Jarvis Migratory Bird Sanctuary

The seed we ordered through the CPD has arrived, so it's time to start preparing and seeding Barry Burton's Grove and the new fenced off area at the northwest corner. At the Saturday March 12th workday, assuming we're relatively snow-free, we'll start by preparing these areas. While the west side doesn't need much prep work, that's not the case with the Grove. The turf grass there was herbicided last fall. The thatch that remains needs to be removed so that the seed we sow can come in contact with the soil.

As I just took my tests for renewing my applicator licenses yesterday, I thought I'd write a few notes that might be useful to any readers who might be planning to take herbicide license tests at the Illinois Department of Agriculture on Bethany Road. They say DeKalb, but Google says Sycamore. No matter, it's not hard to find either way. There is a sign on Bethany Road just east of Route 23 pointing you to the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and a sign in the parking lot.

We met the truck from Spence Restoration Nursery at Jarvis today and unloaded over 1700 plants. Most of them are destined for the marsh, a few for the ponds, and a few others for other locations. A Peoples Energy grant through the Nature Conservancy paid for most of them, with the Chicago Park District picking up the tab for the rest. So bring your trowels and tall rubber boots (or even waders) if you have them, and let's get these guys planted. This is the beginning of a whole new marsh...

We had a meeting today about future work at Barry Burton's Grove. As you may or may not know, this area, between the north fence and Addison Drive is now being managed as part of the nature area. Charlotte, Cathey and I met with Zhanna Yermikov (Natural Areas Manager) and Becky Schillo (Volunteer Coordinator) of the CPD along with David Wachtel and Jason from Aramark.

The early spring migrants are here, the bloodroot and hepatica are blooming, and it's time to think about different tasks. The garlic mustard will be tall enough to pull in a few weeks, but not this coming Saturday. We still need to remove some logs that were too big for us to handle during the last few workdays, but they may not be cut up by CPD's Forestry crews before this Saturday because of all the rain we've had. So that may have to wait another 2 weeks also.

For the last ten years, the work we've done on any day has often been decided on that particular day, or sometimes a few days in advance when we knew what people or groups were coming, or based what supplies we had. While that certainly won't change completely, there are other considerations to when we do what work.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally was able to put together an aerial map composite from several TerraServer satellite images that I had saved way back in 2002. Interestingly, they had not been update as of September 2009, although the formatting of the TerraServer web site has changed, and the scale of those images is different. They were captured on April 10th, 2002, after the changes had been made increasing the size of the enclosed area, expanding the ponds, building the viewing platform, and putting in the new fence.