Last weekend, Groundswell volunteers and staff planted nine more acres at Westport Prairie. Now, the entire valley from Bong Road to Westport Drumlin has been restored to native tallgrass prairie and oak savanna.
Joyful volunteers at last Saturday’s seed planting — Photos by Mario Quintana
Each year, we increase our capacity to plant and take care of more land through greater interest from volunteers who spend time in our preserves and donors who care deeply about conservation.
Habitat restoration also takes a great deal of planning.
Map by BJ Byers
Take a moment with this map (pictured above, or see the PDF here).
If you’ve visited Westport Prairie, you may recognize the purple and salmon shapes as prairie remnants (a remnant is an “old-growth” prairie). Ten years ago, these were fragments of habitat at the margins of agriculture. Each yellow shape is a planting, and only a faint exaggeration of the bursting shades of yellow coneflower, black-eyed Susan, and coreopsis which paint the prairie in summer.
Groundswell’s earliest plantings (2014, 2017, 2019, and 2020) added buffers around the remnants to protect sensitive habitat from pesticide drift. After that, we connected the remnants together to create wildlife corridors and expand habitat (2021, 2022, and 2023).
Before and after photos of the 2022 Westport Prairie planting — Photos by BJ Byers
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan’s conviction, “We are not defending nature. We are nature defending itself.”
I take this literally. As I work at Westport Prairie, my body physically changes to become part of the landscape. My muscles adapt and strengthen to match the slope of the hills. The berries and medicine I forage become part of me. Sunburn hardens my skin.
Sometimes I move through this landscape with a sense of mourning. There are only 168 acres remaining of the 129,000-acre “Empire Prairie” that once stretched across Dane and Columbia County. Volunteer Aaron Suiter reminded me of this fact recently through his blog Plant Propagation Project, and it really sunk in. We are working with mere fragments of what once was.
Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) — Photo by BJ Byers
The work at Westport Prairie also makes me feel hopeful. In the coming years, we will begin planting fields nearly 20 acres in size. Over the next 10 years, all of the land within the green boundaries on the map above will be restored to native tallgrass prairie.
This year, we saw the return of bobolinks to Westport Prairie. As we increase the size of the prairie, it becomes a better refuge for ground nesting birds. This group has seen a 43% population decline since 1970.
Seeing these birds return and being part of creating space for them gives me hope for a future—one in which we see ourselves as part of this ecosystem and care for it accordingly.
I invite you to come out this spring to be among the first to walk our trail newly surrounded by restored prairie.
If you know any birds, tell them to visit Westport Prairie.