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At Home on the Prairie
Everyone works together at Nachusa. Last year, Jay Stacy and Mary Scott spent at least 76 hours (plus the six months of collecting and preparing seed) working on a new six-acre plot. After burning off corn stubble, they dispersed a “prairie cocktail” seed mix. She planted hundreds of bur oak acorns—one by one. |
Retired from a life in retail, at Nachusa he’s really become a teacher or, perhaps, a preacher. During his lessons on the importance of birdsfoot violet, he’ll tell you about the regal fritillary butterfly because, he explains, knowing how and where to find birdsfoot violet is a matter of the insect’s survival. The small plant — named for cleft leaves that resemble birds’ feet — is the butterfly’s preferred larval food. The shelter and sustenance of the violet’s flowers and leaves offer the insect the best chance of making it from larva to pupa, from earthbound caterpillar to wind-kissed butterfly. And when you’ve got regal fritillaries, he’ll tell you, you know you’ve got a really good prairie.
Stacy’s teachings about life on the prairie, and its connectedness, have made converts and attracted a following. Talk to any of the regular stewards about how they came to Nachusa, and they will all tell stories that either start or end with “and then, of course, I met Jay.”
“Tom and I were looking for something to do that mattered to us,” says Jenny Mitchell, explaining why she and her husband have spent two days a week for 10 years working at Nachusa. “The first time we came out here, we met Jay, and we started volunteering, and the rest is kind of history.” The couple, with the help of Mary Scott, another land steward, has created more than 30 acres of high-quality prairie plantings.
Everyone here works together. This morning Stacy is on his knees among the big bluestem and the whorled milkweed, collecting seed alongside Scott. Scott is an 86-year-old retired teacher who is good-naturedly resigned to the fact that Stacy immediately discloses her age when introducing her.
She started working here when she was 79. “A friend brought me to Nachusa Grasslands and taught me how to use my hands for something I’d never done before,” says Scott, who has been volunteering four mornings a week ever since. “I will keep doing this as long as I can,” she says, “as long as I can see and hear and move.” With restoration work, she adds, “you never stop trying, and you have to have a lot of patience. It is like raising a kid.”
For Stacy, it’s like something else. “It’s like that old saying ‘A stitch in time ... ’” he says, stretching out on his stomach to collect seed from Houstonia longifolia, a kind of bluet that grows close to the ground and has pale, delicately lobed flowers about the size of the nail on your little finger. He hangs his glasses on a white plastic bucket and goes to work with his shears, clipping seed pods and dropping them in his bucket as he talks. “The restoration here is like that to me,” he says. “A stitch in time.”
His work may be urgent, but watching Stacy lying on the ground, navigating among the prairie plants, that slow, purposeful caterpillar comes to mind again. Stacy not only has its instincts, but he’s also undergone his own sort of metamorphosis since coming to Nachusa.
Of course, you only change so much. And in no time, he’s off in search of his glasses again.
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Nature picture credits: All Photos © Ann E. Cutting
