The Chicago region, you might guess, wouldn’t have much in the way of endangered species lurking amid the tollways and strip malls.
The black-footed ferret, it can safely be said, has never set foot here. Condors do not swoop in the Loop. And the only whales in Chicago swim in the Shedd Aquarium.
But the fact is, hundreds of rare plants and animals, some found nowhere else in the world, quietly cling to life in the chinks of Chicago’s concrete armor.
According to the Illinois Department of Conservation, the six-county Chicago metropolitan area is home to more than 100 rare species found nowhere else in Illinois, from the pug nose shiner, which lingers in a few Lake County waterways, to the lakeside daisy, which grows only in Will County.
Cook County alone has 59 endangered plants, a fact that may come as a surprise to suburbanites accustomed to seeing little more exotic than dandelions and crab grass.
“People tend to think there’s nothing here, that in this huge urban sprawling metro area how could there be anything anymore?” said Amelia Orton-Palmer, a Chicago-area biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But the Chicago area “has the greatest concentration of (endangered) species anywhere in the state, equaled only by the southern tip of Illinois,” said Gene Kruse, manager of the Illinois Department of Conservation’s endangered species program.
Occasionally, one of these normally reclusive species crawls into public view. Earlier this summer, scientists discovered that the proposed southern extension of Interstate Highway 355 near Romeoville is set to run through one of only two spots in the United States where the Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly lives.
The dragonfly, with its brilliant emerald eyes, is a candidate for inclusion on the federal endangered species list, and planners are still trying to figure out whether it and the roadway can coexist.
Botanists in the region also launch an annual high-profile hunt for the elusive Thismia americana, a tiny fleshy plant unique to Cook County. The sand prairie species, whose nearest relative grows only in New Zealand and Tasmania, hasn’t been spotted for nearly 100 years, but botanists cling to hope it has survived somewhere in south Cook County.
These rare species, however, are just the best publicized of various odd flora and fauna hidden in the bits of prairie and swamp that still surround Chicago.
There’s the prairie white-fringed orchid, listed as threatened nationwide and endangered in Illinois. After heavy summer rains, it’s now in full bloom in a handful of wet prairies in Lake, Cook, McHenry and Kane Counties.
The leafy prairie clover, which is federally endangered, also lingers here, in four spots in Will County forest preserves along the Des Plaines River and nowhere else in Illinois.
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The not-so-Common Tern nests only in this region of Illinois, on Commonwealth Edison land near Lake Michigan in Lake County. And who knew that Chicago was home to a rare and elusive rattlesnake, the Eastern massasauga, which is awaiting designation as a federally endangered species?
Obviously, the fact that the region has so many endangered species is partly bad news. As suburban sprawl has crept across the landscape, more and more native habitat has been destroyed and more and more species unique to this area have been pushed to the brink of extinction.
But the large number of endangered species here also represents some good news, according to state biologists.
First, some species that once thrived across most of Illinois now survive only here because of this area’s unique advantage: its sprawling forest preserve network.
Most other areas of Illinois, he said, have been slow to buy and preserve public land. People there “are still out in the open spaces, and they figure if there’s plenty of space left, why worry about it?” Kruse said.
But much of that open area has been converted to farmland, or to other uses that don’t necessarily protect the native species. As a result, endangered species in the state linger primarily in public-owned preserves, and many of those preserves are in the Chicago area.
The Chicago area’s other advantage is its wetlands. Historically, northeastern Illinois had more wetlands than any other part of the state. Today only a tiny percentage remains. But the area still has more and better-quality marshes, fens and bogs than the rest of the state, and they are home to vast numbers of the state’s endangered species.
In Island Lake, for instance, the rare cuckoo flower and hairy marsh yellow cress persist in the protected Cotton Creek Marsh, near the McHenry-Lake county line. Both plants are found in only a handful of spots in Illinois, almost all of them in the six-county area.
“It’s a real pleasure having them here,” said Patricia Nebgen, Island Lake’s village clerk, who has also seen rare sandhill cranes at the marsh.
But few residents have seen the plants, she said.
It’s unlikely most Chicago-area residents will ever see one of the area’s endangered species. By definition, these odd plants and animals are extremely rare and most have hung on only in inaccessible areas that the plow and bulldozer have been unable to reach.
A few survive in more public places, including private yards, corporate office parks and-in the case of the peregrine falcon-the ledges of Chicago office high-rises.
But their location is usually kept secret, to shield them from both vandals and overeager fans, such as the butterfly enthusiasts who last summer unknowingly collected at a Northwest Indiana steel plant the only Karner blue butterflies seen in the region for decades.
“We’re not anxious to stimulate curiosity seekers,” explained a Long Grove man who cares for a stand of prairie white-fringed orchids on his property. “They get enough abuse from the people who do know about them. Even the best-intentioned people sometimes don’t look where they step.”
The man, who asked that his name not be used, first discovered the rare plants on his property when a neighbor commented on them. A call to the Morton Arboretum confirmed their identity and since then a flood of botanists and naturalists has visited the fen where they grow.
Their caretaker has discovered that living with a rare jewel isn’t always easy. Because overgrazing deer threaten the plants, he’s been forced to erect wire cages around them. Every year he cuts buckthorn and other non-native brush that threatens to crowd them out.