By Jen WiecznerThe Daily Northwestern

Before Prairie Project got there Sunday morning, much of Somme Prairie Grove was a tangle of dark, twisted branches.

By the time it left, it was a clearing in which three great fires smoldered.

But the group wasn’t destroying the environment – they were restoring it.

“It looks completely different,” said Prairie Project co-chair Beth Sturgeon, a Weinberg senior.

Prairie Project is a subgroup of Students for Ecological & Environment Development that visits local forest reserves on weekends to help restore them.

According to its Web site, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County covers 68,000 acres, about 11 percent of the land in Cook County.

“Most of the Chicagoland area was originally prairies,” said Weinberg senior Eileen Penner, the project’s co-chair. “We’re trying to make it a prairie again.”

Penner said there are prairies to restore as close as 20 minutes from campus.

The Prairie Project volunteers entered the prairie at 9 a.m. with about 30 other workers who traipsed single file over wet ground and roots, through woods, across busy thoroughfares and into the tall, golden grass of the field.

The prairie, which is technically a savanna, is so small only a mouse would consider it worthy of the name, said John Balaban, a steward in the North Branch Restoration Project who was volunteering at the site.

Site steward Steve Packard, Balaban said, is considered a guru among restoration volunteers because he started the project of restoring preserves in 1977.

“He said we can’t just buy it and put a fence around it because it’ll collapse,” Balaban said.

Volunteers mostly clear buckthorn, an invasive brush species.

“Basically it spreads like crazy and it’s very hard to remove and it blocks out the grassland’s sunlight,” Penner said.

But Sunday, instead of felling buckthorn, Penner split off with about half of the group to collect seeds to replant the prairie after brush had been cleared.

Near where the group split, a dark area where buckthorn was cleared looked like a bald spot in the grass, all dead, with a pile of black ash in the middle. After clearing an area, authorities set controlled fires in it – what Packard called “the almighty red buffalo.”

Down the trail, the scene appeared more industrial. Wielding sawed, the rest of the group cut branches taller than themselves, calling “timber!” and grunting as they unloaded them onto the three crackling bonfires.

Packard said that though many aspects of restoration take years of studying to learn, he can teach first-timers to help collect seeds and saw branches very quickly.

Four NU undergraduates, including the co-chairs, volunteered Sunday. Penner said that Prairie Project has grown this year, from fielding two consistent volunteers to more than a dozen who signed up this year.

Dr. Joseph Walsh, an NU biological sciences lecturer who sawed buckthorn Sunday and has been volunteering for six years, commended SEED’s ongoing contribution.

“It used to be islands of good habitat in a sea of buckthorn,” Walsh said. “Now it’s islands of buckthorn in a sea of good habitat.”

“If you look at what makes the Midwest great, it’s this soil,” he said, explaining that soil comes from plants, and supports the grain that makes the region one of the main “breadbaskets of the world.”

Walsh said the restoring that the group does benefits the ecosystem so plants can grow and generate soil. The soil is so rich, he said, that it supports the grain that makes the region one of the main “breadbaskets of the world.”

“We kill the goose that laid the golden egg if we let this stuff die,” he said.

Reach Jen Wieczner at [email protected].