Fall 2004

June and Steve Keibler
Airplanes and orchids

To help restore the prairie landscapes of northern Illinois, June Keibler has led a brigade of volunteers armed with toothpicks. Pursuing the same goal, her husband, Steve, has piloted an airplane and wielded an acetylene torch.

	Photo by Kathy Richland.

Long involved as a volunteer steward directing habitat restorations in Kane County, June Keibler took her conservation life in a more intimate direction in the early 1990s with the Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchid Recovery Project. Many of these rare white orchids had become so isolated that they couldn't attract the hawk moths that pollinate them. For nearly a decade, June trained volunteers to find, record, map, and then pollinate the plants, using toothpicks to transfer pollen between flowers. To keep volunteers involved in this deliberate process, June cultivated them with gratitude, feedback from project scientists, and a voice like a prairie stream — a gentle current that cuts its path by sheer persistence.

"Some of the planted sites bloom irregularly now," June said. "One site has had flowers every year since the first bloom. It's very exciting." This year, June handed over the orchid project to focus on leading workdays, heading a stewardship committee, and managing her eight-person restoration business, Witness Tree Native Landscapes.

Steve works from a very different perspective — frequently, from 500 feet overhead. A commercial airline pilot, Steve had always supported June's endeavors, including helping restore the couple's yard to prairie. But in 1992, he bought a 1946 Piper Cub with nature in mind. Steve and his small plane quickly became an important tool for conservationists across Chicago Wilderness.

Photo of Steve Keibler by Kevin E. Schmidt.

In the mid-1990s, photographer Terry Evans used Steve's services to document for The Nature Conservancy the land that would become the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. "To understand the space, the 25,000 acres," Evans wrote, "I needed to see it from above. Flying, I saw one place after another, quickly revealed...a cemetery through a clearing, Prairie Creek running beside the manufacturing area." Steve, she says, "was very careful, handling his plane like a delicate instrument."

Over the course of 110 flights — about 250 hours of donated time in the air — Steve has piloted hydrologists looking for signs of presettlement stream channels, ecologists documenting soil types in order to direct restorations, and biologists trying to chart purple loosestrife populations for elimination.

Sometimes, Steve even heads out for some rare-plant barnstorming. "Once, flying low over a railroad right-of-way looking for prairie remnants, I saw a patch of blue along the track," he says. "It was Jacob's ladder. We went back to the site and also found puccoon and lady's tresses."

The Keiblers' commitment to conservation solidified decades ago, when they recognized that the bluebirds nesting in their yard in Dundee Township depended on nearby field habitat at an abandoned racetrack. Over the next twenty years, June helped establish groups such as the Kane County Natural Area Volunteers and the Fox Valley Land Foundation. She spearheaded the campaign to create the Dundee Township Open Space District, helped elect a conservation-minded supervisor to oversee restoration efforts, and fostered partnerships with the Forest Preserve District and the Park District to purchase land. This network helped save what is now Raceway Woods, and protected many other valuable local sites.

At the recently purchased Dixie-Briggs parcel in Dundee Township, for instance, at the foot of a hill prairie with rarities like Hill's thistle and prairie buttercup, an old International Harvester pickup truck lay upside-down in a creek. While June documented the plant life, Steve took responsibility for the pickup. "There was no way to haul it out without doing more damage," Steve said. "So a buddy and I went in with acetylene torches and cut it into pieces."

The Keiblers share an ethic of connectedness. "We're part of a restoration community with such great teachers and enthusiastic people," June said.

"Everything's connected," Steve echoed. Orchid and hawk moth, bluebird boxes and nearby prairies — even the toothpick brigade and the acetylene torch crew — all are woven together in the lives of June and Steve Keibler.

— Ryan Chew

Related CW articles:

The Amateur and the Pro: Science at the Grass Roots (features June Keibler)

Orchid Recovery Success Bodes Well For Other Species (News of the Wild, Fall 2001)