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player ready...Motorists driving by Somme Prairie Nature Preserve in Northbrook Saturday might have thought they’d been transported to a previous century, as volunteers moved about the prairie using handheld scythes.
Nearly 30 volunteers converged at the nature preserve, on Dundee Road, in the late afternoon hours July 18 for a Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves scything event to cut invasive plant species.
The smoky air quality from the Canadian wildfires had diminished from dangerous levels Thursday to a moderate nearly 60 rating shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday, doable for those willing and able.
The task for the day was to remove sawtooth sunflower and tall goldenrod, said Rebeccah Hartz, restoration volunteer and assistant director of Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. Hartz indicated they “are not woody species,” like buckthorn.
And the best tool for the job, she said, was the scythe.
“Scythes are really effective for cutting very low to the ground and very precisely,” Hartz explained.
“The weeds that can sort of move in and hold their ground and take over…these things are opportunists, they rush in,” Hartz said. “They’ll actually start choking out diversity, and we’re working to restore biodiversity.”
Volunteers hope to restore opportunities for a rare and endangered prairie plant called the eared false foxglove to take root and thrive in the prairie.
“This is a really great plant,” said volunteer Ali Fakhari of Highland Park, showing the foxglove.
Volunteers met in the post office parking lot at 5 p.m. and worked for more than two hours in the adjacent prairie until breaking for a potluck supper on a grassy spot.
Stephen Packard of Northbrook was among regular restoration volunteers. Packard has served as site steward for neighboring Somme Prairie Grove and is a conservationist and author who appears at speaking engagements, such as at a North Barrington event on Monday, July 20 at Grigsby Prairie.
Invasive woody buckthorn stumps, now dead, were seen on the Somme pathway. In recent history, volunteers removed persistent buckthorn so the land could return to its original, native state.
“What happened here, this was all woods,” Packard said. “It was a degraded buckthorn woods and there was nothing left and it takes a long time and a lot of work for the prairie to become established.”
Is Packard satisfied with the prairie’s hardy progress?
“No, I want it to go faster,” Packard said.
But with workday gloves, helping hands and scything, Somme Prairie Nature Preserve has hope, thanks to its volunteer pool, Packard asserted.
“The forest preserve would be the first to say that,” he added.
The historic agricultural scythe is not a typical landscaping tool seen among local green thumbs tending to their suburban gardens.
Volunteer Michael Uhlemann acknowledged, “It’s both of our first times scything.”
His brother Will Uhlemann, of Glenview, said the scythe does bring to mind the looming tool used by a figure from folk tales.
“I guess I would associate it with the Grim Reaper, normally,” Will Uhlemann said about the scythe.
But he placed the day’s focus on nature.
“It’s a great release to be surrounded by all these nature lovers and nature,” Will Uhlemann said.
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John Jacobs of Evanston said about the scythe, “I love things that are cool and old fashioned.
“Technology has its place but for this particular work, this is the best way to do it,” Jacobs said. “The scythe is the most effective way.”
Mick Dart of Highland Park said, “Just being out here is good for the mind, body and soul.”
Volunteer Jordan Botezatu of Lincolnshire said, “That’s why I keep coming — because it’s healing me just as much as I am helping it.”
Volunteer David Duncan of Ravenswood was eyeing a large bouquet of what volunteers perceived as unwanted, an invasive species called sweet clover.
“I need a dumpster for it. This is one of those weeds you can kind of do a whole workday to pull and when you find it, you want to make sure you don’t let it go to seed,” Duncan said.
During the potluck supper as volunteers shared a meal, Christos Economou of Wilmette, and of the New Trier Township High School District 203 Class of 2009, said, “It’s rare that you get to really participate in something that’s positive for the environment and you get to feel optimistic about how things are going, instead of feeling negative and worrying that we’re losing stuff all the time.
“This is kind of like playing offense. We’re trying to restore as much as we can,” Economou said. “That’s a really nice feeling.