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Jay Stacy first visited Nachusa Grasslands 13 years ago. Now he’s a steward and a key player in the restoration of one of the largest prairies remaining in the Prairie State.
By Cara Byington
Photographs by Ann E. Cutting
Standing on a small rise looking across the Illinois prairie through thick glasses and a haze of cigarette smoke, Jay Stacy could hardly be mistaken for a caterpillar. And yet he navigates through the waist-high grasses and up a hill to a small plant called birdsfoot violet as unerringly as if he were driven by pure caterpillar instinct. (The instinct, that is, of a caterpillar that depends on the violet for its food and ultimate metamorphosis into a regal fritillary butterfly, a symbol of high-quality tallgrass prairie. But more on all that later.)
Unfortunately, Stacy’s instincts on human matters are not always as unerring — especially when it comes to the location of his glasses or the ignition status of his cigarettes. He has been on this prairie collecting seed for six hours this morning and has misplaced his glasses six times. Not that anyone is counting. Thus far, there have been no incidents involving his ever-present smokes.
“I set my pants on fire doing this once,” he says, as he pinches the tip of his Marlboro and slips it into the front pocket of his khakis. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, except I was leading a field trip for visitors at the time. I’m sure those poor people still talk about it. Everyone else does.”
Everyone else being the other land stewards who work at The Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands Preserve, a prairie restoration project in north-central Illinois. And it’s true; most of the stewards do have “Jay stories.” They fall into two categories: There is the good-natured teasing about their absent-minded friend, like the time he tore the head off a prairie coneflower to show one visitor how the seeds inside look just like tiny sharks’ teeth, and then realized, sheepishly, that he had decapitated the only prop a tour guide was using at the time. And then there are the laudatory tales that reveal his constant devotion to the preserve, like the time he and Tom Mitchell, another steward, drove over to Ashton, Illinois, to collect seed from a healthy-looking population of prairie dock they had discovered growing next to railroad tracks. The men brought back the seed, and today its descendants bloom every summer at Nachusa.
Stacy has been working at Nachusa for 13 years, frequently putting in 10-hour days, caring for more than 100 acres, planting and reaping seeds by hand — often on hands and knees. He even lived for a while in a trailer near the preserve so he could be on site during the spring and summer seed-collecting seasons. And over the course of time, the man has become as much a part of Nachusa Grasslands, and as dependent on it, as the grasshopper sparrows and the regal fritillary butterflies. He carries a native sense of the vegetation at Nachusa that is so keen it seems imprinted on his DNA.
Nature picture credits: Photos © Ann E. Cutting
