Hiking here with Stacy is like traveling in a foreign country with someone who speaks the language. He knows the names of everything, knows that “the seeds of a plant called Houstonia longifolia look exactly like the poppy seeds on a New York bagel” and that if you put your face close to a plant named pearly everlasting, its flowers smell like maple syrup.
And he has more than just caterpillar instincts. He knows where to find rare prairie gentians blooming on a hilltop in a corner of the preserve and where to find clustered poppy mallow, whose seed he and the other land stewards at Nachusa speak of in whispers and prize like gold. (If the stewards had to buy this seed on the open market, it would cost more than $1,000 a pound.) He knows all of this because he planted these prairies by hand, scattering the seed on the wind or “stepping the seeds in” to the rich prairie soil using the toe of his boots.
The Conservancy has many dedicated land stewards, so none of this work or knowledge might seem all that remarkable. Except that Jay Stacy, with his singular devotion and his skill, isn’t paid a penny.
Like Water, Sunlight, Fire and Seed
Most of the two dozen or so stewards here are volunteers, and many dedicate at least one day a week to work at the preserve. Every year, they collectively donate more than 9,000 hours of their time gathering seed, clearing brush, monitoring plants, conducting prescribed burns — the list is almost endless.
“This preserve is a testament to their efforts,” says Bill Kleiman, preserve manager for Nachusa Grasslands and one of the only paid employees in the bunch. “And they are as vital to the prairies here as water, sunlight, fire and seed.”
“An unparalleled level of dedicated stewardship” is how Todd Bittner, an Illinois natural heritage biologist, describes the volunteer work at Nachusa. And while Nachusa isn’t the Conservancy’s largest prairie-restoration project, that dedication is so remarkable that Kleiman is often invited to meetings to explain the secret of attracting and retaining such committed volunteers. You do have to wonder: What possesses a man like Stacy to devote himself to this tedious, needle-in-a-haystack task — one that won’t come to fruition until after his lifetime.
From Kleiman’s perspective, “it’s no secret.” Most of the long-term volunteers are responsible for specific parcels that make up the preserve. “They have a lot of power to make decisions because they come to know those areas better than anyone else,” he explains. “People take care of the things they feel belong to them. They take care of what they love.”
The preserve they love lies east of the Rock River in north-central Illinois. It is a patchwork of rich, intact natural areas — rare remnant native prairies that have never known the touch of a plow — and restored prairies that are being revived from their former lives as fields of corn and soybeans. Because Illinois has already lost most of its native prairie — prairie that was once part of a sea of grass that stretched from Indiana to Kansas — restoration is the heart of the work here. The goal is to maintain the health of the surviving remnant native prairies and reconnect them by restoring the lands between. Like piecing together a quilt.
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Nature picture credits: All Photos © Ann E. Cutting
