Scott Johnson and his daughter Grace, 13, of Oswego found a way to help the environment as well as enjoy some father-daughter time on Saturday.
“I started coming to this about a year ago,” Scott Johnson said during a prairie restoration day effort at a site in Kendall County near Saw Wee Kee Park between Oswego and Yorkville. “I’m a local high school biology teacher and run the ecology club at Oswego East and am aware of local restoration work and some of the things that the Oswegoland Park District is doing as well as other organizations in the wider community. It was really my daughter Grace who wanted to get out and go through an ecological restoration experience.”
Volunteers representing the Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves met early Saturday morning for the prairie restoration effort aimed at eliminating invasive species at the site.
Beginning at 8 a.m., the restoration effort on the property owned by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources began, led by Oswegoland Park District restoration technician Samuel Kilgore of Oswego, who has been part of the project for nearly two years.
“We started this November of 2021 and we have been meeting more often as time has gone on,” Kilgore said. “At first, we met once a month for the first 18 months, but when I came in about 17 months ago, we moved it to two days a month as I had a little more time. We have a number of regulars, but we are seeing more people out here. While five to eight people is a good average, the last time we met, we had 18 people.”
Kilgore said invasive species removal has focused mostly on a shrub known as buckthorn which he said “in the last 10 or 15 years has really gotten big.”
“The fall, winter and spring, we do a lot of cutting of the buckthorn to get it out of there and then in the summer it’s a lot more hand-pulling of grasses and flowering plants,” he said. “That’s the majority of the invasive plant removal that we do.”
The group also collects seeds from native flowers that are returning to the site as well as “re-identify the types of plants that used to be present on site but haven’t been seen in quite a while.”
“This site was dedicated in the 1990s as a nature preserve and because (Department of Natural Resources) staff, who owned the land, don’t have nearly the manpower or the ability to get to these sites frequently, once it was protected as a nature preserve, management just kind of stopped,” Kilgore said. “Since the 1990s, the only thing the (department) did was mow a short trail there for deer shooting in the winter. The area had 300 native species in it in the 1990s and when we came here three years ago, we found just 15 native plants.”
As a result of the program of invasive species removal, 60 to 70 plant species have returned and more are appearing each year, Kilgore said. He added that people are motivated to continue working on the project as it is clear the work is paying off.
“I think people come back because doing the work and seeing the response in the prairie – kind of learning the story of what the prairie used to be and what it is now – it’s a really infectious process,” he said. “You can see changes year-to-year. You walked though this two years ago and it was just a wall of brush. Now we have almost an acre and a half cleared, and there are wildflowers coming back and we’re finding snakes out there and interesting birds. Most of our volunteers have some connection to nature already and through all those avenues people can find something they’re interested in out there.”
A group of more than half a dozen including the Johnsons set out at the site on Saturday morning ready to work.
Grace Johnson said she likes hanging out with her father and “being out in nature and helping with this restoration project.”
“It’s really fun and fun to do with my dad too,” she said. “Sometimes being out here and trying to chop down honeysuckle is a big job, and the bugs can be bad. I’ve been out here in the winter and like it better because I like it colder.”
Mary Theodor of Oswego said she joined the group a year and a half ago and that she “believes it’s important to preserve the prairie, and I really love nature.”
“I want to have a future where things are preserved for our youth and keep the area beautiful,” she said.
Abby Geers, 17, of Oswego, said she started working last fall on the project as part of a National Honor Society program but kept coming back ever since.
“I’ve been pretty passionate about this stuff for a while and trying to find a way I can better my community,” Geers said. “Especially in high school and here in Illinois, there’s not too many opportunities so to be able to find a group and be super-comfortable with them is very important.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
