, a long list. One that came into our woods, it hadn’t been around at all before, was the ruby-throated hummingbird. It eats a lot of insects that maybe other things don’t eat so much. It does a lot of pollination of red-flowered species. It just likes red. The insects don’t see red, hummingbird does. They are now a great treat to watch. The indigo buntings, we didn’t think of them as woodland birds, but when the woodland gets opened, there are a lot of buntings breeding. She’s the beautiful one and she knows how to build the nest, and they build it in our open woodlands. The bluebirds of course came back.

The scarlet tanagers were breeding in our savanna when the savanna was choked with brush, and we drove them out, we felt bad about that. But there had been one pair breeding in the savannas. Now there are three or four pair every year breeding in the woodlands. So you help some things and you hurt others, but if you’re doing good conservation, overall you’re helping everything. The coyotes came in. They make a big difference for the birds. They control the mesopredators, the raccoons, skunks, opossums, weasels, that. . . We like all those, but there can be too much of a good thing and without the coyotes, those predators eat most of the nestlings of the black-billed cuckoo and the woodcock and some of the other birds that nest on the ground or close to it.

The woodcocks have returned in such impressive numbers that when I send my reports in to Cornell every year, I always get a note saying, “You sure? “You know, can we. . . “How many do you say in your area, we. . . “That doesn’t sound right. ” And I say, “Yeah, check recent years “and come out and take a look if you want, they’re just. . .

” We find a ton of babies every year, we find a ton of nests. The woodhen starts sitting on the nest often when it’s still snowing. She’s still on the nest when the plants come out. She sits right on the ground, you can walk right up to her. If you’re tramping around off-trail, you’ll step on them or scare them up. We encourage people to stay on the trail during that season. Here’s a baby woodcock. How many people can see it? [all laughing] Oh, I see people pointing, that’s good. I wonder if I could point to it. It’s little eyes looking up at it.

You could miss that if you were just walking along. And they won’t move. [audience awws] And here it’s a little older and looks like it’s having more fun. So I wanna end up with a few comments on the human community joining the community of nature and how that’s a beginning for the planet of something very much needed: a friendly, positive approach that at least most people can understand of human beings reinhabiting, re-participating, re-becoming interdependent in a knowledgeable way with nature. Many communities, here we’re at the Orland Grassland, great numbers of regular everyday citizens come out and learn to gather the seeds that are needed. We prep the seeds, lots of people get expert at different types, they learn how to teach people how to do it. When we put the seeds out, everyone feels very generative, and it’s a wonderful feeling. Here we are at Spring Creek, here we’re at the Orland Grassland. Kids, we used to be careful not to give them the rarest plants. We found often, they take the most care.

It’s a personal area, you have to pick the kid, but we want them really widely distributed. A machine cannot do it as well as these people can do it. It’s another seasonal highlight, seasonal ritual. After the seeds are out, very often the organizers celebrate with someone’s backyard or here around a bonfire. A few people cut brush while other people put the seeds out. And it’s part of building community. Once the seeds are out, we start cutting brush again, we invite the schools to come, many kids who otherwise don’t ever see nature see it, like it, it has an impact on them. Many families come. Some kids grow up in families of stewards. And it’s just a valuable thing for them.

Every year for thousands of years, cultures that understood the ecosystem held bonfire festivals on the solstice, at New Year’s, at midwinter, to celebrate the coming of spring. You name it, there’s an excuse, hold a bonfire. We, for ours at the Somme Preserves in Northbrook, invite a bagpiper every year who leads a procession out. 400 neighbors come, many of whom hadn’t been in the woods before, to participate in a wonderful event. They’re close to the bonfire when it starts, and then they move back and back and back and back. [audience laughing] Once again, people bake wonderful treats and we have a great time. And as a result of work like the Wild Ones is doing and these people are doing, more and more government agencies are recognizing that ecosystem restoration is an important part of the mission of the agency. Cook County is now appropriating millions of dollars annually for restoration by contractors. Young people, here they are, a bunch of people being paid to do restoration, are finding careers in the field, which is a wonderful thing, having professionals is a wonderful thing. But it will never replace the volunteers who are the participatory democracy heart of conservation, environment, ecology.

Some of us are both professionals and volunteers. We plan for the future, we pay attention to kids because they are the voters of the future, and for their own benefits. It enriches peoples’ lives. And my favorite slides to end on, this is a butterfly that’s almost extinct in Illinois, the silvery blue. It eats this endangered plant, the wood pea, cream vetchling or the veined vetchling. It depends on us as stewards for its habitat. It has no chance with climate changing. It needs robust populations, large habitats. Here’s the caterpillar of that plant, and if you look closely you can see it is attended by ants. And the ants and the caterpillar have an ancient relationship.

The ants protect the caterpillar from parasites and predators of certain kinds, and the caterpillar in return waits for the ants to stroke its back with their antennae, at which it exudes up a droplet of a food that the ants find irresistible and possibly important. Does it have vitamins? Is it intoxicating? [audience laughing] We don’t know, but we know that these plants and animals depend on each other as all plants and animals, and we, the humans who breathe the same air that the animals and plants exchange, critical for us. So I wanna express appreciation for everybody who organized the conference, for everybody who does this work, for the scientists who are discovering new components for us to incorporate every day, contractors, home gardeners, everybody. It’s a wonderful world and we’re making it better. Thank you. [audience applauding]