At 10:45 AM Sunday morning, three intrepid urbanites - Susan, Steve (amrikisalaami - he blogs about the Middle East while I blog about the Middle West!), and myself - set out on a miniature road trip out to the Nachusa Grassland in North-Central Illinois, about 20 miles west of Rochelle. This 2800 acre patch of tallgrass prairie and oak savannah has been painstakingly restored by volunteers and professionals of the Nature Conservancy from what few degraded remnants were there twenty years ago.



A thicket of american plums (Prunus americana) blend into the rolling prairie countryside as if they were just one more knobby hill in the series. According to our guides, the shade underneath these thickets of plum shrubs is so dense, and so little grows there, that when a fire passes over the prairie it does little more than singe the edges of the clump, since it can find no fuel underneath them.

( Click here for more breaking news from Illinois. )

Looking forward to returning to Nachusa since 1986,
--mark