by Carl Strang
One aspect of Mayslake Forest Preserve that struck me when I moved my office there in November was the impressive restoration work that was taking place (here I am talking about restoration of biological communities rather than the architectural restoration of the mansion, which also is an impressive ongoing process). I think of restoration as the removal of human influences that have disturbed ecological processes and are limiting biodiversity (the variety of life in a place).
The dedication of a group of volunteers deserves a major portion of the credit for this progress at Mayslake, and I will feature them in one or more future posts. For now I want to focus on recent support that their effort has received from Forest Preserve District staff.
A large part of restoration work is the removal of invasive plants that we have, deliberately or inadvertently, brought to our continent from other parts of the world. Liberated from the consumers and other limits that kept them in check in their native lands, these newcomers have an unfair advantage in their competition with North American plants. So, the task of people doing restoration is to serve as herbivores, evening the playing field by removing some of the invasives.
Earlier in January, a crew came in with a brush chomping machine and cleared out an area of buckthorn and honeysuckle that had filled the space beneath the oak trees between Mays Lake and the friary in the southeast corner of the preserve.
I was excited to see this, because it was clear that with those impressive trees in place, the invasive shrubs had been the major obstacle preventing that slope from becoming as beautiful as the previously restored savanna I have shown in past posts.
Then a crew came to burn the scattered brush piles the volunteers had accumulated over the past year in their painstaking hand-cutting of shrubs in woodlands elsewhere in the preserve. Wholesale clearing can’t be done in places where slopes are too steep or where the proportion of native plants is high. There, hand cutting is necessary. The brush pile fires and the smell of their smoke provided a welcome punctuation of my lunchtime walks through the preserve on those days.
I wasn’t the only one noticing those fires, as I will explain tomorrow.
Recent Raptor Notes « Nature Inquiries said,
January 24, 2009 at 12:28 pm
[...] Yesterday I mentioned that the burning brush piles had attracted someone’s attention other than mine. One of the larger fires had just built to a blaze when I noticed the pair of red-tails approaching from the southeast. They made a beeline for the smoke rising from the fire, and rode its tiny thermal (rising column of heated air) upward. Hawks are not regarded as particularly intelligent or playful birds, but this looked like play to me. Apparently this thermal was a disappointment, however, as each bird moved on after giving it a single try. Only then did I think of my camera. The best I can offer is the scene, with the smoke column evident, shortly after the red-tails left. [...]