In the dead of winter, when it’s bone-chilling cold, the ground is frozen and wildlife are burrowed away, that’s when restoration crews are hard at work deep in the Forest Preserves of Cook County. On a recent morning in Spears Woods, a five-person Forest Preserve Leadership Corps crew took turns tossing freshly cut armloads of brush […]
An appreciation for nature led Margaret Tobin of Palos Hills to volunteer in the forest preserves. For Dennis Kankowske, it was “seeing people working in the woods.” After he inquired and found out what they were doing, he was hooked. Tobin and Kankowske are two of the preserves’ top volunteers, amassing hundreds of […]
A member of the Conservation Corps crew assigned to the Ted Stone Preserve. Alexa Molina, a Curie Metro High School senior, is spending six weeks of her summer mulching trails, removing invasive buckthorns and securing logs to create a check dam that will control water runoff in the Ted Stone Forest Preserve. Before she started […]
After everyone set up their tents for the night, there was still plenty of daylight left for tossing a Frisbee across the grassy field, squealing with delight at a peppered moth–or fear over the daddy long-legs–and getting a big pot of chili ready for dinner. It was a perfect day for enjoying everything the Forest […]
When she was a child, Pet Smith’s mother took her on many walks through the Deer Grove Forest Preserve in Palatine. “She loved the area,” says Smith, remembering her late mother Vietta Mickus, who lived in Palatine all of her life. “It was her back yard. She knew it like the back of her hand.” A homemaker […]
Mujeres Latinas en Accion’s Proyecto Juventud teen youth program participated in its first program-wide overnight camping trip at Camp Sullivan in Oak Forest this summer. Supported by Forest Preserve Foundation grants, 49 teens and their mentors experienced the joys (and hardships) of camping, many for their first time – 78 percent of the teens had […]
