Please join us Saturday for our monthly volunteer day at Dan Ryan Woods. We'll meet at the 91st Street parking lot near Hermitage at 10:00 a.m. We will be seed collecting, so please be sure to wear close-toed shoes and long pants. You might also want to bring a water bottle.
Please reach out to Benjamin with any questions at 773-398-1178.
There's a habitat restoration workday this Saturday 8/10 from 10 am to 1 pm at Dan Ryan Woods. No experience is required.
If you'd like to help out, bring your own work gloves if you have them. If not, gloves will be available for use during the workday.
Meet up at the 91st St. parking lot (map link). For more info/to register, click here.
Friends of the Forest Preserves is having its monthly workday in Dan Ryan Woods on Sat. 5/11 from 10 am to 1 pm. Dress for yard work and wear boots or shoes that can handle some mud. If you have work gloves you like, bringing those is a good thing.
Here's more info from Friends of the Forest Preserves:
Our trails need a your help, so please join us this Saturday at 10 a.m. for our annual trail cleanup day. We'll meet in the parking lot at 91st and Hermitage.It's a great way to help with habitat restoration efforts and meet some great people. No previous experience needed.
Want to get out in nature with a group of folks and do some bird watching? Head down to Whistler Woods this Saturday 3/18 at 10 am. Sign up link and more info below.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/major-taylor-trail-clean-up-day-2023-tickets-559520048527
Plenty of people have buckthorn in their yards and have no idea that it is an invasive species that causes problems. I'm guessing that many people think that it's pretty foliage when it starts growing there. This attractive foliage was a big factor in the original importation of this terrible invasive.
If you look closely, you'll see berries - the way that buckthorn can spread so far from where it grows. Birds eat the berries and poop out the seeds anywhere and everywhere. Each year I have to remove some from my yard that undoubtedly got started that way.
I sometimes volunteer at habitat restoration workdays in local forest preserves. Removal of buckthorn is one of the top habitat restoration priorities throughout the Cook County Forest Preserve system. The photo below shows an area that was quite dense with buckthorn before a workday at Dan Ryan Woods this spring. We cleared a LOT of it so that the native species shown here could thrive.
At many locations in our neighborhoods, buckthorn shows up weed tree fences and hedges. That's my name for borders made up of an assortment of invasive and aggressive species like buckthorn and mulberry. Here's an example that's been mostly neglected for years (invasives growing through a chain link fence) and allowed to grow aggressively to the point where it was taking over the sidewalk.
This page is a helpful resource on identifying 2 common types of buckthorn and reasons why it's such a huge problem for our forests and native plants. Here's another good resource.
Here are some tips on how to get rid of buckthorn. It tends to resprout after cutting, so it may take more than one attempt. If you use Roundup, be careful to use it only on the cut stump so that you don't kill other plants around it. It's much less of a headache if you can remove it when it's small.
Eradicating buckthorn wherever possible is important for the health of our forests, wetlands, waterways and other ecosystems. Take a look around your property. If you find buckthorn, please do our local forests a favor and do your best to eliminate this pest.
