In “Sand County Almanac” Aldo Leopold recounts a story of restoration of an aged Wisconsin farm, played out and abandoned, the land worn, furrowed, and unproductive. Over the years, Aldo was able to restore the soil, the landscape and the habitat, turning back the land’s clock to a time before human settlement. I suppose that was, in part, what inspired me late in life to pursue the rewilding and habitat restoration of my family’s 48 acres in eastern Hillsdale County, Michigan.
“Rewilding” is a term more frequently heard in Britain, where the land has been tilled and inhabited for centuries. The idea is to take long-tilled land, where the native species and wildlife are all but absent and return it to a wild state. In the U.S., we speak of “habitat restoration”, the notion that we will somehow put back and restore what has been lost to man’s activities. I prefer “rewilding,” as it has breath and beauty evocative of what the land will be.
In 1999 my parents purchased 24 acres with stream, swamp and uplands, and built a home overlooking the woods. The woodlot had been long-grazed, with barbed wire entombed in the bowels of trees where it had been nailed long ago. Before purchase the previous owner had mined the woods for a stumpage fee, a pittance paid to remove all trees of any value as feed for sawmills manufacturing flooring and lumber. In the fields that had been long grazed the topsoil was gone, and rife with inedible species such as spotted napweed, a tough, resilient weed most difficult to eradicate, even by hungry livestock.
A few years passed, my father died, and mom went to memory care for Alzheimer’s. My brothers and I purchased an adjacent parcel with about 24 acres, an old, worn home nestled on a hill under two sentinel oaks, and a collapsing pole barn sheathed in metal roofing. We called that old home Windy Hill. The first night I stayed at Windy Hill I was woken at 2am by a coyote yipping and howling in the yard, getting closer and closer and circling round. This kept up for about 20 minutes, and I realized it was the prior tenant telling the new one its displeasure. In the morning, the coyote was gone, and what turned into decades of work began.
July 22, 2011 Lucy in the prairie.
We started by researching what had been there pre-settlement and learned that a mixed oak-prairie with occasional woodlots predominated. Two old fields had been planted in brome grass, a short, cold season grass good for grazing and little else. It forms a dense monoculture, choking all other grasses and herbs out, and propagates through rhizomes. Bugs don’t like it, and the only wildlife it supports is voles. We determined to remove it and replace it with a tall grass prairie. Working with the department of natural resources extension service, we obtained prairie seeds and the services of a seed drill, a specialty item needed to place light, fluffy prairie grass seeds in the ground. But first we had to eradicate the Brome grass, which required several cycles of mowing, herbicide treatment and burning.
We had 12 acres to treat, burn and plant, but we had no equipment. After a bit of searching we found an ancient Ford 8N tractor, one of a series manufactured from 1947 to 1952. With it came a 2-bottom plow, and the remnants of a sprayer, with a pump that mounted on the tractors power take off. Separately we purchased a brush hog for mowing the brome grass. We were in business.
The tractor barely ran, and I rebuilt the carburetor and electrical system. The sprayer wasn’t much more than a tank on a frame that mounted on the 3-point hitch, and after a bit of work I had it renewed with a new pump, sprayer nozzles and 20 feet of extension channels to give it a wide swath for herbicide spraying. After several cycles of mowing, spraying and burning we were ready to plant. The seed was delivered by a representative from the extension service, and one day the seed drill and its operator came by and seeded the two plots, nine acres in what we called the oval prairie, and another 3 acres in the front prairie. And then we waited for Spring.
The first prairie grasses emerged in May from the charred remnants of Brome grass, and then grew throughout the summer months, creating a refulgent growth reaching six to eight feet in height. Whereas the old field of brome grass was silent and inactive throughout the summer, the prairie was soon packed with life of all sorts. In the hot summer months, the prairie generated its own cloud of moisture every night, as the prairie roots extended twenty feet or more into the sandy soils to reach cool moisture below. Sucked upward by the turkey’s foot and other grasses, the water from below cooled the grass leaves, which were bedizened each night with pearls of water as airborne moisture condensed.
August 15, 2020 mid-morning prairie cloud.
The cool and moisture stayed throughout the day at the base of the grasses, and even in the hottest summer frogs could be found living among the bunch grass. Insects of all varieties followed, with dragon flies stacking in airborne flights reaching forty feet in the air above the rustling grasses. In another year, we saw our first turkeys in early spring coming to use the prairie and surrounds for nesting, with the hens escorting polts to the prairie to dine on the nutritious mix of insects and seeds. Deer bedded in the prairie, and some mornings when drinking coffee, I would see a doe and her two yearlings stand up from a night’s rest among the grasses. Blue racers and other snakes moved into the prairie cover to dine on mice and rabbits, and a chain of life soon emerged from those first few prairie seeds, planted in the ground not so long ago.
Spring 2022 burn (left), burned (middle) and emergent (right).
At this writing, we now have a prairie over a decade old, and we burn it every three to five years to renew the soils and mimic the burn cycle of a natural prairie. We burn in the early spring, and as the spring rains follow the prairie emerges like an emerald phoenix, along with the chain of life it nurtures.
October 28, 2019 Prairie gold.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but the prairie was the first in a parade of rewilding projects. In a future blog, I will write of the renewal of the woodlot, the installation of an ephemeral pond, milkweed restoration and the fostering of a carbon neutral lifestyle.