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Community Corner

Bartel Grassland Offers a Muddy Classroom

Bartel Grassland conservators passed their skills to the next generation this past weekend, teaching students from Tinley, Oak Forest and Marian Catholic about wildlife.

When Forest Preserve presenter Rebecca Moss got out the 6-foot-bullsnake, all eyes turned to 16-year-old Marian Catholic High School student Chante Coleman.

The teen had showed up early to volunteer at the Bartel Grassland Saturday, but there had already been a few challenges. She exchanged her shoes for a pair of wading boots, left the paved parking lot for knee-deep wetland swamp mud, and had let out a yell when she saw a tiny garter snake.

So the student and adult volunteers were curious how she'd handle an adult bullsnake. 

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"At first, I started out scared, but I conquered my fears," said Coleman. "I was planting plants."

The Bartel Grassland, part of the Tinley Creek Wetland Preserve, is a powerful extension to the classroom, said Oak Forest High School science teacher Dawn Sasek, 47, adding she has led her ecology club out to the site for the last four or five years. "Kids can come out and socialize and it's all a good cause. They just love doing something, and it helps the future."  

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She noted that her students have been given their own small corner of the Cook County Forest Preserve to restore: Yankee Woods, near the corner of 167th and Central near Tinley Park

Oak Forest Ecology Club student president Janine Adams, who noted that she turns 17 on Tuesday, said she's proud of the club's work at Bartel and Yankee Woods. "There were trees, but now it's open."

Club member Brooke Adams, 15, admitted helping to plant 6,000 plugs of indigenous plants was hard, messy work  but, "I loved it!"

Tinley Park Central Middle School student Kieran Nevin, 14, dug holes for indigenous plants all morning. But by noon, the eighth-grader admitted, it was hard to keep his hands off the iPod. No one, it seemed, was keeping their hands off the "18 species of cookies" prepared by "the mad baker of Bartel" Peg Riner.

Besides the bullsnake, students had the chance to see a presentation by Tinley Park Falconer Brenda Occhio, who brought her peregrine falcon, its talons gripped firmly on her leather gauntlet. 

Tinley Park resident George Brown, a retiree, smiled as he commented that it was the kids he came to see.

"I just came out to be with kids, to encourage them that there is something better to do then standing on the street corner."

It will take a year for many of the thousands of plants put into the Bartel plain and marsh Saturday to make their first spectacular appearance. Volunteers said it's worth the wait to see the gentians, irises, blazing star, Queen of the Prairie and Arrowhead plants to make their debut.

It will take much longer than that to restore the Bartel Grassland and wetland back to the glorious prairie garden that it once was, prior to the time of European settlement, said site Dick Riner.

"It will take a hundred years or longer," said Riner cheerfully. "We'll all be gone by then."

Volunteer Glenn Hopkins, 48, of Hometown, smiled and agreed with him.

Life is short, and the conservationist task is long. But today, it seemed, the volunteers had helped pass the baton to the younger generation.

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