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Showing passion for the prairie

Photo

Photo by Dan Lassiter

Dave Bomkamp lights a line of fire during a prairie burn at Blackhawk Technical College on Thursday.

ROCK TOWNSHIP — It's a tiny scrap of land. But its friends think of it as a jewel.

"It's a pretty little prairie," said Chris Wellington, one of a handful of prairie lovers who turned out Friday to set it on fire.

Fire is what keeps a prairie a prairie. Fire kills invasive plants but promotes growth of prairie plants.

So every so often, a prairie needs a fire.

And this one definitely needed it. Invasive woody plants—buckthorn, mulberry and honeysuckle—are stationed at its fringes, ready to crowd out the prairie if given a chance.

This prairie, barely half an acre, lies along the southern border of Blackhawk Technical College's property between Janesville and Beloit.

All around it, farmers have worked the land for decades. But this piece of ground, lying along the slope of a gully, was spared the plow.

"There aren't many prairies left, and a lot of those that are left have been replanted," Wellington noted.

But this one is original. It's a remnant of the prairie that once stretched as far as the eye could see, that was here long before white settlers arrived more than 170 years ago.

It beat the odds and survived.

Wellington's day job is dean of BTC's Monroe campus. She is one of a small group of BTC staff members who have adopted the prairie and are working to expand it.

Wellington said there are no furrow marks in the ground, and historical photos show it remained separate from the farmed land around it.

One other reason to believe this is virgin ground: It's bursting with a bounty of native plants that you won't find in some fields that have gone fallow. Wellington ticks them off: purple coneflower, leadplant, big bluestem, little bluestem, prairie dropseed, shooting star. The list goes on.

Some might not find it very exciting, Wellington said, "to me, it's so incredibly beautiful."

Blooming right now is the pasque flower, pushing up through last year's straw-colored grass, a sign that spring has come to the prairie.

The prairie burners—including BTC instructor David Schmidtke and student Dave Bomkamp—burned slowly and carefully, sectioning off chunks, lighting the dried grasses with a drip torch.

Others stood by with hoses and flappers, which are poles with rectangles of thick rubber on the end, allowing them to smother unruly flames.

The fire caused a staccato salvo of snap, crackle and pop as it increased in intensity now and again. But the wind was calm, and it never got out of control.

About five years ago, BTC staff members applied for permission to cut back the brush and expand the prairie. It's slow work. Plans are for a trail to snake through the area so students can take a break and experience nature, just a minute's walk from their classrooms.

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