My brief bio at the end of an article I wrote for Chicago Wilderness Magazine (in 2003) reads "Ken Mierzwa grew up near remnant bur oak groves north of Chicago..." That place had much to do with my subsequent view of natural areas, and of restoration.
My first few years were spent in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood on Chicago's north side, just off of Fullerton Avenue. As I reached the age of five, my parents moved to the northern suburbs, not very far from the city but at that time (1960) still semi-rural. There, I had my first taste of nature.
My childhood home was on the gentle western slope of the Park Ridge Moraine, a broad ridge of unsorted glacial till left behind by the Wisconsinan glaciation. The concentric moraine, perhaps a couple of miles wide and only about 40 feet high, roughly parallels the Lake Michigan shoreline through the northern suburbs until it abruptly disappears at the limits of the Chicago Lake Plain.
We lived about two blocks from the crest of the moraine. The high spot was marked by a few clusters of trees in what had been a golf course, and was later to become Maryhill Cemetary. At that time it was fenced but fallow and overgrown. One of those clusters of trees, right on the very top of the moraine, consisted mostly of bur oaks. The other trees were newcomers, aggressive pioneer species, fast-growing native species like cottonwoods. There were a few wet spots, most of them man-made... former golf course water holes.
Behind my house was a shallow marsh, which flooded over into our backyard each spring. Here I found my first wildlife; western chorus frogs and plains garter snakes. We found smooth green snakes under our porch the first year, but they quickly disappeared and we never saw any in the neighborhood again.
These are, of course, all prairie animals. Indeed, the empty land behind our house had once been prairie. For decades it had been farmed, and now it ran wild with weeds. There was one beat up old prairie remnant about six blocks to the south, although I didn't recognize it as natural until quite a bit later.
One day I ventured that two blocks to the cemetery fence, a major expedition for a five-year old. Skirting the marsh, I would have walked through successional fields and ducked through openings in hedgerows. In the second block, I entered what up to then had been terra incognita... a tree-shaded land of mystery, a straight dirt pathway wide enough for a car, the tall trees lining each side the same size, arching over and nearly touching to form a dark roof which at my small size, seemed vast and cathedral like. Today, I'd look at such a place and realize that the trees had to have been planted in such straight rows, and they must have all been planted at the same time. They probably weren't much more than 50 or 60 years old. But at that time, I saw only the magic of a new and mysterious place.
The pathway opened out into a clearing along the road, with an abandoned farmhouse tucked into the edge of the trees. We walked through the empty house, broken glass crunching under our small feet.
In front of the house, along the two-lane paved road which divided it from the cemetery fence, was a shallow rectangular pond. Peering into the water, I caught a glimpse of movement. Getting close to the surface and looking closely, I saw a creature of wonder.
It was four or five inches long, olive green, with a broad, flattened head. Reddish gills sprouted from each side of the head at the very back, waving gently in the water. It had four delicate legs, and a high tailfin.
I had just seen my first larval tiger salamander.
The other kids looked and grew bored and moved on to something else. Someone called it a "mudpuppy" which of course was not very accurate. But I was fascinated. Obviously, if I still remember it so vividly 49 years later.
Within a year it had all been destroyed... the pond, the old farmhouse, the magical shaded portal of trees that had led me to this place. It had all been replaced by another new suburban subdivision, setting the pattern of my younger years. I watched so many places as they were destroyed forever. Some of them were special places.
Within a year or two I'd discovered all the ways into the cemetery, all the gaps under or through (and later, as I grew bigger, over) the fence. With my friends, I explored it thoroughly. I'd found the shallow marsh just south of where I'd seen that salamander, a place were I watched northern leopard frogs each spring. A little to the east, toward the crest of the moraine, was a larger pond, straight-edged and obviously excavated. This was the easiest place to find tiger salamanders. Each mid-July, they came out of the water and paused for a few days under bits of plywood or other debris. At first they were mostly olive green, with red gill stubs. Over the course of several days they darkened, eventually becoming black. After the next rain they disappeared, only to be replaced by fresh ones, still green, still with gill stubs. I took a few home, kept them in terrariums full of dirt. They immediately burrowed into the soft earth, constructing elaborate tunnel systems. A few weeks later I'd dig them up, and they were deep black, with small yellow spots on the lower sides. This was how I learned that the field guides didn't always show accurate representations of the animals. There were no pictures of that transitional stage; only the olive green larvae, and the black and yellow adults, which had much more extensive mottling than the juveniles I saw each summer.
Beyond that pond there was another pond. To get there meant scrambling up a bit of a slope at the head of the excavation, onto the very crest of the moraine. The edge of the grove was guarded by brambles, but once through those the oaks closed overhead. A few more feet, and there was a pond unlike the others. This one had no straight sides, it was an irregular oval shape. Large oaks grew right to the edge, with a dense shrub understory. There was a mix of cattails and open water, and it was deeper than the other ponds. The salamanders were harder to find here, there were many more places for them to hide. But several times I was able to wait patiently on the bank, and eventually watch a larval salamander swim into view. Each time, it brought back memories of that first salamander.
By this time I knew a great deal about salamanders. Beginning in second grade, I'd read every book in the school library on amphibians and reptiles. Usually, I'd read each one several times. Paging through books by Roger Conant and Hobart Smith, I never dreamed that one day I'd meet the authors.
Tiger salamanders and oak groves were to become very important to me one day. At that earlier time, they ignited the spark that would lead to future learning.
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