Rachel Goad’s monitoring the day after found quite a few mallows – up from zero the year before – as well as many other conservative plants on the island. There’s still work to do, but it will be done with lifted spirit. After all the work I had done talking about it as a viable state flower, as a symbol of the necessity of habitat restoration, to see it fulfill the promise we made to that habitat was instantly a cherished memory of mine. It wasn’t just the thrill of seeing this plant returning from the dead, it was that it was doing so in its home ecosystem. Gonzo the Muppet sings a song called “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” which features the lyric, “There’s not a word yet/for old friends who’ve just met.” Whatever that word is, that is exactly how I felt. This felt like we had discovered gold, or when Jed Clampett found “bubbling crude,” precious and profound. It was proof that the management strategy of rolling fires was exactly what this plant needed in order to return from the brink (along with canopy-opening and a prescribed burn earlier this year). And it was there that we met this handsome chum:Ī carpet of mallows erupt from a rolling burn pile scar. Trevor, Stephen, Linda Masters, Michael Rzepka, Michael Swierz and myself rowed to the island and walked to the winter burn scars. Then the state reopened the river and we immediately organized a workday and plant monitoring day for August 1st and 2nd. Of course, fire and open sky is also really great for the dreaded invasive white sweet clover, a plant that could easily take over the mallow habitat if left alone. However, looking at the video and comparing it to the Google Earth photo at the top of the post, you can see how much work we were able to accomplish re-opening the canopy and making it mallow-friendly. We got some great hi-res photos as well as this videoīut as you can see, we weren’t able to get close enough to identify individual plants. I was getting itchy like everyone else to see if the plant was back (Trevor said he’d swim there if he had to), and so I asked my friend Eric Wolff if we could fly his drone over the island. For weeks it was very high, very fast, and debris regularly swept down it: the perils of trying to save a plant on an island. The trees in the background are Langham.īecause we are law-abiding habitat restorers and NOT vigilantes, the Friends had to wait until the river was re-opened by the government. The trees in the midground are the former banks of the river. The flooded parking lot at Kankakee River State Park. The mallow’s seeds respond very well to fire in order to germinate (I found this out myself when growing some mallow seeds in a plastic container that I accidentally left out in the sun too long – it scorched the seedlings that had already started (about 30% of what I planted) but in their place the remaining 70% germinated – these things are scorch-activated!). Potawatomi people used to manage the island before being forced from the area by European colonial jerks – a management which included regular fires. Clearing out and burning the invasive brush became essential – not only were they hogging all the soil nutrients and altering its chemistry, but they were shading the open oak woodland habitat that had been in place there for the entirety of the mallow’s existence. Organized by Trevor Edmonson and Stephen Packard, the island’s Friends (which grow by the day) put together a management plan that would restore the habitat to a more mallow-friendly environment. Winter work on the island included cutting down and burning trees that shade the understory and pushes out the oaky habitat that the island had been for millennia.
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