Kane County reforestation efforts add thousands of new trees

Kane County will have up to 1,500 acres of new wooded areas if the Kane County Forest Preserve District continues to plant trees to restore what once was a more heavily forested part of the state.

"The larger the block of woods, the better it is for wildlife," said Drew Ullberg, the district's director of natural resources. "Though Illinois is the Prairie State, trees are part of the original landscape. About 40 percent of Kane County was wooded pre-settlement times."

The county already has about 3,500 acres of woodlands thanks in large part to massive tree planting efforts to celebrate Earth Day. Staff and volunteers have planted up to 2,000 trees during those events.

Nearly 40,000 trees, most of them oaks, have been installed at the Burnidge, Dick Young, Johnson's Mound and Campton Forest Preserves. Ullberg told forest preserve commissioners Tuesday that oak is the primary tree planted instead of other native trees, such as hickory and walnut, because there is no good commercial outlet for the district to purchase those species of trees at affordable prices.

A majority of the planted trees die, with deer, weather, fire and invasive grass the most common killers. The forest preserve, which aims for a 25 percent survival rate, recently started using a deer repellent concoction of rotten eggs and mint to keep the deer from eating the new trees.

Asked to offer a guess at how much of the county is woodland in 2010, Ullman said he wasn't sure, but that it was certainly far less than the 40 percent that existed before people moved in.

"I don't think that we could ever achieve that 40 percent again," he said.