Chonkosaurus, Legend of Cook County

Last Friday Al Scorch and I decided to rent a kayak and paddle around Goose Island in Chicago. It was the first warm day of the year, which is hilarious because it was already early May. We intended to just fuck around and do a plant survey and see what was growing on the remains of dead industry on a river that many have always known to be a smelly, polluted and foul body of water.

As a kid I remember almost falling in the water one time running from crackheads after painting graffiti. I remember feeding bits of bread to invasive Asian carp that would hang out around the pylons that protect the city's many bridges from getting hit by the errant river barge.

The full video is posted on the youtube channel, and of course most the plants that we observed were European invasives. The only native plant that was relatively common seemed to be boxelder, Acer negundo, in the Maple family, Sapindaceae.

What surprised us - as many people now know due to how ridiculously viral it's gotten - was the sight of what had to be a 60 lb snapping turtle perched on some gigantic rusty chains that were holding the rotting pylons together.

Though snapping turtles can tolerate some notoriously shitty water, it was still exhilarating to see such an old and large one hanging out right in the heart of the City. Not only that, but we saw evidence of beavers as well, and the people I spoke with at Urban Rivers who are installing a native plant bioswale only a half mile from where we saw the snapper told us that they've seen beavers and a wide variety of native fish species returned to the river in the last few years. It is great to see things that lived here for hundreds of thousands of years beforehand slowly come back to the place that they used to call home. Now, all someone needs to do is go in and cut back and remove the invasive Buckthorn and plant some native Chicago plants in their place. It's astonishing how quickly wildlife comes back once you plant native plants. All you have to do is plant the natives, and everything else will slowly return.

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