For millions of birds and other wildlife, Chicago’s lakefront
is now a prairie home. Daniel Burnham would be proud.
Burnham
Centennial Prairie
Story By Arthur Melville Pearson
Photos By Elizabeth Middleton
‘‘Make no little plans,”
The Plan of Chicago
famously admonishes.
“They have no magic
to stir men’s blood and
probably themselves
will not be realized.
Make big plans…Think big.”
Written more than a century ago
by co-authors Daniel Burnham and
Edward Bennett, these words continue
to spur the realization of big plans
throughout the greater Chicagoland
region. Among the most recent is the
Burnham Centennial Prairie along the
Chicago lakefront.
The Chicago lakefront is among the
signature legacies of The Plan of Chica-go,
popularly known as The Burnham
Plan. “By right,” the plan suggests, the
lakefront “belongs to the people [and]
should be treated as park space to the
greatest extent possible.” And so it
does, and so it has. For 18.5 miles, from
Hollywood Beach to the South Shore
Cultural Center, the lakefront remains
one continuous public park space for
the people.
And for the birds.
The nearly 3 million residents of
Chicago share the lakefront with an
even greater number of birds. The
open Green space that lines the cobalt
blue waters of Lake Michigan is a mag-net
for more than 5 million birds as
they migrate through the city every
spring and fall. Wild, often vibrantly
colored birds from as far away as the
rain forests of Brazil and the farthest
reaches of the Arctic Circle find a
much-needed refuge along the Chicago
lakefront to rest and feed before con-tinuing
on their journeys.
Because the lakefront is just as
important to birds as it is to people, in
2000 former Mayor Richard M. Daley
signed the Urban Conservation Treaty
RYE-zee). As many as 200 varieties of
mycorrhizae may live in the roots of
prairie plants to the necessarily mutual
benefit of both. In exchange for carbo-hydrates
provided by the plant, mycor-rhizae
improve plants’ abilities to absorb
water and nutrients from the soil.
Most of the Chicago lakefront park is
built on landfill—much of it refuse from
the Great Fire of 1871—and much has
been planted in turfgrass for decades. As
a result, there are few, if any, species of
prairie mycorrhizae in the soil.
To address this deficit, the park
district has partnered with Indiana Uni-versity
post-doctoral research scientist
Elizabeth Middleton to test various
mycorrhizae treatments within the
Burnham Centennial Prairie. Results
from the first year reveal that conserva-tive—
or hard to grow—native species
such as wild nodding onion responded
strongly to “nurse plants” inoculated
with native mycorrhizae. This com-pared
favorably to nurse plants inocu-lated
with commercially cultivated
mycorrhizae, which fared less well
even than nurse plants grown in soils
without any mycorrhizae at all.
Part of the U.S. Environmental Pro-tection
Agency-funded research also
includes testing the effectiveness of dif-for
Migrating Birds. This agreement
with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
obliges the city to help protect migrat-ing
birds through education and habitat
improvement.
The Chicago Park District responded
the very next year, establishing three
bird sanctuaries along the lakefront at
Jackson Park, Lincoln Park and Burn-ham
Park. These efforts largely involved
enhancing existing habitat with differ-ent
kinds of native grasses, flowers,
shrubs and trees. A few years later, the
park district established an entirely
new, 6-acre bird sanctuary, partly atop
an underground parking garage at
McCormick Place convention center.
Spurred by this success, in 2009 the
park district celebrated the 100-year
anniversary of the publication of The
Plan of Chicago by breaking ground on
the Burnham Centennial Prairie. Aptly
named, it embodies Burnhamesque big
thinking in several ways.
At a combined 56 acres—36 on the
east side of Lake Shore Drive and 20 on
the west—the prairie is by far the
largest natural area created to date by
the park district. The eastern portion
extends from the McCormick Bird Sanc-tuary
south to 39th Street. The western
portion extends from 31st Street to
47th Street, where it connects with the
existing Burnham Nature Sanctuary.
The Burnham Centennial Prairie
stands out, too, for being created out of
nothing. Or, rather, in place of turf
grass. Emily Dickinson once poetically
observed that
To make a prairie it takes
a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
It turns out that the actual work of
making a prairie is considerably more
difficult. The prairies of Illinois evolved
over thousands of years, forming com-plex
relationships among an astonishing
diversity of plants, animals and soils.
One of the unsung players in prairie evo-lution
is a fungus-root symbiosis known
as mycorrhizae (pronounced my-kor-
8 / OutdoorIllinois August 2011
Creating a prairie involves under-standing
the relationships among
plants and mycorrhizae, a fungus-root
symbiosis that improves
plant’s abilities to absorb water
and nutrients from the soil.
August 2011 OutdoorIllinois / 9
cedar waxwing European starling
(Photo By John K. Cassady.)
(Photo By John K. Cassady.)
