Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

I grew up in the dawn’s long shadows of the bluff line. I have watched a lifetime of sunsets illuminating the cliff face — like a limestone necklace, jewelling the landscape of Valmeyer. My German ancestors spoke legions about the bluff lands’ magic and bounty; they spoke with that old German reverence for the natural world.

German is a daring language, with precise, inch-long words, bringing both abstract and concrete, active and passive meaning, all at once, to our deepest inner feelings. In German, Naturanschauungsunterricht captures the meaning of a reverence for nature — its study, its lessons, its joy — in a single word, and connotes our collective responsibilities as nature’s caretaker for future generations.

That notion — Naturanschauungsunterricht — is, in concept, very appropriate for preserving our bluff lands most precious natural heritage; and, in practice, is serving to insure protected natural landscapes, in perpetuity, for generations to come.

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

The Mississippi River bluff land corridor in Monroe County is one of the most resource rich natural areas in Illinois. A bird’s eye view of the lay of the landscape serves to illustrate the importance of that natural heritage. At the foot of the bluffs’ cliff face dramatically looming above the flood plain, ancient wetlands, dependant on spring-fed creeks emanating from the bluffs, host an unbelievable variety of bird life, amphibians, and reptiles, many of which migrate twice-annually to and from winter hibernacula in the bluffs.

Pen Daubach, Clifftop

Atop the cliff face, isolated patches and thin ribbons of hill prairie perch precariously to the bluff edges. Only 500 acres of loess hill prairie remain in Illinois, and 40% of the state’s total are in Monroe County. Nearby the prairies, small forest openings host limestone glades, an even rarer natural habitat in the state. Only 200 acres of limestone glade remain and 30% of them can be found here in Monroe County.

The upland forest, riding eastward across the corridor, is also distinctive.

From Valmeyer southward, the forest is mostly undeveloped, with several unfragmented blocks in excess of 2,500 acres making it one of the largest contiguous woodlands in the state. And forest-wide, throughout the corridor, deeply karstified terrane, marked by 10,000 sinkholes and more cave openings than any other region of the state, make it a very unique area in Illinois.

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

The 40-minute drive along Bluff Road, from Columbia to Prairie du Rocher, passes below some of the rarest and most intact wildlife habitat in the state. As a measure of its importance, some 2000 acres in the corridor are now permanently protected with conservation easements through a mix of conservation-minded and enterprising solutions.

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources owns and manages the 700-acre Fults Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, just a mile south of the Village of Fults. The preserve hosts the largest hill prairie acreage in the state. It is open to the public and features a 1½-mile loop trail system.

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

Nearly 700-acres of the corridor are privately-owned, but are permanently protected with conservation easements donated to the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission (INPC). INPC helps the landowners steward the tracts and they are, obviously, not open to the public.

The Village of Valmeyer, I am proud to report, conveyed a conservation easement on its 630-acre Salt Lick Point tract in 2005. The Salt Lick Point Land and Water Reserve is managed by INPC, with the help of the village’s Salt Lick Point Stewardship Committee volunteers and Valmeyer’s Boy Scout Troop # 345. The volunteers have established a wonderful 5-mile interlocking trail system on the site, which is open to the public.

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

Clifftop’s and the Southwestern Illinois Resource Conservation & Development’s recent joint acquisition of the White Rock tract adds a new and innovative dimension to land protection in the corridor. In the first ever joint-venture land acquisition initiative in the state, the two local nonprofit organizations jointly own and steward the 475-acre tract. White Rock is located about a mile south of Valmeyer, along Bluff Road. White Rock will be dedicated as a nature preserve, and after the establishment of a parking area and trail system, the site will be opened to public hiking in October 2011. Anyone interested in helping with the White Rock project should contact Clifftop.

When ready, White Rock’s public trail system will present another recreational opportunity for Monroe County. The Salt Lick Point Reserve and Fults Hill Prairie Preserve already see almost 4000 visitors a year. This not only represents a potential economic boon for our area, but also is testimony that lots of folks share that old fashioned reverence for nature and support saving some natural area space as a public place.

Clifftop, a local nonprofit organization, is focused on preserving and protecting area bluff lands.

A version of this article appeared in the March 4 2011 edition of the Monroe County Independent.

© 2011 all content rights reserved, Clifftop NFP.

Illinois, the “Prairie State,” once was a part of a vast grassland, stretching from Indiana to Nebraska, from Texas to Saskatchewan, called the tallgrass prairie.  In 1800, 22 million acres of Illinois were tallgrass prairie and 14 million acres were forest.

Millions of years ago, because of the Rocky Mountain uplift, a large rain-shadow was created in the middle of the continent.  A precipitation gradient, running west-to-east, became the dominant factor in what grows where.  The height of grasses and frequency of trees increase as you move from the foot of the Rockies, across the Midwest, and into the Appalachians.  After the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, distinct species of drought-tolerant plants took hold to form the huge swathes of prairie in Illinois.

Even as they declared it “wilderness,” the heavily-forested terrain of

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

eastern North America remained recognizably similar to the homelands of early European explores and settlers.  There was, further, familiarity in land use due to horticultural practices of Amerindians, who opened small fields within the vast forests.

But for those who initially explored and then those settlers who slowly “westered-on” as they cut down timbers to homestead through the ever-shrinking eastern forests, the tallgrass prairie offered no frame of reference.  They had never seen or heard of the steppes of Asia, the African veldt, or the South American pampas.

The first European explorers who ventured into the tallgrass prairie were astounded by its vast expanse, seemingly so devoid of landmarks that it was comparable only to the empty seas.  Louis Joliet, after his legendary 1673 exploration down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, reported on “limitless expanses of prairies, miraculous oceans of grasslands, stretching as far as the eye could see.”

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

Even the word “prairie” hints at the difficulty early explorers had in grasping the uniqueness of this new place and their struggle for cultural referents.  This word was coined in the 18th century and was derived from the Old French praerie which was rooted in the Latin word pratum for “meadow.”  The word, though evocative of a familiar European landscape — an enclosed grassy area, dotted with daisies and poppies and regularly mowed for animal fodder  — could not itself possibly contain the vast wild ecosystem that was the tallgrass prairie.  No longer a referent to meadow, the word prairie grew even as that landscape was being transformed, into its modern meaning: an expansively open, unconfined area dominated by grasses and the absence of many trees.

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

A tallgrass prairie simply is an association of distinct grasses and forbs (mostly flowering composites and legumes) growing close together, sharing time, space and nutrients.  Over time, prairie plants adapted to survive the extremes in temperature, drought, wind, high light intensity,  grazing by large herbivores (bison and elk), as well as underground disturbance by burrowing animals,  and disturbance by fire, which prevents the establishment and succession of trees.

Here, too, word usage tells a distinct story, but one far different from and having no analogy to a meadow.  For Native American peoples of the mid-continent, prairie and fire were one and the same word.  Prairie plants survive because their roots and rhizomes are protected from the searing heat of prairie fires which burn through dried and dead vegetation in the late fall through early spring dormant-growth season.

A tallgrass prairie is a quiltwork of plant cooperation and a kaleidoscope of colors, bloomtimes, heights and shapes, all wafting in the winds from early spring to late fall.  What you see in looking over a prairie is only a third of the dynamics of the ecosystem.  Prairies are root-driven communities with two-thirds of their biomass underground.  Deep, very deep roots insure plant survival in a landscape hospitable only to very drought tolerant plants.  A

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

gardener knows, for example, that time, some effort and a shovel will suffice to transplant a daylily or a rose.  But moving a prairie coneflower sets the patient gardener to considerable effort with a very long-bladed spade.  A transplant-minded gardener would be better prepared to deal with an established compass plant by using a back hoe.

Most of the metabolic activity in a prairie occurs at the root-soil interface, the rhizosphere.  During photosynthesis prairie plants move energy-rich compounds to their roots, where they are released into the surrounding soil and serve as carbon and vitamins for microbes.  The microbes, in turn, help transport other nutrients back to the plant roots.  This microbe-plant symbiotic association brings huge levels of biomass and energy to a prairie ecosystem.

And, were there’s biomass and energy aplenty,  there’s food and shelter for a myriad of animals.  Insects galore — especially large crickets, grasshoppers and leafhoppers — live out their lives in prairies.  Dozens of species of our local butterflies use only prairie

Pen DauBach, Clifftop

plants as larval hosts.  Over 60 species of our butterflies congregate on prairie plants, like multicolored shavings drawn to a magnet, for nectaring sources.

Where bugs abound, our birds follow.  Upland Sandpipers, meadowlarks, bobwhite quail, shrikes, kestrels, bobolinks, Northern Harriers, and Grasshopper and Henslow’s Sparrows are commonly found in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

For us, a tallgrass prairie is akin now to slow paging through a greatly over-sized wall calendar with gorgeous images of exotic places.  Every month brings to us new pictures of striking beauty and memories of our ancient lands.  But our calendar is sepia-toned and edge-frayed for our tallgrass prairies exist now only as place names on old plat maps.

New Design Prairie and Prairie du Rond (Round), which quickly was renamed Yankee Prairie, were smaller prairie patches east of present-day Burksville in Monroe County.  They became the centerpiece of Illinois’ first post-Revolutionary War settlement area, the New Design Colony.  New Design established the first school

Pen DauBach, Clifftop

house in the state in the early 1780s and the children may have admired the prairies on their walks there or, perhaps, were tardy to school as they lingered to chase a butterfly .

Flat Prairie was located 20 miles east of Fort Kaskaskia, in the Cox Creek area of Randolph County.  History holds that it was so flat, and its expansive grasses so flourishingly tall, that a horseman had to stand on the back of his mount for any hope of spying another approaching rider.

Big Prairie, in Monroe and St. Clair Counties, ran for miles in the American Bottoms between old Fish Lake and the bluffs, from present-day Columbia toward Cahokia.  James Piggot built a fortified homestead overlooking the prairie in 1783, along the Kaskaskia Trail, at the base of the bluffs, just west of what now is Columbia. Two men died on the prairie in 1806, when lightening created a firestorm.

Horse Prairie, located in northern Randolph County between Sparta and Marissa, covered nine square miles of territory.  The prairie got its name from stories of wild horses which once roamed the prairie.  That legend gained new currency when, in 1803,  a long-remembered horse race was held on the prairie.  Bets up to $500 were wagered, an astronomic sum of money for the time, guaranteeing that the race would live on in memory, even as the prairie was converted to agricultural fields.

And, Prairie du Long, aptly named on two counts, stretched for 20 long miles from southern St. Clair County, through Monroe County’s eastern panhandle, and into Randolph County.  The prairie also lasted the longest, with settlement of the area and conversion to agriculture not occurring until the mid-1800s.

While the place names endure, only remnants of tallgrass prairie live on.  In Illinois, only 2000 acres of original tallgrass prairie

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

remain.  But interesting variations, called hill prairies, still festoon the precipitous river bluff tops above the cliff face in Monroe and Randolph Counties.  And, tallgrass prairie reconstruction is becoming increasingly popular in our area.  Several state sites, such as Illinois Caverns Natural Area, near the historic New Design prairies, have reconstructed prairies and dozens of local landowners have reestablished prairies.  These prairie patches — though only small relics of a once vast ecosystem — still bear witness to the unique nature of the tallgrass prairie.

Clifftop, a local nonprofit organization, is focused on preserving and protecting area bluff lands.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2 2008 edition of the Monroe County Clarion.

© 2008 all content rights reserved, Clifftop NFP.

Dennis FitzWilliam, Clifftop

Illinois, the Prairie State, once was part of a vast grassland, covering most of central North America, called the tallgrass prairie.  In pre-European settlement times, Illinois consisted of approximately 22 million acres of prairie — about 60 percent of the state’s land — and 14 million acres of forest.

At the time of European settlement, several large tallgrass prairies existed in Monroe and Randolph Counties.  Big Prairie, on the American Bottoms, ran for 10 miles in southern St. Clair and northern Monroe Counties.   Flat Prairie, some 10 miles in diameter, was located 20 miles east of Kaskaskia in Randolph County.  Horse Prairie, also in Randolph County, got is name from the presence of wild horses roaming there.  And the grandest, Prairie du Long, a huge 70-square mile tallgrass prairie, stretched from southern St. Clair County through Monroe County’s eastern panhandle into Randolph County.

By 1830, farmers began to realize that tallgrass prairie soils were more fertile than forest soils and much easier to convert to agricultural use.  In the years following the Civil War, conversion and cultivation of prairie accelerated.  This was due to both the development of railroads, giving farmers improved transportation for their goods, and to the ever-increasing pace of agricultural mechanization.  By 1900, most of Illinois’ tallgrass prairie was gone.  Today, only one percent of the original sea of grass remains in the state.  In an ironic twist the very “sodbuster” pioneers who broke the great prairies for agricultural bounty now protect many of the small remnants, for pioneer cemeteries, untouched by plow and mower, now harbor tallgrass prairies.

Martin Kemper, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Also remaining, however, are variations on tallgrass prairie called hill prairies.  Hill prairies are distinctive natural communities occurring along the bluff tops of major rivers in the Midwest.  They are island-like small patches of prairie growing on the steep south- and southwest-facing slopes immediately above the cliffs.  The hot, windy and dry conditions on the slopes discourage all but the hardiest prairie plants.

The bluff lands of Monroe County historically were completely forested, excepting on the cliff edges and in forest openings, called glades.  Today, our bluff lands are home to more hill prairies than any other county in Illinois.  Many of the hill prairies can be easily spotted from Bluff Road, clinging to the slopes, from the tree lines to the cliff edges.  The hill prairies of Monroe County differ from others in the state because of a unique geologic history.

Pleistocene glaciers that covered most of Illinois — which were responsible for the pancake flatness of most of our state — didn’t quite reach the bluff corridor.  Our landscape is really a geographic extension of Missouri’s Ozark Plateau jutting into Illinois.  As a result, our hill prairies host some unusual plants and animals, more characteristic of Missouri and the West, and rare or nonexistent elsewhere in Illinois.

Hill prairies are a collage of plants — broad-leaved plants called forbs and grasses — growing close together; sharing and competing for resources.  This arms race for resources — for sunlight, soil moisture and nutrients — results in the plants taking turns at growth and flowering.  Small, short forbs grow and flower earlier racing ahead of the taller grasses to stay in the sunlight.  These earliest growing flowering plants include alumroots, oxalis, whitlow grass, blue-eyed grass, bluets, cleft phlox, and puccoons. They are the first to flower, but are largely dormant by June.

As the summer progresses, so does the height of flowering forbs, continuing to race the heights of the dominant grasses.  Next to bloom are several species of coreopsis, spiderworts, fleabanes, bergamot, coneflowers, skullcaps, beardtongue, prickly pear cactus and milkweeds.  Then come the legumes:

Dennis FitzWilliam, Clifftop

lead plant, bush clovers, prairie clovers, mountain mints, goat’s rue, scurf pea, and partridge pea.  Blazing stars follow.  Even as they race the grasses for available sunlight, many of the forbs also lean on and into the grasses which help them stand erect.  The forbs return the favor with an abundance of nectar-producing flowers attracting insect pollinators who also visit and pollinate the tiny flowers arranged along the growing tips of the grasses.

By midsummer, three tall grasses dominate the hill prairies:  thigh-high side-oats grama, waist-high little bluestem, and head-high Indian grass.  As the grasses turn to fall colors, complete setting their seeds,  and begin to dry out

Martin Kemper, Illinois Deptartment of Natural Resources

and die back, it is time for the “composite” flowers.  A dozen species of goldenrods, asters, and boneset come into bloom in late summer, setting their bright colors against the dominate orange and golden-tans of the still-upright dried grasses.

In all, over a hundred species of plants make up our hill prairies.  A couple of noteworthy “Ozarkian” rarities are found only here in the entire state.  Missouri coneflowers, a certain heliotrope, and a dwarf bedstraw grow only in Monroe and Randolph County hill prairies.  Stickleaf can be found only here and in three other counties along the Mississippi.  Our hill prairies and glades also host two animal species found only here in all of Illinois.

The stripped or plains scorpion lives only in the hill prairies of Monroe and Randolph Counties.  It is Illinois’ only scorpion, and is a far more common resident of the Missouri Ozarks. Scorpions belong to the same family, Arachnida, as spiders, ticks and mites, and, like them, have four pairs of jointed

Scott Ballard, Illinois Department of Natural Resources

legs  The paired enlarged pincers at their front are used to capture prey; the stinger at the tip of the long tail is used in defense.  Even though scorpions may have as many as six pairs of eyes positioned on their backs and along their bodies, they have poor eyesight.  The pincers have tiny, very sensitive hairs that help detect motion, and scorpions also have a comb-like structure on their undersides which seems to sense movement including ground vibrations, and also may detect sound.  Scorpions are solitary creatures, interacting only to mate or, sometimes, to prey upon each other.  Scorpions give birth to live young, which climb onto their mother’s back and remain with her for one to two weeks.

The plains scorpion is about an inch and half-long, and holds its tail to one side, as do all scorpions that remain under stone or bark during the day.  They are active only at night, emerging from their shelters to hunt their prey — spiders, cockroaches, ants, beetles and crickets, or, sometimes, a smaller, weaker scorpion. The sting of our native scorpion generally is no worse than a bee or wasp sting, although a few people may have an allergic reaction and experience severe symptoms.

Plains scorpions sometimes are food for another very rare hill prairie, glade, and talus slope resident, the flathead snake.  The diminutive, seven-inch long flathead snakes now are only found in Monroe County, although their range once included St. Clair, Randolph and Union Counties.  They have brownish-tan bodies, darker brown heads, and salmon-pink bellies.  Also nocturnal, flathead snakes live under rocks and logs on rocky wooded hillsides with plentiful limestone.  They eat plains scorpions as well as spiders, centipedes and other small insects which they seem to track by scent.  Flathead snakes pose no threat to humans but may serve to remind us of the unique nature and specialness of our bluff lands.

Recognizing the singular uniqueness of the hill prairies, the State of Illinois established Fults Hill Prairie Nature Preserve in 1970.  Located just south of the Village of Fults along Bluff Road, the 532-acre site contains the largest complex of hill prairies in Illinois.  In 1986, the U.S. Department of Interior’s National Park Service designated Fults Hill Prairie a National Natural Landmark.  There are only 600 such landmarks in the entire country.  Our bluff

Dennis FitzWilliam, Clifftop

lands shelter a little known, one-of-a-kind natural national treasure, in our own backyard.

Clifftop, a local nonprofit organization, is focused on preserving and protecting area bluff lands.

A version of this article appeared in the July 4 2007 edition of the Monroe County Clarion.

© 2007 all content rights reserved, Clifftop NFP.