A visit to Bell Bowl Prairie one year later
The remaining 4.88 acres of gravel hill prairie never had a chance.
I’m haunted by a recent visit to Rockford’s Bell Bowl Prairie. Or I should say a visit of what’s left of Bell Bowl Prairie.
I last visited in October 2021, when the news emerged that an airport road would be constructed through the Category 1, high-quality gravel hill prairie. It is—or was—an irreplaceable post-glacial remnant, and one of the last remaining of its kind nationwide. It gets its name from a subtle, bowl-shaped landform above the confluence of the scenic Kishwaukee and Rock rivers. As the glaciers retreated, they deposited gravel and soils that resulted in just the right substrate for some of our prettiest native grasses and forbs. Pasqueflowers bloom on the western-facing slope, among the few places in the East where they exist to this day. Blue Grosbeaks, scarce in northern Illinois, found a home here as well as Dickcissels, Meadowlarks, and Cuckoos. The presence of the rare Rusty-patched Bumble Bee halted construction at times.
I approached the airport during the waning light of a cold March day. It had been almost exactly one year since construction commenced at the prairie. I was thinking about how the 4.88-acre prairie had been forsaken as I sped past the terminal building and a few small hangars. I saw a gleaming new Amazon distribution center and a large, sterile retention pond dug into what had been the bowl of the prairie. As I observed the scale of the airport expansion, I realized that maybe Bell Bowl Prairie never had a chance.
“The bowl’s already gone.” That was one of the first things a fellow birder told me when I inquired about the situation at Bell Bowl Prairie three years ago. I was approaching the story as someone who only knew it in broad strokes—there was a state natural area and an airport involved. And the airport wanted to pave the prairie.
What I didn’t realize was that the entire ecosystem around the airport had long been dismantled and distorted. The core of the prairie, the most sensitive 4.11 acres, was all that really remained in the face of the inexorable march of so-called progress. Nothing was stopping the desire to expand the airport to be the No. 1 cargo hub in the United States. Certainly not 4.88 acres that looked like a weedy mess to the untrained eye.
This hit home for me again as I crept past an Amazon entrance and approached the southern extent of the prairie excavation. There were dozers and scrapers sitting dormant. A road construction sign had blown over in the wind. A barbed-wire fence had since gone up through the prairie, adjacent to tarmac and part of the FAA-protected portion of the airport property. Where I was standing was probably off-limits, too.
I thought about the failure of the system and the resultant ecocide. The eager public officials and billionaires and faceless functionaries who wanted this to be so. In the end, there really wasn’t a system for Bell Bowl Prairie—nor any of the other thousands of sites with high-quality natural value and light protection. Yes, these sites are on a state inventory list, but that didn’t mean they’d avoid development, even in this seemingly most enlightened age of environmentalism and broad awareness of issues like climate change.
Documenting these places is of meager solace in the face of commercial forces, satraps, and skewed incentives. There is an ecological price to the Amazon package that arrives at your home in one or two days instead of three. And in part that price was Bell Bowl Prairie.
The loss is immense. Thank you for writing about it, both investigative and poetic.
That is tragic. We see that everywhere. It’s like a giant earth eating machine with no sense or intelligence, scraping up the earth’s crust and the wildlife with it. We don’t understand how much we are making life uninhabitable for every living thing, including us, on this beautiful blue planet.