Kleen’s data in its application for the federal landowner incentive program (LIP), which is funded by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and implemented by DNR and local soil and water conservation districts.

To qualify for assistance, the society needed to prove that at least five species in greatest need of conservation inhabited the sanctuary; Kleen showed nine, including the yellow-billed cuckoo and blue-winged warbler. This spring, Kleen identified 81 different species and nearly 1,500 total birds in a second banding round.

In April the Illinois Audubon Society was awarded a $27,990 LIP grant for restoration and native species conservation. The society will match the grant at 25 percent, or $9,330, for a total project cost of $37,320.

“Education is going to be our key focus here by developing as many different micro-communities as we can on the site,” LaGesse says. Last week the project leader introduced a two-year timeline to the new local sanctuary committee, comprised of several society members and DNR employees. They plan to use grant dollars to restructure the new 12acre parcel at the north end of the property, as well as a 100-foot corridor along Clear Lake and Forrest avenues.

Their first task is to rid the project site of large invasive trees like Siberian elm so native species have room and sunlight to grow. In normal rural circumstances, LaGesse says, he’d bulldoze and burn them. In Adams’ urban setting, he gets creative.

Next week he’ll bring in tree grinders, machines that consume 70-to-80-foot trees within five minutes. After 12 to 15 days of tree clearing, they’ll start attacking resilient exotic plants like winter creeper and multiflora rose and thinning the corridor around the property.

Bulldozers will be used to create a 1.25acre wetland on the southern edge of the 12 acre project site in late summer. Water control structures and piping will be installed to control water levels. LaGesse plans to extend four to six frog ponds to the north of the wetland and expand the area’s nearby prairie.

He will also oversee a large planting of wetland shrubs, like prairie willow and indigo bush. Shrub communities are the state’s rarest natural communities, he says; Adams’ will be among only one or two others. LaGesse hopes to include the public in the seed plantings.

“That will be our first real getting the masses dirty here,” he says. In the future, the local sanctuary committee hopes to replace the site’s oil-and-chip parking lot with a permeable parking lot. This “green” feature catches rainwater in cisterns for reuse. Converting the sanctuary’s remaining 20 acres into a native oak-hickory forest and expanding the current one-mile trail system are also future to-do’s.

While Clay called on LaGesse to manage the backwoods of Adams Wildlife Sanctuary, he looked to someone equally qualified to rework the landscape around the society’s headquarters.

Kent Massie of Massie & Massie Associates, a land planning and landscape architecture firm in Springfield, was initially involved in saving the Margery Adams home and stepped in again to help resurrect the new building’s grounds.

Massie developed a one-year plan to create a historic shade garden and education areas. Clay says some costs will be covered by the building fund; Massie says he’s also working to package projects into items that area groups can adopt. The Illinois Native Plants Society and the Springfield Civic Garden Club have both agreed to help. Work began Tuesday on a 30-seat council ring that can be used to watch wildlife or hold presentations. A small butterfly fountain will be constructed nearby using boul-

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