By Jared Gorrell

Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD – I have suddenly grown a fascination with the topic of endangered species through discovering one of the rarest tree species in Illinois. That would be the eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), and finding it here in Illinois is something of a major surprise.

The discovery of the eastern hemlock came after a series of events. In June 2015, I visited the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. There, hemlocks are dying by the thousands thanks to the hemlock wooly adelgid, a small insect that looks like a piece of white lint.  However, en masse, the millions of adelgids were, and are, drinking the hemlocks’ sap far faster than the trees can replace it. The trees die, and the bugs move on to the next tree, and the next, and the next. As a result, these little vampiric insects are causing one of the largest mass tree deaths in the United States today. Nearly all eastern hemlocks in the southern Appalachians will be gone in a few years. Thankfully, in the north, around the Great Lakes, the climate is too cold for the hemlock wooly adelgid, but not too cold for the hemlock. As a result, this tree is not likely to go extinct.

In Illinois, this tree, for the most part, has already gone extinct. During the last series of glaciers, eastern hemlocks were found in Illinois. As the climate warmed and dried, the hemlocks were pushed farther and farther north, into Wisconsin, where they are currently found. This is a tree present mostly in areas that are colder, wetter and with far more acidic soil than Illinois. (That PH scale from chemistry class matters a lot when it comes to plants. The PH of a soil determines what plants live on it about as significantly as light and water do.)

The discovery of the eastern hemlock in Illinois itself came about after a trip to Starved Rock State Park by the Lincoln Land Environmental Club in November 2015. I, a member of the club, went along. While hiking in St. Louis Canyon, we happened upon the trees, which I recognized as being eastern hemlocks. Several online searches later, I came to the conclusion that these trees are not found in Illinois, or at least are not widely recorded as being present in Illinois. Most major botanical websites had eastern hemlocks labeled as not occurring in this state. I had to take a second look. The follow-up trip, taken over Spring Break 2016, confirmed it. I had stumbled across the rarest trees in Illinois. There appears to be only 11 trees, all present in two canyons in Starved Rock State Park, which is one of the few areas in Illinois with suitable habitat.

With an observed total of 11 trees, one might think that this would be an endangered species in this state. For plants and animals that are rare in Illinois, the state of Illinois has its list of state-threatened and endangered species. For a species to be listed as state-endangered in Illinois there are five criteria, each of which is considered significant enough to put the species on the list. First, the species may be federally threatened or endangered, or proposed to be so. Second, the species must have suffered a severe population decline within Illinois due to human-caused activities, i.e. development, agriculture, hunting, or collecting. Third, the species may have a limited overall geographic range. Fourth, the species may have a limited range or a low population in Illinois alone. Finally, in a similar vein to the last two reasons, the species may be a disjunct species, one that is not found in large numbers in Illinois because the main portion of the species’ range is elsewhere. The eastern hemlock meets the fourth and fifth criteria of being a state-endangered species, but according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the tree is not listed as protected at all. Except for a few officials at Starved Rock State Park, I do not believe that the eastern hemlock is known to still exist in the wild in Illinois.

At present, it is the goal of this nature columnist to get the eastern hemlock recognized as a state-endangered species. Of course, that’s where bureaucracy comes in. Every five years, the Endangered Species Protection Board, the state organization in charge of determining whether a species deserves protection, reviews candidacy for protection for rare species. The next time the board will do so is in 2020. Each one of these reviews includes a public hearing, which I plan to attend… in 2019. Until then, the trees will just have to wait. In the meantime, I encourage anyone visiting Starved Rock State Park to keep an eye out, especially in St. Louis Canyon, where the bulk of the population lives. For all that we know, there could be many more eastern hemlocks in Illinois, just waiting to be discovered by sharp-eyed naturalists.

Jared Gorrell can be reached at [email protected] or at his blog, The Wild Land of Lincoln (lincolnlandnature.blogspot.com)