If you have recently hiked through Saul Lake Bog Nature Preserve, you may have noticed that some of the trees bear blue or red markings. If you guessed that those markings denote trees that will be removed, you are right. Unfortunately, oak wilt has been discovered on the preserve and has already killed dozens of oaks. The disease will continue to spread without action, and that
Happy Halloween! It’s that special time of year when we spend unusual amounts of time thinking about ghosts, goblins, skeletons, spiders, and creepy things in general. We here at the Land Conservancy are no exception: Lately I’ve been thinking about parasites. What’s a parasite, exactly? In short, it’s a creature that lives on or in another organism, on which it feeds. Lampreys, leeches,
A couple weeks ago, a post from outdoor retailer REI scrolled across my Instagram feed. The post announced a new focus for this year’s edition of #OptOutside, REI’s increasingly popular push to get people outdoors on Black Friday. This time around, instead of just getting
Oak savannas (sometimes called oak barrens or oak openings) are transitional habitats between tallgrass prairies and oak forests. They tend to be very diverse because they contain both forest and prairie species. Oak savannas are maintained by periodic fire, which encourages oak regeneration but keeps
It was confirmed: oak wilt had claimed the lives almost all the red and black oaks across this section of woods. Oak wilt is a disease caused by the non-native fungus Ceratocystis fagacearum, and is lethal to oak trees. But as devastating as oak wilt
Long before the state of Michigan was made up of a patchwork of geometric farm fields, sprawling cities, meandering highways, and stretches of forest, the state was made up mostly of a dynamic mixture of three landscapes--prairie, oak savanna, and oak forest. Those habitats shifted
On a bright clear morning in early December, I watched a bulldozer tear up the land. Back and forth it worked, methodically stripping vegetation from the ground and skimming off the soil. Behind it, an excavator ripped into a hillside and piled the dirt a few
Restoring Land, Restoring Hope. On Black Friday, 23 people came out to Saul Lake Bog Nature Preserve and planted a prairie. While the rest of America was out fighting crowds, standing in line, and getting into altercations over parking spots, 23 people were outside, breathing fresh
As a young boy I lived in central Illinois, a region better known for its endless seas of windswept corn than any magnificent natural wonders. So I was lucky, perhaps, that my parents’ house backed up to one of the largest oak forests in the
Post Update: This week, a crew will be working at Maas Family Nature Preserve to remove trees from six acres of forest that is encroaching on rare oak barrens. Some may wonder, "why is the land conservancy removing trees at one preserve while planting trees at