Gensburg-Markham Prairie — expanding a remnant

Fermilab Prairie — experiment in expansiveness

North Branch Prairies — Forest Preserve prairies and woodlands

Summer 2000

Classic Prairie Restorations
by Ray Wiggers. ------> To Introduction
Schulenberg Prairie | Gensburg-Markham Prairie | North Branch Prairies

Batavia, Illinois

small plot of rehabilitated ground may sustain a surprisingly diverse plant community, but a fully functioning prairie ecosystem is predicated on wide-open spaces. After all, expansiveness was one of the defining aspects of the original Illinois prairie, and the one most impressive to early explorers and settlers.

But in modern times, restorers who have too little elbowroom for the animals they wish to reintroduce soon discover a crucial problem. As seasoned zoologists can testify, it does little good to release members of the native fauna, only to see them leave the prairie grounds on a one-way journey to the local strip mall.

Largely for that reason, Dr. Robert Betz was on the lookout, in the early 1970s, for tracts of land that could serve as the world’s first large-scale prairie reconstruction. When he heard that Robert Wilson, director of the huge Fermilab research complex in Batavia, was seeking Morton Arboretum advice in landscaping his facility’s grounds, Betz contacted the Fermilab administration.

Soon thereafter, he presented Wilson with a visionary plan: to adorn the research facility not with horticulture but with ecosystems, not with landscape trees and garden beds, but with megaprairie. According to Dr. Betz, Wilson was attracted to this radical notion from the start, yet was concerned about how long the establishment of native grassland would take. When Betz admitted, accurately enough, that the job could take decades, Wilson responded with elegant decisiveness: "Then we’d better get started this afternoon."

Securing Wilson’s approval was no small victory in the history of restoration politics. But there was still the matter of convincing the facility’s grounds crew. Fermilab services manager Bob Lootens, a Kane County native whose family had farmed a portion of the Fermilab property before it was acquired by the government, was one of the skeptics. "They notified us that this professor from Chicago was coming out to tell us what to do. We started the project thinking it was crazy to plant wildflowers on land that could produce 100 bushels of corn per acre. And now we’re more pro-prairie than anyone else."

By inspiring the enthusiasm of Fermilab crew leaders Bob Lootens and Mike Becker — who in turn have inspired their crew members to become excellent restorers and naturalists — Dr. Betz unleashed, among other things, plenty of mechanical creativity. Because restoration undertaken on foot is largely impractical over such a large an area, the Fermilab crew tinkered with existing agricultural equipment — everything from combines and seed drills to seed-sorting mills and the "cultipackers" that tamp down disked and sown soil.

The result of this pooling of agricultural know-how was the development of a highly specialized technology that lets a handful of human beings, who have many other things to do as well, transform a township-sized domain. "That was the turning point," says Dr. Betz, "when we could do things on a mechanized basis." And Bob Lootens cites a statistic that is remarkable to anyone who has seen the extent of the Fermilab preserve: prairie-related work now takes up only about one-twentieth of his crew’s average workweek.

The realization of Dr. Betz’s Fermilab vision began in 1974 with a trial plot of a little over nine acres, situated within the lab’s great accelerator ring. Twenty-six years later, the reconstruction encompasses more than 1,100 acres in various stages of development. In one sense, it is Schulenberg Prairie stretched out on a canvas 10 times as large — unabashed reconstruction, the planting of prairie seeds in disked-up cornfields. Of this total, one 90-acre section, containing the Margaret Pearson Interpretive Trail, is routinely accessible to the public. In the fall, hundreds of volunteers, heeding the siren call of Fermilab press releases, take part in hand-collecting seed from species of plants not easily reached by the mechanical harvesters.

Any newcomer who tours the project as a whole in midsummer is apt to wonder why big bluestem and Indian grass dominate so thoroughly, especially in the newer sections. The forbs — the wildflower species — almost seem to have been forgotten. But this approach is the embodiment of Betzian technique. Each new reconstruction section begins with what the Fermilab team calls the Prairie Matrix: a basic selection of the hardiest, most tenacious prairie plant species, the most visible of which are the tall grasses. Once these colonists have set the stage by altering the soil profile and outcompeting Eurasian weeds, the other, less tolerant native plants will supposedly take hold, too. In the time it takes the Prairie Matrix to do its pioneering work, the main human effort (so Dr. Betz contends) should be directed toward continued seeding and periodic prescribed burns.

The belief that the reconstructed prairie will develop and defend itself well against all invaders must be understood in the context of Dr. Betz’s almost geologic view of time. Still, his noninterventionist, let-nature-do-the-work doctrine raises the eyebrows of colleagues intent on more decisive results in shorter timeframes. And this is an important debating point.

Dr. Betz rightfully points with pride to the substantial wildflower populations now blooming in the older Fermilab plots. He notes that the big bluestem grass, once eight feet tall, now grows two feet shorter-a sure sign that the other prairie plants are getting a greater percentage of the nutrients in the soil. In other words, they’re competing successfully with the plants that once served as the playground bullies.

"And so they should," he says. "The forbs have coevolved with the grasses for several million years. They know how to make a go of it."

With its world class physics lab in the background, Fermilab Prairie is quintessential Chicago Wilderness. Photo by Fermi National Accelerator Lab.