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Spring Creek Forest Preserve
With land, vision, and volunteers, a lot is possible!
© Jeff Flinn, CC
Near Chicago, the Spring Creek Forest Preserve includes acres of woodlands, wetlands, and prairie. The vision is a healthy, sustained, natural area enriching the lives of people while supporting native plants and wildlife. Audubon Chicago Region is helping with restoration. Justin Pepper says of the project: "The fall is the most hopeful time of year. We collect and distribute seed from the rare prairie grasses and wildflowers. Through that, we will be able to help restore emergent wetlands, wet prairies, mesic prairies, dry prairies."
And birds like this Eastern Meadowlark will thrive, too!
BirdNote®
Land, Vision and Volunteers – Interview with Justin Pepper
Interviewed and written by Chris Peterson
This is BirdNote!
[Songs of Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Yellow-billed Cuckoo]
Near Chicago, a combination of land, vision, and volunteers bodes well for birds. [Great Crested Flycatcher and Henslow’s Sparrow in background] The land is the Spring Creek Forest Preserve – 4,000 acres of woodlands, wetlands and prairie owned by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. [The vision is a healthy, sustained, natural area enriching the lives of people while supporting a wide array of native plants and wildlife. The volunteers? They’re true partners advancing the vision; they could be out on the land right now.]
Here’s Justin Pepper, Acting Director of Audubon Chicago Region, which is helping with restoration:
“The fall is… to me it’s the most hopeful time of year from the perspective of the stewardship calendar. That’s the time of year that we collect and distribute seed from upwards of 170, maybe 200 species from shrubs and woodier plants all the way to very fine wildflowers and grasses and the whole lot…[We will collect individual species, we will clean the individual species and then we will take those seeds, the cleaned seeds, and mix them back in to habitat-specific seed mixes.] And through that, we will be able to help restore emergent wetlands, wet prairies, mesic prairies, dry prairies… We’ll have a few different woodland mixes, savannah mixes…and then of course that’s going to benefit the birds...”
…birds such as Bobolinks [song of Bobolink], Henslow’s Sparrows, cuckoos, Great Crested Flycatchers, and warblers… that stop here or migrate through in spring.
Today’s show is brought to you by The Bobolink Foundation. There’s more to this story online at birdnote.org.
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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Song of Rose-breasted Grosbeak 53163 recorded by S.R. Pantel; song of Yellow-billed Cuckoo 10009 by T. Gallion; song of Great Crested Flycatcher 94314 by W. L. Hershberger; song of Henslow’s Sparrow 84803 by W. L. Hershberger; song of Bobolink 47596 by D.S. Herr; and song of Brown Thrasher 94281 by W. L. Hershberger. Used song of Blue-winged Warbler 121993 (with Common Yellowthroat in background) by C. Marantz as the ambient track.
Interview from Marantz III T216 and 217
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org September 2012 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# prairierestoration-01-2012-09-13 prairierestoration-01
Sights & Sounds
