sand and water

Sometime in the early 1990s, I went exploring in the Kankakee sand area south of Chicago. Here, post-glacial outwash was blown into dune fields, and today the black-oak covered dunes rise above surrounding level farmland.

There are a lot of places worth visiting in the Kankakee sand area. There's a unique flora and fauna there, including southern and western species thriving on the warmer and drier sand. This is as close as it gets to lizard land around Chicago. Literally, because two species, the six-lined (or prairie) racerunner and the western slender glass lizard are associated with the sand areas.

Today though, I'll talk about my first visit to Conrad Savanna, in Newton County Indiana. Following directions in the then-current version of an Indiana Nature Preserves directory, I went for a walk in the preserve located just off U.S. Rt. 41. At that time, it covered perhaps a few hundred acres.

One of the characteristics of the earlier phases of natural land acquisition is that, of necessity, we usually must focus on saving the core areas. With limited resources, we can't buy it all right away. If we wait too long, something we can't replace may be lost, so we seek out the rare places, the unique places.

At Conrad Savanna, that's what initially happened. On that first visit, I found a preserve consisting of a dune field with black oak sand savanna and a few small sand prairie openings. Essentially all of the preserve was higher than the surrounding landscape, and I wasn't able to find any water within the preserve. The dry-mesic to xeric communities had been preserved. On the adjacent privately owned farmlands, there was some water, in the form of roadside drainage ditches. In these ditches I found green frogs and northern leopard frogs. Here was a classic example of biodiversity being excluded from protected lands by decisions on what to purchase. In this case, the entire wetter half of the spectrum was excluded, still at risk.

Unlike many preserves, which are acquired and then left like little jewels in isolation, at Conrad Savanna the story doesn't end here. Yesterday I did a little browsing on the area, and found that a project I'd seen the very beginnings of has continued to grow. Indiana DNR and the Division of Nature Preserves, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and others, have continued to acquire land in Newton County. They'd already bought a place called Goose Lake when I was there, although the lake was long drained, but there was a lot of private land in between. Apparently those properties have now been linked together, and thousands of acres have now been protected. An acquisition that size must by definition include a range of communities, from dry to wet. If the preserve is big enough to plug some of those ditches, it can be even wetter. The dune fields now become one element within a larger fabric.

For now, I'm not going to delve too much more into this. Better to wait, and to visit the site on some future Chicago trip. Once that happens, I expect to have a much more interesting story to tell.