Once spanning over 170 million acres of the continent, Illinois was one state among many that hosted tallgrass prairie. Within this greater ecosystem was a mosaic of smaller habitats ranging from dolomitic pavements, sand hills, and wetlands. 

Its rapid destruction by drain tile and plow, however, has made it one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America. In less than two generations, over 95% of the tallgrass prairie was destroyed and replaced primarily by commercial agriculture. 

There are just twenty designated National Grasslands in the United States — all located west of the Mississippi River. Just 60 miles south of Chicago, however, Midewin is the country’s first and only “National Tallgrass Prairie.” Other nearby natural areas, like The Nature Conservancy’s Indian Boundary Prairies, are located even closer to city limits. 

During a visit to Paintbrush Prairie Nature Preserve, the site manager & entomologist explained how many insects and plants alike may be classified as “remnant-dependent.” And with less than 4% of remnant tallgrass prairie remaining, these sensitive species are at risk for extinction. 

Days not spent collecting seed were often used to monitor rare species with the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Plants of Concern program, such as the state-endangered Buffalo Clover (Trifolium reflexum).This species thrives on disturbed sites, and is believed to have gotten its name from its tendency to grow in buffalo wallows. 

Field days always presented new opportunities, such as accompanying the Wildlife & Range crews for robel pole monitoring and cover board surveys; or floristic quality inventory assessments and meander surveys with the Botany team. And because all seed is processed in-house at Midewin, we also got hands-on experience in native plant horticulture.

My summer spent as a Conservation and Land Management intern was the perfect chance to explore an early career in botany, right in my own backyard.

And although I wasn’t camping in Californian deserts or collecting high-altitude plant species in the Rocky Mountains, Midewin’s unique locale offered relevant experience for an aspiring land manager. 

Dade Bradley

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Many blog posts will mention the bittersweet feeling of finishing their internship, and mine is no exception. It feels like just yesterday I arrived in Illinois, getting comfortable, and now I’m preparing to head back home. This transition is undeniably bittersweet, but I’m also genuinely excited about what the future holds. This experience has added another valuable chapter to my life.

Not only was the work I undertook here rewarding and filled with meaning, but I also had the privilege of meeting many remarkable people. They all had a deep passion for their work, which was always my hope, and I was delighted to discover that the restoration team at Midewin embodied this passion. The field is fortunate to have dedicated individuals who genuinely care about their work and the people who join them in their mission. The team at Midewin has been inclusive, patient, and highly supportive of us interns, guiding us every step of the way as we embarked on our field season.

Midewin is truly a special place, a hidden gem amidst the sea of soybeans and corn that dominate the Midwest landscape. In a region where agriculture and development have wreaked havoc on the natural habitat, leaving few intact ecosystems behind, Midewin stands out. It’s unique not only because it was the site of the former Joliet army ammunition factory but also because of its dedicated focus on restoring prairies from what were once fallow fields. Restoration is a time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive endeavor, but Midewin serves as a shining example for the entire Prairie State and beyond.

The prairie, eastern deciduous forest, and savanna ecosystems have endured decades of logging, agriculture, and land-use changes, taking a toll on their plant communities. Restoring these ecosystems is a monumental task, and Midewin is taking significant steps to make it happen.

The most encouraging experiences always leave you with a bittersweet taste in your mouth. Like the first time you ever had a sour patch kid. It’s a new exciting time you can barely hold in your laughter of joy. You’ve heard the jingles : “First they’re sour, then they’re sweet” and “Sour Patch Kids: Sour, Sweet, Gone”. Yet in the head of a five year old, these words don’t hold much meaning. All you know is there is a handful of brightly colored, sugar-coated candies in your hands waiting to be in your mouth!

The first taste shocks you and your whole system, bringing a hard realization of panic to your brain. 

“What have I done?! Why do people like these?!”

It floods all of your senses with a sharp ping. In rare situations, even shocking your lower jaw into a tightening, almost stinging pain.

My first days as a CLM intern at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie brought on a similar shock to my system. Taking a botany internship with the Federal Government is already an unnerving experience. Stack on top of the fact that I have had little formal training on the plant sciences thus far, I felt way over my head. People were throwing out plant names left and right that I had not even heard of before. How was I going to figure out all of these species in 5 months? 

Our first week we learned about Brassicaceae and Rosaceae with an in field lesson on how to identify the different species in each Genus. To tell the truth… it was extremely overwhelming. Sure I had used a dichotomous key before, but these people just knew what they were looking at were different features. I hadn’t even seen the plant before let alone its unique features. I felt like a shock of 100 sour patch kids fully coated in sour sugar into my mouth!

But here’s the funny part about sour patch kids. When the initial shock of sour subsides, they leave a sweet gooey candy that fills your mouth with rich flavors of blue raspberry, watermelon, strawberry, and lemon! Your young five year old heart swells with joy from the burst of sugar on your tongue. Your eyes widen as you grin ear to ear. Finally, the sweetness has shown its cards at last!

As I continued my work on the prairie it got easier. The ugly sourness of fear and intimidation faded away as I bonded with my co-interns (Shout out our 20 hour flights to Boise, ID), worked more with the technicians, and learned to identify my prairie plants. The people here made my experience so sweet. Whether it was monitoring rare plant species in a dolomite prairie with thick sun rays beating your back. Planting Sporobolus heterolepis for a mycorrhizal experiment in the rain, or kissing a bunch of snakes as they tried to slither away in your hands, the days were always eventful.

We as a team have keyed our unknown species of plants, pursued trivia, built retention walls, trudged through dirty streams, and of course, collected seeds. We’ve sworn, yelled, complained, hugged, laughed, and celebrated together through it all. Working together we have done as much for the prairie as it has done for us and we hope it was enough.

The funny thing is about bittersweet endings is you would give anything to go back to that first day. Those sour first days when it all felt like too much because you know how sweet of an experience it will turn out to be. Then it’s all done, just a blip in time to be remembered but never repeated. 

Almost like the company knew what they were doing when they wrote the slogan for sour patch kids:

“Sour Patch Kids: Sour, Sweet, Gone”

Over the months the seeds we have been collecting have changed. Earlier my mind was so focused on sedges and where they were in our prairie’s. But I haven’t thought about sedges in a long time. Instead my harvesting mind has switched to silphiums. Silphiums are one of the characteristic features of Midewin, and we have a lot of them as you can see from this picture. This time of year is really the time when seeding has been put into high gear, as now we have help from experienced volunteers, many of the other technicians, and even the mighty acorns, an army of 12 year old schoolchildren that help collect seed from easy to access areas like seed beds. Also what has changed is our attitude towards collecting seed. Earlier we tried to find more unique and rare species that were hidden in the tall grasses. Now we are trying to get more bulk collections of our main workhorse plants such as rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium). In the past this plant was a thorn in my side, almost literally as it would often snag painfully against my leg, now I get to exact my revenge.

Besides seed collecting, which has occupied a bulk of our time, we also did some more plant monitoring in a more unique way. This method, instead of getting a quadrat out, was more free form and has the title of “Fall Meandering”. For an hour we walked around various areas of our prairie’s and identified any of the plants we saw and jotted it down. It was a nice leisurely stroll through the vegetation. In this exercise, even more than the previous plant monitoring, I really think I learned a lot more of the plants that existed around me. One such plant was Solidago altissima (insert picture) which I had thought was just the invasive Canada goldenrod. But they are slightly different in the inflorescence as the length of those small little petals differentiates them. 

As the final leg of this journey comes up on us and we can see the finish line we have to keep remembering to stay the course and keep taking the necessary steps.

The high desert sun over the Payette has receded into misty mornings and many a rainy day, and the larches and aspens are turning to spires of gold among the evergreens. The past month has been a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure story; the credits have begun to roll for the main storyline of seed collecting, so we’ve had some time to work with a handful of other crews on a smattering of side quests.
We started off the month with a collection of red-osier dogwood seeds (Cornus sericea) that we suggested as a good way to learn to collect not only tree seeds but also fleshy fruit. The question of the hour then became: how do we get these out of the little white berries they grow inside? The answer, it turns out, was to dump them into a 5-gallon bucket and stomp them like wine grapes. They feel so, so weird between your toes – would not recommend! But after laying them in the sun for a few days to dry, we ended up with a rather bulky bag of about 40,000 seeds. Not too bad for two hours’ worth of collecting.

After this rather bizarre episode, we tagged along with a wildlife biologist to retrieve game cameras on the farthest-flung reaches of the forest out by Hells Canyon. We returned with a camera roll full of elk, fishers, and bears, an incredible panoramic view of America’s deepest river gorge, and a new population of a rare bitterroot flower. We spent the next week or two wrapping up collections of roses, alders and daisies before Dan took a week to visit Great Basin. I stayed behind to finish some office work and map streams in a timber sale with our hydrology crew, and then it was my turn to take a week off and drive through the gorgeous Idaho panhandle.
I spent most of my week’s vacation touring Coeur d’Alene, a quaint little lakeside city where the rain and coffee abound this time of year – and, it turns out, some large furry beasts. On the far shore of Coeur d’Alene lake, a campground is tucked away in the pines, accessible only by kayaking across the water. I paddled an evening’s worth of gear across, set up a tent, and was about to make supper and go to bed when I heard the sounds of heavy animal breaths just into the woods. Shining my flashlight in their direction revealed – two large glowing eyes staring back at me, about three feet off the ground. It may be worth mentioning at this point that Coeur d’Alene is on the edge of grizzly country. I packed my tent back into my kayak and muscled the boat back across the lake with a furious intensity that would make any Viking captain proud.

After this rather startling misadventure, I spent the rest of the week exploring the town, fly-fishing, hiking to waterfalls in the Selkirk Mountains, and generally having the best time of the summer. Not to mention all the other off-the-cuff day trips we’ve taken: I finally caught my first trout of the season in the beautiful Clearwater River and went sandboarding (!) at Bruneau Dunes State Park. It seems unbelievable that the end of our time in Idaho will be here in only two more weeks, but I’ve experienced and learned so much in the past few months. I’ll be glad to be home soon, but saying adieu to the Rocky Mountains is going to be a bittersweet farewell.