Middle Fork Savanna is an image, a 550-acre miniature of northeastern Illinois as it looked in 1800. The image is blurred and distorted by alien plants and animals and by railroad embankments and drainage tiles, but we can still catch a glimpse of what Illinois was before the Potawatomi were thrown out.
I’ve spent several mornings over the past two months wandering through the Middle Fork trying to put together an inclusive list of the nesting birds that live there. I had originally planned to spend nearly every morning in June there, but the weather got in the way.
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The one grove that has been cleared of buckthorn and burned has a quite different character. Yellow warblers live in that grove, along with yellowthroats and indigo buntings. These are usually thought of as edge species, but they seem to be doing well in the interior of an oak grove with a ground layer of low shrubs mixed with grasses.
Perhaps the most intriguing habitat at the Middle Fork is the brushy prairie. The minds of those who manage prairie remnants or direct restoration efforts have been dominated by a vision of the prairie as a place with no wood. It’s all grasses and wildflowers that die back to the roots in fall. Fires sweep over it regularly and prevent woody plants from ever taking hold. A prairie manager looking at the brushy areas at Middle Fork would almost certainly be thinking about using a combination of lopping sheers and frequent fires to clear out those gray dogwood clumps. Give us a few years, he would say, and well have this looking like a proper prairie.
