The city of Chicago, but the city has recently released a plan to protect its existing important wild (or feral) areas. A US public radio story describes how Chicago is Making room for wildlife in the city.
Jerry Adelmann’s been a fan of green space in the city for decades. He’s the chair of Mayor Richard Daley’s Nature and Wildlife Committee. Two years back, Adelmann suggested making a comprehensive inventory of Chicago’s last remaining scraps of habitat.
“We have some of the rarest ecosystems on the globe – tall grass prairie remnants, oak savanna, some of our wetland communities are extraordinarily rare, rarer than the tropical rainforest, and yet they’re here in our forest preserves and our parks, and in some cases, unprotected.”
The city recently unveiled a new plan to protect these little places in the city. The Nature and Wildlife Plan highlights one hundred sites, adding up to almost 5,000 acres. Most of the sites are already part of city parks or forest lands, but until recently, they didn’t have special protection.
Kathy Dickhut is with Chicago’s planning department. She says before Chicago’s recent zoning reform, these sites the city wanted to protect were zoned as residential or commercial areas. Now they’re zoned as natural areas.
“Buildings aren’t allowed, parking lots aren’t allowed. This area is not going to be zoned for any other active use whereas other parts of the parks we have field houses, zoos, ball fields, but in these areas we’re not going to have structures.”
Dickhut says even though land’s at a premium in the city, the planning department hasn’t run into a lot of opposition with the new habitat plan. She says she just got a lot of blank looks. Local officials were surprised the city wanted these small pockets of land.
And that actually worked in the city’s favor. The city’s been able to acquire new lands for habitat that no one else wanted.
“As a rule we don’t like to take the throwaways for parks and habitat. But in some cases, habitat lands work well where other things won’t work well. If you’ve got a road and a river and a very skinny piece of land that won’t fit anything else, that’s good for habitat, because anywhere where land meets water is good for habitat.”
The city’s also turning an old parking lot back into sand dunes and elevated train embankments into strips of green space. And though some of this land isn’t exactly prime real estate, the city does get donations with a little more charisma.
In Chicago’s industrial southeast side, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered bald eagles nesting in the area for the first time in a century. The birds were nesting on a 16 acre plot owned by Mittal Steel USA. The city got the company to donate the land.