Chicago EXPLORING NATURE & CULTURE WFALILL 19D99 ERNES S EXISTENTIAL MUSHROOMS • T URNSTONES AND ME What is Chicago Wilderness? Chicago Wilderness is some of the finest and most significant nature in the temperate world, with roughly 200,000 acres of protected natural lands harboring native plant and animal communities that are more rare— and their survival more globally threatened—than the tropical rain forests. CHICAGO WILDERNESS is an unprecedented alliance of 92 public and private organizations working together to study and restore, protect and manage the precious natural resources of the Chicago region for the benefit of the public. Chicago WILDERNES S is a quarterly magazine that celebrates the rich natural heritage of this region and tells the inspiring stories of the people and organizations working to heal and protect local nature. CHICAGO WILDERNESS A Regional Nature Reserve Wildness and Boundaries oes this photograph depict Chicago Wilderness? far apart from where we live. The birds and the bees and Is it beautiful, or is it grim? Noble maple leaf the butterflies do not respect such boundaries. Neither do D caught by an ugly cyclone fence? Or is the fence aggressive weeds, nor the shady maples that invade and a helpful barrier to protect some patch of nature? degrade oak woods, nor acid rain. Neither should we. In the early days of prairie conservation here, Dr. Consider this fact: Twice a year a colossal flood of Robert Betz labored heroically to put cyclone fences birds washes over this region, birds flocking south from around our few last beleaguered prairies—as a first step. the north woods in Wisconsin and Ontario, from the Some thought the work was over once nature was shores of Hudson Bay, from the Arctic tundra. Using protected from people. river valleys, moraines, Environmental histo - and lakefront as migra - rian William Cronon, tory corridors, many of author of Nature’s these birds find tempo - Metropolis, Chicago and the rary refuge and Great West, delivered an sustenance for their jour - address to the Kennicott neys in local preserves, Society of the Chicago but many also appear in Academy of Sciences in Chicago Wilderness June. As Cronon analyzed yards and alleys and it, wilderness is neither a streets. Many are eaten thing nor a place but is by house cats on the “a profoundly human loose, or carom into idea.” A product of buildings and cell tow - P h o t European romanticism, o ers, or are poisoned by : J a s the idea of wilderness o garden pesticides. For n L i emerges from European n good or ill, our entire d s e notions of the sublime: a y region becomes part of notion first embodied in artistic, theatrical images of this semi-annual nature story, part of this hemisphere’s waterfalls (Niagara!), canyons (Grand!), thunderclouds, wilderness. mountaintops. So the whole idea of wilderness came as Mushroom collectors fanning out through the woods, part of the cultural baggage that the European immi - maintaining Old World culture in this region, also are a grants among our ancestors brought to this new land. part of Chicago Wilderness, enjoying and appreciating There is, Cronon noted, a fundamental dualism and ingesting it too. woven into this idea of wilderness—the notion that In his essay on page 26, Peter Friederici tells a delight - humans are outside of and in opposition to nature. fully human story of nature, how boyhood visits to local Chicago Wilderness, as a vision for this region, pro - wilds inspired and changed him. People, birds, and foundly challenges that construct. Indeed, Chicago mushrooms take part in Chicago Wilderness. As hunter- Wilderness posits a different paradigm: that humans, gatherers on five continents, our species has been a part O P rather than standing outside of nature, can be a healthy of wildness, as long as we have existed. P O S part of healthy nature. So head out to the woods this fall, or stroll along city I T E Chicago Wilderness seeks to deconstruct the artificial streets. Watch the maple leaves fight with the oaks, or : P boundaries that would have us believe rare nature exists catch in a fence. Celebrate autumn with the illimitable h o t only where fenced into “no human impact” areas, places birds. Inside and outside of boundaries. o b y C a Debra Shore s e y EDITOR G a l v i n F ALL 1999 CONTENTS P h o t o : FEATURES M i c h a e l S h e d l EXISTENTIAL MUSHROOMS: 4 o c The Middle Kingdom of Chicago Wilderness k by Raymond Wiggers . .4 Where Old World houby hunters search for tasty morsels, and top-notch scientists explore the mysterious underground indispensability of fungi. THE FALL: A Harvest for Eyes and Soul . .10 Ripeness of summer fades into the last lush fall of the millennium. P h o t o D E PA RTMENTS : E r i c a B e n s 10 o Into the Wild . .15 n Where to slush through the leaves, or plan a fall camping trip. How to volunteer. Working the Wilderness: The Burn That Wasn’t . .16 by Joe Neumann I Meet Your Neighbors . .23 l l u s t A Shaggy Bark Story: hickory nuts and nuttier. Story of a Lost Star. r a t i o n South Side Tour Guides. : M a t t h e Guest Essay . .26 w V i n Turnstones and Me by Peter Friederici c e 26 n t Family Quiz Game . .28 Test your local nature knowledge. Chicago News from Chicago Wilderness . .29 WILDERNES S Reading Pictures . .36 Volume III, Number 1 Photo and Synthesis. BOARD OF DIRECTORS: President : Dr. George Rabb Vice-President : Dan Griffin Secretary : Laura Gates Treasurer : Barbara Whitney Carr Jerry Adelmann, Laura Hohnhold, John Rogner, Ron Wolk EDITOR . Debra Shore SENIOR EDITOR . Stephen Packard ASSISTANT EDITORS . Sheryl De Vore Chris Howes NEWS EDITORS . Elizabeth Sanders Alison Carney Brown ART DIRECTOR . Terri Wymore EDITORIAL CONSULTANT . Bill Aldrich Chicago WILDERNESS is published quarterly. Subscriptions are $12/yr. Please address all subscription correspondence to Chicago WILDERNESS , P.O. Box 268, Downers Grove, IL 60515-0268. (630) 963-8010. Please direct editorial inquiries and correspondence to Editor, Chicago WILDERNESS , 9232 Avers Ave, Evanston, IL 60203. (847) 677-2470. e-mail: [email protected] Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned without a self- ABOVE: Bird’s nest fungi emerge from wood as flat-topped muffins (center). When they open, addressed stamped envelope. Chicago WILDERNESS is rain splashes out the egg-like spore capsules. Photo by Kohout Productions/Root Resources. printed on recycled paper and should be passed around OPPOSITE: Rough blazing stars in shifting sands of sand prairie at Illinois Beach State Park. from friend to friend. Chicago WILDERNESS is endorsed Photo by Willard Clay. by the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council. The opinions COVER: Shaggy mane mushrooms are common along woodland trails, but they might also come expressed in these pages, however, are the authors’ own. © up in your lawn. Photo by Joe Nowak. by Chicago Wilderness Magazine , Inc. ISSN 1097-8917. Postmaster, address service requested to Chicago WILDERNESS , PO Box 268, Downers Grove, IL F ALL 1999 60515-0268. 3 All rights reserved. 4 C HICAGO W ILDERNESS Mushrooms Exploring Chicagoland’s Middle Kingdom P h o t o : P a t by Raymond Wiggers r i c i a A r m s t r o n g f you need proof of this dom of highly proficient consumers, the ani - mals. Admitting to such shared ancestry world’s rottenness, con - might run counter to our preferences, so you sider the fungi. They may be relieved to know that most scientists now put fungi in a separate, middle king - are the insidious dom, between the plants and animals. agents of decay Unlike bacteria, fungi are eukaryotes— advanced organisms with cell nuclei and and untimely death. They compro - organelles. With a fossil record extending mise our crops, attack our favorite back four to eight hundred million years, fungi are now recognized, at least by the sci - P shade trees, undermine our wooden h entific community, as lead actors in the o t o : drama of life. M i dwellings, stain our walls with c h a Most fungus is invisible, underground or e l S h mildew, and plague us with a host of inside rotting wood. Mushrooms are actually e d l o c diseases ranging from athlete’s foot to the short-lived fruiting bodies of larger, web - k like networks of hyphae, or fungal strands. lethal infections. For the sake of our own These networks, also called mycelia, grow in survival, we must keep these disgusting, alien soil, leaf litter, wood, and other substrates. forms of life at bay. (In one Michigan woodland, researchers Such anti-fungus prejudice brings out the have found a mycelium— one individual fighting side of Field Museum mycologist Dr. organism—that covers 35 acres and is Gregory Mueller. “This is a perfect example approximately 1,500 years old.) Mushrooms of ignorance breeding contempt,” he says and similar structures such as polypores, with a sense of authority born of much time earth stars, and puffballs, are the cleverly spent defending the planet’s most misunder - engineered mechanisms these fungi use to P h o t stood organisms. “Without fungi, we simply produce and disperse their spores. And this o : K o wouldn’t exist. Without their skills as they do by relying on nature’s ancient, costly, h o u t decomposers, for example, we’d drown in an but effective game of large numbers.