McHenry County Coalition Works to Return Oaks to Full Splendor: In McHenry County, Coalition Taking Steps to Restore Shrinking Forests

By Carolyn Starks, Chicago Tribune

Feb. 4–The oak saplings at Glacier Oaks Nursery in Harvard are bundled like children in a snowstorm inside warm tunnels that will help them thrive until spring. They may look fragile, but their spindly branches carry a heavy burden.

Conservationists are counting on these baby trees as a small step in helping assure that mighty oak forests remain rooted in McHenry County.

Based on hand-drawn maps and aerial photos, a recent study showed an 87 percent decline in oak groves since the early decades of the 19th Century, when the first settlers arrived. Trees that once covered 143,000 acres, about a third of the county, now account for 18,000 acres.

The biggest drop came between 1837 to 1872, when half of the oak coverage, more than 70,000 acres, was chopped down by settlers carving out farm fields. The decline since then is attributed to everything from gravel mining to development to disease.

Across the country, experts long have studied the decline of oak forests and suggested how to control the loss. Over the years, widespread and frequent outbreaks of oak tree deaths have been reported in New England, the Middle Atlantic States and the Southeast, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Closer to home, a study of oak forests across seven Midwest states — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin — showed that as many as one-third of the trees died or were damaged from 1972 to 1998, said Jennifer Juzwik, a research plant pathologist with the Forest Service. The causes included disease, insect defoliation and invasive species.

“The trend over 20 years is that there is an increase in oak mortality as well as decline of oaks,” Juzwik said. “The magnitude of decline and death varies by state with Missouri being the highest.”

With their sweeping boughs and massive trunks, combined with the great age they can attain, oaks long have been a symbol of strength and endurance that can lift the soul and inspire the imagination. It was news in McHenry County in 1999 when a 200-year-old bur oak 5 stories tall, one of the state’s original territory markers, was designated a historic site.

That may help explain why a county coalition of conservationists, residents, local governments and businesses — named Project Quercus, the Latin word for oak — has formed to reverse the trend. In addition to planting oaks, a countywide oak preservation ordinance has been drafted.

It’s remarkable for a county to devote such a painstaking, 14-month documentation effort to the cause, said Marlin Bowles, plant conservation biologist at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.

“It’s a big problem, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

McHenry and Lake Counties are particularly vulnerable because they have the most to lose. Before settlement, McHenry County was 44 percent timber and Lake County 55 percent, with most of the trees oaks, Bowles said.

If nothing is done, the oak in McHenry County could disappear as a self-sustaining ecosystem during the next 20 years, said Ed Collins, the McHenry County Conservation District’s natural resource manager.

“Oaks give us a sense of place, of who we are. We are not the desert Southwest or the pine forests of the north,” Collins said. “We’re the upper Midwest marked by beautiful prairies and oak groves.”

Oaks are remarkably adapted for survival, but stress factors — everything from drought in the Missouri Ozarks to gypsy moths in Illinois — can weaken the trees, leaving them vulnerable.

Competition from exotic species, lack of regeneration and disease can prove fatal.

New plantings in some urban and rural areas have helped, but the numbers aren’t large enough to reverse the trend, Juzwik said. Oak forests need to be at least 100 acres to thrive as a complete ecosystem, experts say.

Casting a long shadow over the nation’s history, oak trees formed the hulls of American warships during the Revolution, inspired poetry and served as the signposts in some of our most treasured stories.

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Boo Radley left little gifts in the knothole of an oak tree for Jem and Scout; in the opening scene of “Gone With the Wind,” Scarlett O’Hara flirted with bachelors under a canopy of oaks at Tara.

When the French explored the upper Midwest by canoe in the 1600s, the Jesuits with them described the Chicago region as the most beautiful they had seen since leaving Canada, Collins said. The oaks, he said, were plentiful and perfectly spaced.

“They said the prairies were verdant and the groves look as though they were apple orchards planted by the hand of God for the pleasure of man,” he said.

Joe Beeson, an owner of the Harvard nursery, was one of the first to express concern about the dwindling oak population in McHenry County to local conservationists, who were noticing the same trend.

There are 17 oak species native to Illinois, with the white oak and bur oak the most prevalent. To tell their story, the Conservation District first used a base map from 1837 hand-drawn by the first surveyors, who walked the landscape and mapped out townships by marking the nearest vegetation as a witness to the boundary. These typically were oak trees.

The first aerial photos of the county, taken in 1939, confirmed another huge reduction to 26,000 acres due to agriculture and the beginning of gravel mining.

Further reduction to 18,000 acres by 2005 was the result of residential and commercial development, disease and invasive species, experts said.

The saplings growing at Glacier Oaks in Harvard are meant to suggest the means to a better oak tree population in the future, officials said.

Last year, the pilot year for the program, schoolchildren and Scout troops planted more than 200 trees and committed to water and watch over them for two years, Beeson said. The children were allowed to adopt their oaks and name them.

In the process, they learned that that an entire community of life, animals as well as plants, depends on the oak ecosystem for survival.

Even more than their historical significance, that is the main reason the trees are so important, said Lisa Haderlein, a member of the Land Conservancy of McHenry County.

“They are much more valuable for wildlife for habitat and food because they have a nut,” she said. “If something doesn’t change in the next few years, we’ll start to see them fall and we won’t be able to replace them.”

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cstarks@tribune.com

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