Last Saturday about 175 people gathered at Oakton Community College to learn about nature in the Chicago area. All of us who were there are part of the Volunteer Stewardship Network, a group started a little more than a decade ago by the Illinois Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. The network now operates all over the state, but most of the people in it live and work in the six counties of the Chicago metropolitan area.
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The active involvement of thousands of volunteers is one of the distinguishing features of natural land management in the Chicago area. Even though most of those present did not have degrees in biology, the level of expertise was very high, and the presentations were often at a level comparable to those at conferences of professional scientists.
The day started with a keynote address by Eric Metzler, president of the Ohio Lepidopterists Society, a group of enthusiasts that has recently assembled an atlas of the lepidoptera of Ohio. With small grants from Ohio’s nongame tax checkoff to cover expenses, the members of the society volunteered their time to record range and habitat information for all butterfly and moth species that currently occur in Ohio. This is a fauna that includes about 150 species of butterflies and several times that many moths. In the process of cataloging Ohio’s scale-winged insects, the volunteers discovered dozens of species new to science.
The plugs were set in typical park lawn, filling holes spaced like those in a muffin pan. Fortunately 1993 was a very wet year, so the Marquette Park prairie got off to a good start. Since then Neumann has been working to expand the prairie from the plugs to the places between them. The Park District has seeded another one-acre plot next to the transplants. No species were lost in the move, and the prairie is growing.
Grassland birds tend to be strongly area sensitive. They will not nest in small open fields, even though they use only a few acres as a nesting territory. Grasshopper sparrows are only a few inches long, but one pair will not nest in any field smaller than about 30 acres. Henslow’s sparrows like even larger spaces. They are rarely found in grasslands smaller than 100 acres. Studies on the nesting success of prairie species have shown that nest predation near tree lines at the edges of fields is twice as high as it is in nests far from trees. The birds’ preference for wide-open spaces may be a sound survival strategy.
