News

Sauganash Revival

From both the surrounding neighborhood and across Cook County, volunteers converged on Sauganash Prairie Grove in LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve for a celebratory return of volunteer stewardship to a needy natural gem.

This first Sunday in March brought blue skies and surprisingly warm temperatures to Chicago’s Northwest Side. With several inches of snow underfoot, volunteers and district staff used loppers and hand saws to cut invasive plants that have degraded this high-quality woodland, savanna, and sedge meadow complex in the absence of regular fire.

For Larry Hodak, who has been a volunteer steward in the preserves for roughly 25 years, the crowd of over 90 volunteers from around the region was “an incredible feeling, a physically and emotionally healing day. Plus it was a perfect workday. With the frozen ground we got an incredible amount of work done.”

Sauganash Prairie Grove and neighboring Bunker Hill Savanna were some of the first to fall under, and the last to emerge from, a politically motivated ban on volunteer stewardship in the preserves, a ban that initially included such seemingly uncontroversial activities as litter clean-up by Scouts.

In the absence of regular stewardship, the health of these rare places declined quickly as nonnatives and other invasive plants moved in. The loss of volunteers contributed to a general sense of abandonment, leaving the preserve vulnerable to abuses such as illegal trail building.

The return of full-fledged volunteer stewardship brings these preserves in line with volunteer activities that occur across the Cook County Forest Preserves.

“The work being done at Sauganash Prairie Grove, Bunker Hill, and other North Branch sites is the same as work being done everywhere else in the district by volunteers,” said Bill Koenig, volunteer coordinator with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. “Volunteers are an important extension of the Forest Preserve District. It is our policy to manage the land exactly as volunteers were doing, and across the county their work is celebrated and appreciated.”

To learn more, get involved, or visit, go to northbranchrestoration.org.

— Douglas Chien