On a partly sunny, cool autumn morning, I walk a wood chip trail around Butler Lake in Libertyville, on the north side of Libertyville High School.
This part of the lakeshore is choked with nonnative buckthorn, which makes it difficult for other understory plants to grow. But there are also huge cottonwood trees, some of them 75 feet tall and at least 100 to 150 years old, and they beckon to migratory birds looking for insect meals.
Some spring days, migratory orioles, warblers, and grosbeaks sing and feed in the vegetation corridor, and some days in fall, the same species chip softly, no longer singing, as they seek food to sustain them on their way south.
On one particular autumn day, three black-throated blue warblers, typically only found as singles, flitted in the leaves while two ovenbirds walked on the woodland floor and American redstarts fanned black and red tails to scare up insects. These birds will be gone soon and hopefully reappear next spring.
As the wood chip trail ends, it opens to an expanse of prairie and a wetland, intermixed with homes and lawns. Cattails grow along the wetland’s edge, though the invasive phragmites threatens to overtake them. Tall native plants, including glade mallow and purpletop grass, hug the wetland shoreline.
In a nearby prairie patch, New England asters reveal purple petals and yellow centers, which attract monarchs, and the round, red berries of the pokeweed plant provide food to thrushes and other migratory birds.
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I sit on a bench to contemplate the beauty, but I also mourn the loss of what was here more than a century ago. A scientific paper from 1915 describes what I would see at Butler Lake, a shallow glacial lake, if I were able to travel back in time more than a century ago.
“Five hours on Butler’s Lake, Lake County, Ill.” by Walter A. Goelitz describes the lake being smaller back then, covering 30 to 40 acres and surrounded by a few woodlots, pastures, yards, and one public road.
“The margin is shallow and swampy, with cattails and reeds extending in from 20 to 200 feet from the hilly ground surrounding the lake,” he wrote.
Those swampy margins attracted breeding wetland birds, many of which are endangered in Illinois today, and certainly do not breed at Butler Lake anymore. Goelitz spent just two hours there on a July day and found 12 bird nests, including two of the state-endangered yellow-headed blackbird.
“Besides these nests there were some 20 young birds scrambling through the reeds or sunning themselves on dead cattail stalks,” he wrote. Just 200 feet away was the nest of the state-endangered common gallinule. This nest had seven eggs, which he noticed were “pipped,” meaning the young were emerging from their eggs.
A least bittern, also threatened in Illinois, flushed just a few feet away, and then he encountered 15 black terns, state-endangered, flying around and screaming to protect three nests on a small mat of rushes floating on the water.
To see such wonders is nearly unimaginable to me.
Damming of the lake at one time may have reduced the amount of specific wetlands needed by the rare breeding birds. Today the lake is surrounded by impervious surfaces such as parking lots, roads, and buildings, which can negatively impact water quality during rainstorms.
That’s not to say people are not taking care of Butler Lake. It is owned and managed by the Village of Libertyville and Community High School District 128, which works to improve the lake’s health. A group called Friends of Butler Lake has helped monitor and improve the lake’s health over the years.
A 2015 Lake County Health Department report showed that the lake was healthier than it was in 2005 due to shoreline restoration and other work, such as adding bioswales and walkways in which rainwater could penetrate instead of running off into the lake.
The lake serves as an outdoor learning laboratory for Libertyville High School students, who visit each May to learn ways to monitor the lake’s health. They also help remove non-native plants like buckthorn, planting native ones and working on shoreline erosion projects. Their work has just begun.
I fervently hope that humans will continue to protect Butler Lake. In recent visits, I’ve seen terns flying over the lake and heard and seen a sora rail give its whinny-like songs from the cattails. I’ve seen native plants called prairie dock hug the shoreline, with their tall slender stalks ending in brilliant yellow blooms.
Rachel Carson once wrote, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.” Though the marshy areas there are just a vestige of what they once were, Butler Lake still provides healing when I visit.
We need more refrains of nature in our lives, and more people working to protect the little we have now compared to what was here in the past.
Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor, and photographer for the baiduhai and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment, and co-author of an upcoming book on “Birds of the Midwest,” to be published by Timber Press in 2027. Send story ideas and thoughts to [email protected].