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[music]
The really significant part of the West Chicago Prairie
is that original remnant material has been preserved.
This was run as a stockyard operation from settlement times
so although some of the areas were plowed,
some were not.
It was all grazed but, some of it wasn’t plowed.
And as a result, there’s material in here
that has been remnant since ice receded 10,000 years ago.
There’s over 500 species of native plants on the preserve,
that’s partly because it’s a pretty big preserve,
over 300 acres; and we also have several ecosystem types.
We have wetlands and woodlands and savannas,
as well as the prairie, so we got a lot of diversity
because of that.
The Stewardship Group was formed a long time ago by Mel Hoff.
In 1982, he had just retired from Amoco,
and he was looking for a conservation job.
A few years earlier, the county and the city of West Chicago
had purchased the West Chicago Prairie
and they were looking for a steward, so it was really a perfect match.
And he got around right on the job
and started organizing the Stewardship Group.
Being a steward really is a lot of work.
Luckily, I have a lot of volunteers who help me,
and I really couldn't do it without them.
We have roughly 100 members;
some are more active than others, of course.
Some have been members for a long time
and now they pretty much don’t work out here,
but they donate the money to help us.
We have, maybe, 20 really active members who show up very regularly.
We have about 20 organized workdays where anybody can just come,
show up, and they can work with us as volunteers.
We also have a number of smaller workdays that our --
really, our members do that are special jobs maybe, weed control or
monitoring, for example.
We do also run a couple of field trips where we get people
to come out and see what’s going on out here;
that’s partly to show off the prairie and partly to recruit volunteers.
All in all, we volunteer about 1,000 hours a year out here
at the West Chicago Prairie.
We have really great connections
with the Natural Resource Management crew.
Because of the great cooperation and coordination,
we can do a lot of things out here.
Anything that requires, you know, heavy machinery, for example,
the Forest Preserve District is doing
and the Forest Preserve does the burns as well.
But the items that need a lot of hands,
like brush hauling or weeding or some of the other activities -
seed collecting, for example - those are the ones we concentrate on.