To help ‘restore a really intact ecosystem’ in Will County

The area known as the Braidwood Sands is home to more rare species than any other location in Will County, according to Floyd Catchpole, land management program coordinator for the Forest Preserve District of will County.

And now, thanks to $92,000 grant that the Illinois Habitat Fund Special Wildlife Funds Grant Program recently awarded to the district, the district will continue restoring that habitat, Catchpole said.

“We have a special opportunity to restore a really intact ecosystem,” Catchpole said. “We have the pieces and the parts and it’s a matter of bringing them back to health and tying them together. I hope that in another 50 years, people will be able to walk through a landscape and see savannas and prairies and species in abundance.”

He said the area is a “very fragmented landscape” with little pockets of prairies, savannas, wetlands and meadows and a “pretty amazing collection of state-threatened and endangered species.”

“It’s a real diversity of natural communities,” Catchpole said.

The funding was announced Jan. 25 by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and will be used to improve the habitat for 63 different species at the Forest Preserve District of Will County’s Braidwood Dunes and Savanna Nature Preserve, Kankakee Sands Preserve and Sand Ridge Savanna Nature Preserve, according to a news release from the district.

This includes “20 species considered endangered or threatened in Illinois and 43 species in greatest conservation need,” the release said. “In greatest conversation need” is designation given by Illinois for “species that are in serious trouble but not yet endangered,” the release also said.

“We have a lot of rare plants and animals on these preserves that could very easily go extinct,” Catchpole said.

The district said it will pair this state funding with $110,000 of district funds, providing $202,000 for the work. To understand why this restoration is so important, the district provided a little history.

Braidwood Sands are, which include the above mentioned preserves along with the nearby state-owned Hitts Siding Prairie and Wilmington Shrub Prairie, is a region of nearly 3,000 acres that was formerly the lakebed for Lake Wauponsee, which glaciers created 19,000 years ago, the district said.

At some point the moraine, which held these waters back, broke. That produced the Kankakee Torrent, “the largest known flood event in Illinois, the district said. But eventually the water receded. What remained were sandy soils and remnant prairies, wetlands and savannas, the release said.

“As a result, the Braidwood Sands area has far more rare species than any other area in Will County,” Catchpole said in the release. “”To date, we have converted over 400 acres of agricultural fields into prairie, greatly reduced invasive species and restored natural prairies and savannas.”

An additional benefit is the opportunity for people in the future to see “what the landscape of Illinois used to look like and what a really diverse landscape looks like,” Catchpole said.

The changes in Illinois over the last 100 years especially have resulted in a really simplified landscape, Catchpole said. At one point, Illinois was home to 10,000 very different species, he added.

“It was just a constant array of blooming flowers from early spring to the end of fall, with numerous species of insects in large numbers swarming over the flowers and pollinating them,” Catchpole said. “Of course, this supports a huge population of birds. Then it was just a very rich, vibrant, ecological system that, by and large, people have not even realized we’ve lost.”

But the restoration is more than just protecting species in their natural habitats, Catchpole said. It’s also about protecting the species “we’re not even aware of,” he added.

“Many fungi are poorly studied,” Catchpole said. “We could lose them without ever knowing we had them.”

For more informaton on the efforts to restore the Braindwood Sands are and why that’s important, visit reconnectwithnature.org/News-Events/Big-Features/Saving-the-Sand-Savanna.

View this gallery of photos of various species in the Braidwood Sands area.

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Restoration efforts at the Forest Preserve District’s Kankakee Sands preserve have converted former agricultural fields into large patches of prairie, that support a wide variety of native flora and fauna, including this swamp milkweed and cabbage butterfly. (Photo provided)