The following is a love story about a tree. If you don't like trees, you'd better not bother to read on. At about 4am on July 5th, I was awakened by the sound of thunder and lightening. I looked through my south-facing window and saw an amazing display of lightening bolts shooting horizontally across the sky and occasionally toward the ground. It was raining heavily, and the wind was pushing the rain in a horizontal direction toward the east. I was witnessing a major thunder storm coming through Jackson Park. The storm was over by 8am when I headed for the Clarence Darrow Bridge to start my usual bird/nature walk through the Paul H. Douglas Nature Sanctuary (Wooded Island) behind the Museum of Science and Industry. As I approached the bridge I saw the first evidence of a major disaster ahead. A huge, 60 foot Green Ash tree, probably the largest of its kind in Jackson Park, was lying on its side just east of the bridge. Several months earlier I had aged that tree with a formula provided by arborists at the Morton Arboretum. It had started from a seed in 1853-the same year that Paul Cornell founded the community of Hyde Park.


The real shock took hold as I entered Wooded Island just to the south of the Darrow Bridge. It looked like a tornado had gone through it. I counted over fifty trees, including many of the largest and oldest on the island, that were completely blown over. There were at least seventy-five more trees that were standing like skeletons completely stripped of their major branches, including the only Horse Chestnut on the island that may have been planted by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1892-93 when he designed the island and planted hundreds of trees there for the Worldís Columbian Exposition of 1893. Since I had started bird/nature walks on the island almost thirty years ago, I had admired that Horse Chestnut for the migrating humming birds that were attracted to its flowers each May. It had stood fifty feet high, and now stood only twenty-five feet as all the upper branches had been stripped off by the storm. There must have been hundreds of birds and nests that were destroyed by the storm. The worst was yet to come.


As I made my way through tangled branches and over fallen trunks of numerous maples, ashes, basswoods and cottonwods that littered the sidewalk around the island, I came upon the tree that I had known and loved for over sixty years. It was a mighty Burr Oak that had stood about sixty-five feet high, with a crown that spread ninety feet across. I had aged that tree to 273 years of age. It had sprouted from an acorn in 1730. I knew it was the oldest oak in Jackson Park, and later found out from the chief forester in the Chicago Park District that it was probably the oldest oak in the entire city. I had first discovered this tree in 1943 after my family had moved back to Chicago from Los Angeles. I quickly found Wooded Island, only a few blocks from my home, and it became my "jungle" as I grew up. As a nine-year-old, my main interest was climbing trees, and the oak was my favorite since it had a low branch that angled near the ground and was easy to get into. When I got high into that oak, I felt like Tarzan or, more appropriately, his son, "Boy," who was about my age. I went to all the Tarzan movies that played constantly in the early 1940s in the many theaters along 63rd street in Woodlawn, and it was not difficult transferring Tarzan's life in the trees to my fertile imagination on Wooded Island. Johnny Weissmuller was my boyhood hero. After my tree-climbing days were over, I was introduced to the bird life of Wooded Island in 1950 by a biology teacher at Hyde Park High School. I gravitated to my favorite oak, and was enthralled by the many birds I saw in that tree over the years.

By 1974, when Alderman Len Despres encouraged me to start group bird walks on the island, my favorite oak had grown to massive proportions, with a trunk three feet in diameter. For the past twenty-nine plus years I have continued these walks, always pointing out my favorite oak tree, telling of its history and reminding everyone that it would probably live to be five hundred years old. I loved that tree more than anything else in nature.

When I came upon the tree that July 5th morning, I couldnít believe it when I saw it lying on the ground, covering a third of the entire islandís width. I shed a few tears for the first time in my life over a fallen tree. It had been snapped off like a toothpick near its base by winds of 88 mph - hurricane force - by a microburst with downdrafts of winds that rushed in an easterly direction felling 450 trees in Washington and Jackson Parks. Such events are often called "horizontal tornadoes." It cut a half-mile swath through all of Wooded Island. There are now high openings where trees once stood. The island has now taken on more of the character of the oak savannah that it was back in the 1800s. Many saplings will be planted to replace the lost trees, but it will take many years before they mature.

It was decided at a recent meeting of the Jackson Park Advisory Council to recommend to the Park District to leave most of the famous oak's trunk where it fell. It could become a "nurse" tree, allowing other trees and plants to grow out of the decomposing wood over time. There is also the possibility that "suckers" might grow from the huge rot system left by the tree, creating more oaks in its place. I won't live long enough to see this happen, but perhaps the bird watchers and nature lovers 25 or 50 years from today will witness this happening, and will begin another love affair with offspring of my beloved tree!