Whiteside County Natural Area Guardians

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Whiteside County Natural Area Guardians

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We are a community of volunteers dedicated to local natural areas and their flora and fauna, meeting every second Thursday of the month during the growing season, on weekends for workdays, and for tours, speaker presentations, and more.

10/14/2026

The month of cemetery prairie love has begun! More chances to help out at special sites in Henry, Whiteside, and Mercer Counties coming right up 🗓️⬇️⬇️

10/07/2026

What a great prescribed fire workshop this past weekend at Dean Huisingh‘s Native Habitat Restorations in Fulton! The assembly of would-be ecological fire-starters—arriving from as far away as Moline and Lake Carroll—learned tips and tools of the trade from Pheasants Forever Farm Bill Biologist Jacob Birch, as well as from the other burn bosses in the room, and then put that new knowledge into practice during a small, safe fire

Now it’s on to burn season!

10/03/2026

Cemetery prairies need you!

In collaboration with many partners, including NAGs, Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves is dedicating the month of October to the stewardship of pioneer cemetery prairies across northern Illinois

These places are a lesson in survival. Spared by the plow 150 years ago, they harbor fragments of a resilient ecosystem that persisted for millennia and once covered 20+ million acres of the state

They’re also vulnerable, threatened on all sides by invasive species, the encroachment of brush, pesticide drift, and the absence of fire

But perhaps most importantly, they are fascinating, home to a treasure trove of plants and animals that many don’t know exist, yet are 💯 Illinois

Will you help make a life-or-death difference for these irreplaceable pieces of Illinois history, natural, and human? Check out the link in the first comment for a list of nearby workdays, and more information about this prairie initiative

09/29/2026

What a weekend!

A crowd of us stopped by Heaton Cemetery to hear Dana Fellows discuss the civil war veterans, victims of typhoid fever, children mysteriously buried without their parents, and other settlers whose histories he exhaustively researched while cleaning and repairing their shattered tombstones—an exhausting but gratifying effort undertaken across some 60 visits to the site this year, and with the help of about 180 bags of concrete and, occasionally, the hands and machinery of other volunteers

As NAGs chair Sammy Dalati explained during the tour, that slice of human history is framed by the never-plowed prairie remnant at the back of the cemetery, a living relic of the sea of grass and wildflowers that folks of the 1800s inhabited, now dotted with white, pink, and purple asters showing their thanks for the first prescribed fire there—this past January—in about a decade

We followed that up with a tour at the Lyndon-Agnew Nature Preserve, to take in the fading summer vegetation, winged ants massing for their “nuptial flights,” and to contemplate the work completed and yet to do at this fine railroad remnant… + a praying mantis!

Sandwiched in between, harvest began. At Sandytown we filled a yardwaste bag and more with little bluestem, false boneset, western sunflower, and other fall-maturing species, in anticipation of tossing them into degraded parts of the site later this year

Address

Whiteside County, IL
61270-2953

Website

https://whitesidecountyswcd.com/natural-area-guardians

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