prairie and marsh

Prairie Wolf Slough in Highland Park, Illinois was agricultural land just a few decades ago. The Lake County Forest Preserve District and several project partners restored the site, mostly prairie with areas of shallow seasonal marsh. The marsh is visible in the left background of the photo, dominated by cattails.

The site is an island in suburbia. It's right next to a shopping mall, which at least makes it easy to grab a cup of coffee before walking the trails. On a sunny day shiny corporate office buildings can be seen gleaming in the far distance, much more subdued on the rainy day of the photo. To the east is an upscale residential neighborhood, to the north a four-lane highway. Yet the site looks pretty good, and supports healthy populations of western chorus frogs and northern leopard frogs. It's a good example of a restoration from bare ground, seeding the prairie back, and plugging ditches or breaking tiles to bring back wetlands, and then managing intensively to keep invasives in check. The site sees low-level but constant trail use, with a small parking area to make access easy.

Although I had very little to do with this one... a half-day baseline amphibian survey when the site was recently abandoned ag land in the late 1980s, and some backup for a grad student monitoring frogs post-restoration, about 15 years ago, I like to stop in every now and then simply because it's so easy to do, and on the way to other sites where I've spent much more time.