Chris Evans, River-to-River CWMA, Bugwood.org copy

The story usually is told as “put a frog in boiling water and he’ll jump out, but put him in water and slowly raise the temperature and he’ll just sit there and cook to death.”  While we’re all lots more used to frogs – boiled or not – most of us recognize the camel’s nose as the same sort of story; that is, “once the camel gets his nose in the tent, the rest of him is sure to follow.”  Boiled frogs, camels’ noses, slippery slopes: metaphors of warning about failure to notice slowly occurring changes and the terrible consequences that result from lack of awareness.

Such metaphors are attractive and seem to offer a powerful argument.  But, frogs DO jump out when the heat makes them uncomfortable no matter how gradually the water is warmed, unless, of course, the experimenter unfairly places a lid on the container or otherwise makes the leap to freedom impossible.  The frog doesn’t helplessly slide down a slippery slope of slowly and passively being cooked to death – he “votes with his feet” and makes an exit.

In similar fashion, a number of area residents have decided to fight back against the onslaught of non-native invasive plants and boot them off their lands.  The Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative between Clifftop and USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is a special program for landowners within the Hill Prairie / Karst Sinkhole Plain.  This resource-rich area is the focus area for a special program of NRCS cost-share incentives to landowners to help them steward and care for natural resources and improve wildlife habitat on their lands.

Participants in this program may receive funding to help cover the costs: to have a Certified Forester write a forest management plan; improve timber stands on their property; hire contractors for or retain payments for doing the work of controlling and eradicating non-native invasive plant species; restore rare and declining habitats; and varieties of additional programs to improve wildlife habitat on their landholdings.

Since the start of the CCPI program in late summer 2009, 31 landowners-managers have enrolled nearly 1,800 acres for a variety of cost-share practices.  A total of more than $320,000 in funding has been committed to these efforts which will be carried out over a number of years.  Much of the work and cost-share dollars are devoted to controlling and removing exotic non-native invasive plants, especially bush honeysuckle.

This is NOT how to hunt honeysuckle. Pen DauBach, Clifftop.

Each autumn, as area hunters look forward to another season of deer hunting, the honeysuckle problem becomes more apparent. Hunters are wondering how to stalk, how to aim, how to even see their way to a reasonable shot through the “*^^*# (expletives deleted)— DARN honeysuckle!”

Sadly, the short answer to the frustrated hunter is simple: “You’re not.” That is, not if the honeysuckle has formed its own groves, because by then it’s just too dense. Deer do love the thick stuff and often stay there, but not so much because the honeysuckle provides lots of nutritious food. They do browse the plants, but honeysuckle is not a staple food, like oak acorns, and is more a deer form of junk food, filling but not particularly nutrient packed. The structure of honeysuckle thickets, the very twisting, blanketing, all-encompassing tangles, help deer hide from their human predators. Our local landscape shows only too much evidence of honeysuckle monocultures.

Several species of Asian bush honeysuckles are present in the U.S. and all have the same basic story of importation for apparently “good” purposes with unintended and dramatically bad results.  Viewed as sweet-smelling, pretty shrubs, bush honeysuckles were imported first to Europe in 1855 and then introduced to the Eastern U.S. in 1896.  Widely sold as ornamental plantings, bush honeysuckles also were recommended for additional seemingly beneficial purposes.  Since deer browse the vegetation and birds and small mammals eat the prolific red berries, bush honeysuckles were viewed as excellent wildlife plantings, and, because the plants form dense colonies due to root suckering, they also were promoted as a way to control soil erosion.

James H. Miller, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org

But these two qualities — tremendous seed production and root generation — coupled with a total lack of controlling predators or diseases in U.S. lands, allowed bush honeysuckle to become one of the most invasive plants on our landscape.   As recently as 30 years ago, bush honeysuckles were not known to grow in our area of the state.  Time-lapse maps of invasive species show a steady and speedy movement of these plants out of urban areas and into all parts of Illinois.

Bush honeysuckle forms understory thickets that shade out and crowd out the natural regeneration of our native plants. Large colonies of bush honeysuckle are easily viewed along Route 3, especially at wooded areas near Columbia and Waterloo, along Bluff Road, and, sadly, at nearly any wooded area.  The totality of impact is dramatic, for once a bush honeysuckle thicket has formed, few other plants are able to grow and reproduce.  Bush honeysuckle, like many exotic invasives, creates a monoculture of itself, alone, and transforms a landscape into a desert that gives little sustenance.

Our native oaks and hickories can no longer generate new seedling growth due to the deep shade honeysuckle thickets create.  New trees and the future acorn and nut production are therefore reduced.  Deer, turkey, quail and a host of other critters that depend on acorns and nuts for food simply run out of food and, where possible, move on, sometimes to adjacent woods and sometimes into yards and gardens. Native wildflowers are shaded out and, lacking enough sunlight to bloom and set seeds, simply die out.  Similarly, our native morels and mushrooms cannot maintain colonies without healthy oak-hickory forest areas on which to spread their spores, and are gone forever.

Bush honeysuckle is easily recognized. In fall, its leaves remain green long after native trees and shrubs have dropped their leaves.  In spring, bush honeysuckle greens up and leafs out before our native trees and shrubs do.  Their ability to green-up earlier and stay green longer gives these invaders an eight to ten week longer growing season — another adaptive advantage which makes bush honeysuckle out-compete our native plants.

Chuck Bargeron, University of Georgia, Bugwood.org

Bush honeysuckle is an erect, multi-stemmed semi-evergreen/deciduous shrub with arching branches that can grow 10-20 feet tall. Its leaves are opposite, untoothed, oblong tapering at the tips, and 2-3” long. Fragrant tubular flowers appear in spring and age from white to yellow.  Bush honeysuckle berries are red, 1/4 inch in diameter, and appear in May-June. Birds and small mammals eat the berries and help spread the invaders as the seeds are evacuated far from the original plant.  The berries, however, are low in fat content compared to our native berries, and provide poor food value to our game and non-game birds and mammals.

There is a simple, surefire field test for ensuring you have identified bush honeysuckle and not confused it with one of our beneficial native plants. Simply cut off a woody twig or branchlet with a scissors or a knife. Bush honeysuckle has hollow pith; our native good guys do not.

There are several management techniques to control and eliminate bush honeysuckle. Smaller specimens, 2 or less feet high, can be easily pulled by two hands.  Weed-pullers should take care to disturb the soil as little as possible, since seeds may already be present, and, if berries are on the pulled bushes, the pulled plants should be bagged and removed from the area.

Herbicides are effective in controlling bush honeysuckle. Foliar spraying may be the best method for large-scale, heavy infestations. Use a systemic herbicide such as glyphosate (Roundup) or triclopyr (Garlon, Crossbow, Tahoe) in the manufacturer’s recommended dilution strength, adding surfactant if recommended. Thoroughly wet all the honeysuckles’ leaves. This method is most effective in late September through early November.

The downside of this method is potential damage to other desirable plants and contamination of the watershed. Herbicide drift may kill plants close by. If you use too much of the herbicide, the toxins may pass through the honeysuckles’ roots into the roots of nearby desirable non-target native plants. You need to avoid using herbicides near creeks, wetlands, sinkhole ponds, and the watershed in general. And, foliar spraying does not kill any seeds present on the plants.  Finally, the foliar spray method uses the largest amount of expensive herbicide.

An alternate method to eradicate bush honeysuckle is a combination of manual and chemical practices.  It’s also the most work, but has the highest success rate with existing colonies of bush honeysuckle.

Simply cut the bush honeysuckle shrubs down to the lowest possible common stem(s) near the ground and then immediately paint, daub or squirt herbicide on the cut stump.  Don’t wait to apply the herbicide, because the stump can scab over in less than an hour which prevents herbicide penetration. This method is also most effective in the late September – early November timeframe because sap is moving down to the roots and will help carry the herbicide.  Again, any dead bushes with berries should be carefully removed from the area to prevent seed spread.

Finally, bush honeysuckle cannot tolerate fire. But our native oaks and hickories thrive on fire.  A prescribed and controlled burn of your woods in late fall or winter will go a long way in managing honeysuckle. Just make certain you conduct a burn in accordance with Illinois’ Prescribed Burn Law.

Full control and eradication of a bush honeysuckle thicket is a multiyear tasking.  Unfortunately the seeds can remain viable within the soil for several years and, more unfortunately still, seeds from plants in other areas can still be transported into the area you’ve worked so hard to clear of this tenacious invader.

With effort and with cost-share help landowners in our bluff lands are making a difference.  They are not waiting for bush honeysuckle to transform their landscape but are booting it off their grounds and helping wildlife and wildlife habitat remain a part of the great outdoors we share.

And for the hunter — of deer, squirrels, turkey, mushrooms, wildflowers, birdsong or any other woodland experience – putting a target on honeysuckle and starting a campaign of control must become another well-honed autumn tradition, so that the real hunts can continue.

Clifftop, a local nonprofit organization, is focused on preserving and protecting area bluff lands. For more information about invasive plants in our bluffs see that section at our web site www.clifftopalliance.org

Versions of this article appeared in the October 15 2010 and October 21 2011 editions of the Monroe County Independent.

© 2010 all content rights reserved, Clifftop NFP.

Dennis FitzWilliam, Clifftop

Writer John Fowles spent a portion of his childhood in rural England when his family moved from a London suburb to escape World War II blitzkrieg attacks on the city.  His memory of life in the country, particularly life in a setting with woodlands, was, he later wrote, “Slinking off into trees was always slinking into heaven.”  The heaven Fowles sought was not a neat park-like expanse of manicured woodland.  It was, as he called it, a “green chaos” of trees at all ages of growth, shrubs, vines, herbaceous flowers and grasses, and a wilderness of animals – insects, spiders, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals – as well as fungi, lichens and even the decaying detritus within a wooded area: the green chaos of a healthy, incredibly complex coexistence of living forms.  De-poeticized scientific descriptions refer to this as “biodiversity.”

Tom Rollins, Thomas Rollins Photography

Our bluff lands still contain treasures of biodiversity – a great mix of life forms that make up healthy natural communities.  While it does seem to be a chicken/egg paradox, healthy, naturally biodiverse communities are self-sustaining through biodiversity itself.  An ecosystem, such as our upland oak-hickory forest, is a dynamic push-and-pull of interdependencies among and between the species that live here.  The development of interdependency means that time, along with other non-biological factors, is itself a factor in the complexity of biodiversity.

Natural communities grow up together within the limits made possible by non-biological factors, including soil, weather, geology, sun and wind exposure.  Co-evolution — the tendency of species within an ecosystem to become dependent upon each other – takes place over great lengths of time and through multiple generations.

Pen DauBach, Clifftop

Recently, our bluff lands’ natural communities have been part of an experiment in time compression.  This experiment has neither a time machine under development nor, even, a white-coated, rumple-haired scientific director stirring up beakers of chemicals, admiring the arc of electric currents, or conducting various dissections and lab trials.  The experiment – ongoing and underfoot on nearly every wooded and non-agricultural acre – compresses time and tests the ability of species to survive when the bounds of co-evolutionary relationships begin to unravel in quick order.

Our natural landscape is being transformed by invasive plants that alter the long-term relationships between plant and animal species, destroying wildlife habitat and our rich natural heritage.

Dennis FitzWilliam, Clifftop. This woodland, with the forest floor carpeted with wild hydrangea and other herbaceous plants, is an example of a healthy system filled with native plants.

An “invasive” plant species simply is an aggressive plant type that grows rapidly, reproduces greatly and out-competes other plant species.  Within a relatively short time an invasive species can replace nearly all other plants and can even create a monoculture of only one species – itself.  An “exotic, or non-native, invasive” plant species is similarly aggressive but was introduced from a distant area.

Invasive plants, including the non-native ones, grow and reproduce well in new areas due to a combination of reasons.  These can include similarity in climate and growing conditions; the innate ability of the species to grow and reproduce within a wider range of conditions; an absence of predators or diseases that, in the native range, consumed either the plants or the seeds, and kept the population under control; or, the inability of the native plant species to compete, especially within the altered growing conditions that the non-native plant species itself creates.  Several invasive species in our bluff lands are altering the natural plant and animal communities.

Leslie J. Mehrhoff, University of Connecticut

Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), imported from Asia to Pennsylvania as an ornamental in 1751, probably has not been purposefully planted for more than a century, but now occurs in nearly all states.  A prolific seeder (up to 300,000 seeds per tree), it also spreads through numerous root suckers and re-sprouts from cut stumps and root fragments.  Extremely fast growing – up to eight feet a year — once established, Tree-of-Heaven can quickly take over a site and form an impenetrable thicket.  Unfortunately, Tree-of-Heaven thickets are only too numerous along the talus slope of our bluffs all along Bluff Road; even more unfortunately, Tree-of-Heaven is spreading deep into the woods.

In similar fashion, Silk Tree or Mimosa (Albizia julbrissin), is a strong competitor to

USDA Forest Service

native trees and shrubs in open areas and forest edges, particularly along stream banks.  Widely planted as an ornamental since its introduction from Asia in 1745, and a particular favorite amongst early French settlers of our area, it spreads by both vegetative and seed reproduction.  In open areas, or glades, within our woods, mimosa continues to alter the landscape, as it is a member of the Pea family, and, in common with members of this group, fixes nitrogen into the soil.  The enriched soil then becomes less hospitable to native herbaceous plants that flower and re-seed best in the lean, less fertilized soils within which they evolved.

Both bush honeysuckle and Japanese (vining) honeysuckle (Lonicera mackii and L. Japonica) also were introduced as ornamental plants and sometimes still are recommended as wildlife browse, particularly for deer.  But the hunter who pins hopes on these plants soon learns to curse the day he or she encouraged honeysuckle, for, while deer do eat the plants, they cannot keep up with the rampant growth.  Where a healthy woodlands once nourished a variety of game and non-game species, a honeysuckle thicket soon grows and offers little food but endless tangles and noisy trip snares for humans who seek to walk through the nearly solid mass of shrubs and vines.

Dennis FitzWilliam

And, though a native of our bottomland forests, Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) also is an invasive of our upland oak-hickory woodlands, particularly along moister north-facing slopes.  Although seeds are not produced until trees are at least 22 years old, sugar maples are prolific reproducers, with the winged seeds carried up to 330 feet by wind.  A Michigan study tallied 70,000 seeds per acre in the center of a clear-cut in a forest.  Coupled with high average germination — up to 95% — mixed-wood forests can become dominated by maple growth.

Invasive plants can and do become the dominant species in areas where they grow without challenge.  They create a monoculture of themselves and transform the landscape into a desert that gives little to no sustenance to all the species that had depended upon and which had co-evolved with the native plant community.  The ability of other life forms – from morel mushrooms and lichens growing on rocks and wind-fall timber, all through insects and spiders, reptiles, birds and mammals – to live and reproduce is radically altered.

Challenging the growth and spread of invasive plant species is hard and not inexpensive work that requires a tool kit of selective practices applied over several years and, often, constant vigilance and continued work to prevent re-infestation.  Landowners and managers, however, reap the rewards of helping sustain the diversity of life in our bluff lands.  Beyond the beauty and the simple goodness of being part of a dynamic natural community, landowners can bank on human-centered economic returns by helping “nature” help itself.

After a bank account-filling harvest of oak and hickory timber from a woodland, ensuring correct practices so that new oaks and hickories regenerate, rather than letting the land lapse into a maple or bush honeysuckle desert, assures the landowner that children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, can, in turn, profit from a healthy timber harvest.  And, each generation also will be able to hunt and relish the species dependent on oak acorns and hickory nuts, our deer and turkey, as well as other forest bounty, like sweet morels signaling springtime and a proper cycle of life, decay, and regeneration within the woods.  And the hunters, whether for turkey, deer, or ‘shrooms, can admire a tapestry of wildflowers even as they listen to the flute-song of a thrush, the hoot of an owl, the plaintive call of a bluebird, and inhale the not-very-sweet musky scent of last night’s encounter between a fox kit and an adult skunk.

Efforts at sustaining and maintaining natural communities within our bluff lands recently have become – not easier – but, at least, a bit more affordable.  When a group of local landholders formed Clifftop in 2006, the organization’s goals included improving land and wildlife management and stewardship practices and helping with the implementation of conservation programs.  Clifftop has partnered with others, including federal and state agencies and additional non-governmental organizations, to help implement the Illinois Wildlife Action Plan.  The genesis of this plan – recognized as one of the 10 best within the entire nation – was a 2001 U.S. Congressional effort to help reduce conservation costs throughout the U.S. by addressing wildlife habitat and species needs before critical measures (such as listing a species as threatened or endangered) were necessary.

The Illinois Wildlife Action Plan places stress on controlling and eradicating invasive plant species as a primary way of improving wildlife habitat.  The partnership effort Clifftop has joined has led to a new form of conservation funding, called the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative (CCPI) with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).  The entire initiative, if USDA funds remain available throughout the planned four-year extent of the program, will bring $1.5 million in funds and in-kind services to our bluff lands area for invasive species control, forest stand improvements, reforestation, prescribed burning, and conservation planning.  The program will use two popular NRCS Farm Bill programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) and technical assistance from Clifftop, NRCS, and the partners in the local planning process of the Illinois Wildlife Action Plan, to help put quality conservation planning and practices on the land.  Qualifying landowners can receive financial assistance and technical help to implement practices that benefit conservation goals.

Restoring, maintaining, and celebrating the “green chaos” of our bluff lands landscape is slinking into, indeed, hard work, but also, a bit of heaven.

Paul Feldker, Clifftop. Slinking off to a green chaos of natural beauty.

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

A version of this article appeared in the September 4 2009 edition of the Monroe County Independent.

© 2009 all content rights reserved, Clifftop NFP.