Forensic Ecology

No pictures this week. Today was as dreary as it could be. We had some good rain, and I am still grateful for every drop that falls. Our water table can use the recharge. It’s nice to have a rainy day when you have nowhere to go. I sat at my desk most of the day (after making waffles for breakfast) writing and drinking ginger tea.

I went to a McHenry County Conservation District (MCCD) workshop yesterday called “Forensic Ecology.” The purpose of the training was to teach us how to research a piece of land from the original Illinois land survey in 1837. We also got a fair amount of pre-European settlement history. One of our instructors, Ginevra, gave us the history from the Silurian 500,000 million years ago when Illinois was a shallow inland sea to the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier 10,000 years ago. She connected this extremely early history with our soil types and topography.

Our guest speaker for the morning, John, was one of the men who does a lot of restoration work for MCCD. He told us about dredging a pond at Rush Creek in Harvard. Not surprisingly, the end of the pond next to the gravel pit was gravel. On the other end, though, he was digging in blue clay. He started hitting solid objects. They turned out to be spruce trees with the needles still on the branches. He worked carefully to get a big chunk of trunk out intact. He sent a sample for carbon dating. The results showed that the wood was 14,700 years old! The trees must have gone down in a huge flood that buried them in sediment and, in the absence of oxygen, preserved them forever. Our other instructor, Gail, rummaged in a back room and brought the log out. I got to see it with my own eyes and touch it with my own hands. 14,700 years!

Gail brought a collection of Native American artifacts that she had found on her family’s farm while she was growing up. Through her work on some historic restorations, she got to know some archeologists. She was able to get approximate dates for the tools she had found. She passed around a hand ax that was 3000 years old. I held it in my hand too, feeling a peculiar sense of connection to the other hands that held that ax so long ago. We passed around a scraper and a point (a.k.a. arrowhead) from 1000 years ago. Yes, indeed, if you don’t think our ancestors were smart and strong, you go out and try to kill a deer with a rock.

Gail took us through recorded history, explaining various sources of information. Lots of court records are digitized and available online. During lunch, I was able to look up the survey record of our farm. It was surveyed sometime between July 7 and July 10, 1837. Part of the area was “land thinly covered with bur oak timber. Soil good and fit for cultivation.” Much of it, though, was “land swampy prairies and unfit for cultivation.”

And then came John Johnstone, the father of modern drain tiles. By the 1850’s swamps were being drained like crazy, with ever more mechanized means of digging the trenches. Before it was all over, 800,000,000 feet of drain tile was installed in Illinois, and we’ve got some on our land. I have seen the pipe draining into the Piscasaw Creek.

In the afternoon, Ginevra took us through some sites to access GIS databases. The technology has come a long way since I was in graduate school. Lots of maps are available for free. I can hardly wait to start poking around.