December 2, 2009 at 6:58 am (botany, mammals, restoration)
Tags: aster, bottlebrush grass, bur oak, Conrad Fialkowski, fox squirrel, Hystrix patula, Jacqui Gleason, Mayslake, Quercus macrocarpa, savanna, sumac
by Carl Strang
I have enjoyed watching Autumn’s transition in the savannas at Mayslake Forest Preserve. Early in the season I found an aster growing, and blooming, in an unlikely spot: a crevice a few feet off the ground between forks of a bur oak.
Here it is close up.
Squirrels continued to take advantage of the oaks’ mast year. Here is the synchronized eating team.
Colors peaked, then faded. The sumacs provided a final burst.
Meanwhile, assisted by other volunteers, stewards Conrad Fialkowski and Jacqui Gleason continued removing buckthorn bushes from the edges of the savanna. They augmented the brush piles by piling on leaves.
They had raked the leaves to clear space for spreading bottlebrush grass seeds.
That grass is their workhorse for initially reclaiming restored ground in open woodlands.
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November 24, 2009 at 6:51 am (botany, ecology, restoration)
Tags: Euonymus obovatus, trailing strawberry bush, Meacham Grove, Maple Grove, controlled burn
by Carl Strang
Recently I described this year’s results in my ongoing study of the trailing strawberry bush, Euonymus obovatus, at Meacham Grove Forest Preserve. There was notable growth in the median size of patches or colonies of the plant in 2009, which may have benefited from a controlled burn that took place there in 2007.
The graph shows that Euonymus patch size dropped in 2008, apparently from burn damage. The jump in 2009 I suspect was the result of the fire’s harming Euonymus competitors and giving the trailing strawberry bush an opening. Trailing strawberry bush colonies approached sizes they had not achieved since the 1980’s. I returned to Meacham Grove, as well as Maple Grove, on November 11 to collect data on leaf miners in maple trees. I found that both study areas had received controlled burns.
At least some of the Euonymus twigs were severely scorched.
Burned stems like the one in the photo represent a setback for the species, but the previous burn helped by reducing the competition. Now I am interested in seeing how this trailing shrub will respond over the coming season.
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November 18, 2009 at 7:44 am (birds, methods, restoration)
Tags: Mayslake, tracking, great horned owl, restoration, bones
by Carl Strang
Restoration work that clears ground, whether through controlled burns or brush removal, can reveal stories from the past in the form of skeletal remains. Last week Mayslake Forest Preserve restoration co-steward Jacqui Gleason showed me part of a skeleton exposed through recent brush clearing performed by Forest Preserve District staff in the prairie area near the stream.
Fuzzy brown feathers around the feet, as well as the size and proportion of the bones, identify the remains as belonging to a great horned owl.
I don’t have the skill to age the remains, either in the sense of when the bird died or how old it was. Most animals die young, so if I had to guess I would say this probably was a youngster that died in its first year. If so, it wasn’t from 2009. As I reported earlier, the most recent great horned owl nest on the preserve met with tragedy.
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November 9, 2009 at 6:43 am (restoration)
Tags: Conrad Fialkowski, Jacqui Gleason, Mayslake, prairie, restoration, savanna, wetlands
by Carl Strang
When Jacqui Pearl got married, she had a decision to make. You see, the love of her life’s last name was Gleason. Older readers, at least, will see that this could be problematic. She chose to go with Jacqui Gleason. The things we do for love.
A few years ago, Jacqui joined the Mayslake Forest Preserve garden volunteer team. Quickly she realized that this did not provide enough work to satisfy her, and at the same time she became aware of the impressive restoration progress being made out beyond the mansion grounds by Conrad Fialkowski. I can think of no better word to describe Jacqui and Conrad than dynamos. They are out there at least a couple times a week, often more, in all kinds of weather, through the entire year. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they are there individually, always they work hard, clearing brush, collecting seeds, planting seeds, assessing results.
Incidentally, another side to Jacqui is that she works with Chicago’s Lyric opera, dressing the women performers, a job which sometimes entails frantic quick costume changes in the middle of a scene (she mentions the pride that she and her colleagues have in effecting a complete makeover in 60 seconds or less).
Mayslake’s prairie, savanna and wetland areas are coming along nicely thanks to the dedication of Conrad and Jacqui. In the past year they have expanded the cleared area around the edges of the north savanna, fought off brush invasions in prairie and wetlands, collected and broadcast loads of seeds, and documented several newly appeared flowers in the savanna and prairie. Last winter they were assisted by District staff through a significant clearing of brush in the north savanna. The result of all this dedication is that Mayslake has one of the best restoration projects going in the entire Forest Preserve District of DuPage County.
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October 27, 2009 at 5:38 pm (botany, restoration)
Tags: Alliaria petiolata, experiment, garlic mustard, invasive plants, seedling survival
by Carl Strang
In the spring I began a study of how garlic mustard, a harmful exotic biennial, might best be controlled by manual means. In small areas where the plant is just beginning to invade, and where use of herbicides is undesirable, it is possible to uproot or clip the second-year plants. Results so far indicate that pulling is more effective than clipping, but there is a timing variable to investigate, and I need also to determine whether pulling stimulates an increased germination of seedlings in the following year.
Last week I returned to my study plots to count seedlings at the end of their first season. As the above photo shows, some tree and shrub leaves had fallen, so I carefully removed these to make sure my seedling counts were complete.
I had expected some attrition through competition, but was surprised at the numbers of seedlings that had died. Every single one of the 27 square meters in the study plots showed big drops in numbers of seedlings, even in cases where there were so few that competition between them would seem to be negligible. Where in May seedling counts ranged from 12 to 345 in the square meter areas, in October the counts were 0 to 55. Especially dramatic were the control squares, in which second-year plants had been allowed to proceed to fruiting before I clipped them. There, seedlings had looked weak, but plenty still remained in May. However, the total of 214 seedlings in May had dropped to only 3 seedlings in the 9 square meters of the control treatment by October. Apparently their inhibition by the second year plants had been too great for them to overcome. Attrition in pulled treatment squares had been from 747 to 236 between May and October, and the corresponding numbers for clipped treatment squares were 1002 and 107. Statistical computations supported the difference between controls and both treatments in October counts, but indicated no statistical significance between the two treatments.
Now I wait for spring. I plan to set up new study plots next year, but will apply the same treatments a month later, to see what difference timing makes. I also will return to this year’s plots. I want to follow this year’s seedlings through to their fruiting times, and to see if the numbers of new seedlings in those squares support or reject the notion that pulling increases seed bank germination.
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October 12, 2009 at 6:24 am (botany, ecology, history (human), methods, restoration)
Tags: Culver, Houghton Lake, Lake Maxinkuckee, Lost Lake, marsh, Marshall County Indiana, Moore Lake, pitcher plant, prairie, presettlement vegetation map, sedge meadow, sundew
by Carl Strang
The places we live and work all were wilderness at one time. National parks, state parks, and nature preserves protect and restore areas intended to represent the landscape as it was before large scale agriculture began the sequence of alterations that have brought us to the present day. A number of studies have produced maps showing, in some detail, what the counties of northeast Illinois looked like 200 years ago. In the late 1980’s I decided to do the same for my home area, Union Township in Marshall County, Indiana. Here is a watercolor rendering of my results.
I was reminded of that project by Scott’s excellent recent post on Houghton Lake in his blog, Through Handlens and Binoculars. Houghton Lake is the small lake closest to the map’s upper left corner. Recently it was acquired by The Nature Conservancy, and is getting the attention needed to preserve the rare plants and vegetation communities that have persisted there.
My mapping study began with a visit to the County Surveyor’s office in Plymouth, the county seat, to copy the original survey notes. Two different surveyors explored the local wilderness in 1834 and 1836, marking out the land on behalf of the federal government for purchase by American farmers. The 1836 survey covered the Indian reservations east of Lake Maxinkuckee, the township’s largest lake. That land became available to eastern farmers after the forced removal of the Potawatomis via the Trail of Death in 1838.
The surveyors’ main job was to mark the section corners and quarter-section corners (a section is a square mile). They also described the land, so that potential buyers back east could make informed choices. For example, after passing through what is now the center of the town of Culver, on Maxinkuckee’s west shore, surveyor David Hillis wrote, “Land rolling. 3d rate. Hickory etc.” Usually the description was dispassionate, but sometimes a surveyor revealed the sweat and discomfort of the experience. After crossing an extensive marsh at the south end of Maxinkuckee, Jeremiah Smith allowed, “In Sec. 34, at 1.20 (an) inlet 80L. wide coming from S.E. A nasty place.”
One of the surveyor’s helpers blazed and inscribed two “witness trees” at each section corner. The surveyor wrote down the species of tree along with its distance and direction from the corner. The tree species suggests to us what kind of vegetation community occupied that corner, and the tree’s distance from the corner hints at how close together the trees grew in that spot.
The surveyors also were careful to map the edges of lakes and rivers. In Union Township only Lake Maxinkuckee and Lost Lake, off its west edge, still have their 1834 outlines. Houghton Lake, and Moore Lake beside it, today are remnants of the larger water bodies they were in the early 1800’s. Two other lakes in the west-central part of the township no longer exist. They were shallow and easily drained for agricultural purposes before 1900.
Plant communities described by the surveyors as “wet prairies” or “marshes” were extensive mixtures of cattail marshes, sedge meadows and wet to moist prairies. Some of these featured insect-eating plants, the pitcher plants and sundews. See Scott’s post for photographs of some of the botanical beauty preserved around Houghton Lake. I’ll continue this account tomorrow.
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August 25, 2009 at 6:09 am (restoration)
Tags: bottlebrush grass, Conrad Fialkowski, Hystrix patula, Jacqui Gleason, Mayslake
by Carl Strang
From the start of this blog, I have sung the praises of the restoration work that has been ongoing for many years at Mayslake Forest Preserve. The time is well past due for recognizing the person primarily responsible for that success: Conrad Fialkowski.
Recently I had the opportunity to watch Conrad in action. Mayslake was one of the hosts for a camp called Outdoor Explorers. The week-long, cooperative program brought children from four communities out to four forest preserves on a rotating basis. The children were selected for their limited opportunity to experience the outdoors (one boy asked me if there were any bears to worry about). One of their activities at Mayslake was to remove buckthorn and honeysuckle brush from a woodland, first step in its restoration. Conrad was masterful in his direction of this activity. The kids enjoyed wielding loppers and bow saws, and thanks to Conrad this was done safely and effectively. Conrad was especially effective in his recognition and support of the individual talents in each child. Here he poses with one of the groups of kids and their park district counselors in front of the mountain of brush they had cut.
But this is only the first step in the process. Much work remains for Conrad and co-steward Jacqui Gleason (who we’ll meet later; she joined Conrad in this effort three years ago). Those two volunteers put in many hours of difficult labor per week year round. They will need to keep the brush stumps from resprouting, and plant seeds to hold the ground gained through the kids’ effort. One of Conrad’s many secrets is the effectiveness of bottlebrush grass in preventing erosion and resisting the invasion of undesirable plants in the early stages of woodland restoration at Mayslake.
I have been getting a lot of compliments about the flower photos in this blog. You can thank Conrad and Jacqui for those plants’ having the opportunity to grow at Mayslake Forest Preserve.
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June 20, 2009 at 5:02 am (botany, restoration)
Tags: Alliaria petiolata, experiment, garlic mustard, invasive plants
by Carl Strang
One of my studies this spring has been an experimental comparison of removal techniques for garlic mustard, an invasive biennial that poses problems in our woodlands because it inhibits the growth of all other plants (including trees).
A month ago I removed all the second-year plants from my study plots. As I reported then, it was clear that pulling the plants in March was more effective than was cutting them off at ground level, though both treatments killed most of the plants. In the following photo you can see an example of new side shoots springing up from where the main stem had been clipped.
In that May treatment I also clipped the control plants at ground level. After waiting four weeks I recently returned to see whether any second-year plants had recovered to send up new stalks. I also wanted to check progress of seedlings, which had been suppressed by the control plants but had been growing vigorously in treatment areas.
The results again were impressive. All but 6 of the 1482 control plants (99.6%) were killed by the May clipping treatment, in contrast to clipping in March. None of the few survivors of the pull treatment that I cut in May survived. More (17) second-year plants survived their second clipping.
At the moment it appears that early pulling and late clipping both are effective techniques, but I have more tests to do next year. The jury still is out on the question of whether (or under what conditions) pulling may increase germination from the seed bank in the soil.
After a month the seedlings in the control squares still were far from making up the ground they lost in comparison to seedlings in treatment squares.
The next step in this study will be a return to count the seedlings in the fall. I am interested in how much they thin themselves through competition with one another.
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May 27, 2009 at 11:15 am (botany, restoration)
by Carl Strang
In mid-May I returned to my garlic mustard study plots to harvest the second year plants, counting the survivors in each square-meter subplot to learn what had happened. The second year plants had developed flower buds,
then flowered.
Meanwhile the seedlings were adding leaves.
When the time came to count and remove second year plants, the contrast between treated and control square-meters was clear cut beyond expectation.
The plant count on untreated (control) squares ranged 100-223 per square meter, with a median value of 159. In some of the treated squares I had uprooted all of the second year plants I could see in March. A few remained in May, probably ones that were so small in March that I mistook them for seedlings. Their numbers ranged 1-4 on the square-meter subplots, with a median of 3. I was most interested in the other treatment, in which I pinched or clipped plants at ground level, leaving the roots. There had been indications in the literature that this would be sufficient to kill the plants. Such was not entirely the case here.
Some clipped plants had enough stem buried beneath the ground that they recovered and their new shoots were producing fruits. Their numbers were much lower than in the controls, but also distinctly greater than in the pulled plant treatment: range of 21-47, median of 23. These differences were statistically significant. Clipping in March killed most but not all plants.
I also was interested in seedlings. The claim has been made that uprooting plants disturbs the soil and so increases the number of seedlings. Seedling numbers increased between March and April in control squares as well as in both treatment types, but there was no statistically significant difference among the three different square types. I will need to return next year to see if there is a difference then, but so far I find no support for the claim that uprooting garlic mustard has undesirable effects.
On the other hand, when I removed the second-year plants in May, I saw that seedlings in treatment squares were robust and healthy looking.
In contrast, the ones in control squares were puny.
Clearly they had been suppressed by the second year plants. Time will tell if they catch up with the ones in the treatment squares.
I will want to see if the ground-level clipping of control plants in May succeeded in killing them. Also, next year I am thinking of applying the initial treatments in April rather than in March, and doing the clip treatment at a more realistic level of a short distance above the ground.
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May 25, 2009 at 11:15 am (botany, restoration)
Tags: brush removal, common dewberry, controlled burn, Cornus stolonifera, Geranium maculatum, Hydrophyllum virginianum, Mayslake, oak, red-osier dogwood, restoration, Rubus flagellaris, Virginia waterleaf, wild geranium
by Carl Strang
In earlier posts I have written about the restoration work going on at Mayslake Forest Preserve. Today I want to share some of the positive results that already are visible. The prairie was burned in late March, and as usual looked like a desolate moonscape afterward.
This week that same area is green with vigorous growth.
Meanwhile, the slope between the friary and May’s Lake has greened with diverse plants.
In places there are abundant oak seedlings, the potential next generation that had no chance beneath the dense buckthorn and honeysuckle brush that was cleared out over the winter. Members of both the white and red oak groups are visible here.
In addition, Virginia waterleaf is flowering in good numbers all along the slope.
Toward the bottom of the hill some wild geraniums have begun to bloom.
Nearby are some Rubus which key out to common dewberry.
A red-osier dogwood was one of the woody plants carefully avoided by the brush-clearing crew, and it is flowering.
Earlier I showed the abundant trout lilies, toothworts, three species of buttercups, dutchman’s breeches, trilliums, violets, wood anemones and so forth. More will follow.
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