As far as I know, I’ve never seen a Henslow’s sparrow. Sometimes, when I’m traipsing through someone else’s tallgrass field at sunset, I spy a small, sparrow-like bird, and I wonder. Could this be the one? Not likely, I have to admit. The Henslow’s sparrow is an endangered species. I may never see one.

The list of Illinois’ endangered critters — now forced to inhabit a corn and soybean landscape that used to be tallgrass prairie — is disturbingly long and varied. It includes another two dozen birds, ranging from the once-ubiquitous greater prairie chicken and the common barn owl — now uncommon — to the American bittern and Bewick’s wren. I’ve seen these latter two in the wild, once each. Two more avian species are threatened by ongoing efforts to make prairie earth sprout money, bringing the total to 26 species. And birds are only the most obvious species routed from their homes in the past century. Less obvious, but surely as important, are seven endangered insects, eight endangered reptiles and no fewer than 265 endangered plants, many of them prarie species.

In short, the tallgrass prairie, once the essential ecosystem of Illinois, is now in tatters, leaving its inhabitants grasping at the straws of life. Of course, the inventory doesn’t even include species that fled Illinois long ago to sustain a precarious existence elsewhere. Try to find a bison around here. Or a wolf.

Still, endangered species protection is one of those hot button issues that terrifies nominally rational politicians. In fact, the horror stories are common currency: the snail darter that holds up a dam, the owl that costs 10,000 jobs. So politicians are left to wring their hands.

Indeed, the concept of protecting individual species is flawed, though not for the reasons their opponents would have us believe. The problem is not those few high-profile species standing in the path of progress. Instead, the difficulty is that entire ecosystems covering several states have been chopped, drained, plowed, paved, mined, polluted and subdivided to the point of no return. Ninety percent of the tallgrass prairies that once covered central North America have been converted to modern

Illinois Issues May 2000 | 35

human uses. What remains is spread piecemeal across the landscape, a few acres here, a couple more there. In consequence, a whole host of plants and animals are endangered, while countless others seek refuge where they can.

Saving species requires saving habitats. Nature is finicky that way.

Henslow’s sparrow is as good an example as any. These are birds of the grassland, ones who prefer tall, dense growths that have not suffered disturbance in some years. As recently as half a century ago, if their grassy homes burned in a prairie fire, they would move on to other appropriate habitat, while grasshopper sparrows, who like freshly burned areas, assumed their places. Since World War II, though, virtually all of Illinois’ grassland has come under attack from chemistry-based farming practices and suburban sprawl. As the prairies have disappeared, so have the sparrows. They cannot survive in those tiny preservation plots, too often invaded by raccoon, fox and family cat. Between 1966 and 1991, the population of Henslow’s sparrows has declined by 4.2 percent annually.

Habitat loss is species extermination. Yet we nod to the concept of species preservation without understanding what has to happen. To save the Henslow’s sparrows, the sandhill cranes, the upland sandpipers, we will have to recycle the land we’ve already put to the thresher and the bulldozer. We will have to build on abandoned lots and factory sites in urban areas instead of weakening the federal and state Endangered Species acts, making it possible to carve up a little more prairie, a little more forest. As it is, less than 1 percent of Illinois remains something like wilderness, tiny, besieged islands in a sea of human landscapes. That’s a figure 10 times poorer than the national average.

Still, we continue to allow “progress” to “improve” the rest. What matters more for the general survival of wildlife in Illinois is the cavalier attitude our leaders exhibit when it comes to zoning and planning. The reports from Bloomington, Champaign, Decatur and Springfield are depressingly similar. The most fertile land in the world is buried beneath acres of concrete that support redundant shopping malls, while cities consume surrounding agricultural villages, converting them to antiseptic bedroom communities.

I moved to a small town outside Springfield because I liked the (comparative) wildness. Now Springfield has come to town, and civic leaders will not rest until they have cut down every old tree, torn up every wooded hillside. Starlings and house sparrows flourish, but I have not seen a fox or an indigo bunting in a long while. Wild nature is in full retreat from a civilization craving too much order, too much simplicity.

A little uniform green lawn and a few half-poisoned robins is not enough. We need to be reminded of these things over and over again, so it seems. Fortunately, we have just such a reminder in The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America, written by David Wilcove, senior ecologist for the Environmental Defense Fund. No less an authority than Peter Matthiessen, one of America’s greatest living nature writers, calls it “an exceptionally useful book.”

Wilcove is quick to point out that there have been comparatively few total species extinctions during the 400 years Europeans have occupied what is now the United States. Even these few losses have changed the landscape irretrievably — it is impossible, for instance, to imagine springtime skies darkened with the migrations of millions of passenger pigeons. Until the 1890s, hunters blasted away with reckless abandon, killing millions for food, for profit, for amusement. The last ancient and lonely bird died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

What concerns Wilcove most is the ominous plunge in myriad species populations as America gravitates toward a sterile, homogenized national landscape. One flowering plant, one vertebrate, one butterfly species out of every three living in the United States

Illinois Issues May 2000 | 36

Certainly all five are hard at work in Illinois. But Wilcove ranges throughout the United States, all too easily detailing his horsemen at work in every ecosystem in the country. The sheer range and multitude of the environmental challenges he documents is deeply disquieting. When we do take the time to acknowledge the environmental decay daily occurring in Illinois, we generally fail to recognize that this experience is but one in a host of national troubles.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to chronicling environmental degradation is the lack of hard data. Much of the talk about species loss has centered on birds, simply because people have taken the time to watch and count these lovable creatures for close to two centuries. Here in Illinois, ornithologists undertook a statewide bird census between 1906 and 1909, and again between 1956 and 1958. These two data sets, combined with more recent information, provide a picture of avian response to human changes in the landscape. Prairie species were doing all right at the beginning of the century, making do with hayfields in the place of wild grasslands. As the century unrolled, livestock production diminished, reducing the demand for hay, and farmers shifted to monocultural strains of alfalfa. Corn and soybeans increasingly absorbed more land, and urban sprawl impinged. The census documents the consequences. Some songbird species have declined by as much as 85 percent.

But what of less loved species? Beneath the troubled waters of the Great Lakes, the Illinois River, the Mississippi, the evidence is harder to come by. That aquatic life is in trouble, no one with any sense has the least doubt. Something like two freshwater mussels out of every three is nearing extinction, and one freshwater fish species in three. Overfishing, exotic species and pollution have done their work. Everywhere Wilcove looks, readily recognizable animals in trouble represent the tip of a very menacing iceberg. Nature is in far worse shape than we think. Yet the soothsayers urge us not to be over-worried. They argue, is not extinction natural? Does not science tell us that most of the animals gracing the earth over the past 650 million years have disappeared? Environments change, creatures die. Mass extinctions punctuate the fossil record.

True enough. But consider this: In a mass extinction, there is no guarantee that any species long dependent on a stable environment will pull through a profound environmental change. For any given species, to escape decimation is to defy long odds. The human species included. As long as we continue to drink water, breathe air, derive sustenance from the good earth, we are just one more species dependent on the current environment — the one we are changing so dramatically.

Illinois’ 127 endangered species are our early warning. Environmentalism is not about saving the earth; it is about preserving an earth friendly to the life that is here now, ourselves especially. Are we smart enough to avoid decimating our future?

The Condor’s Shadow is one of those books you put down with a long sigh. Reading it is good for the soul, in much the same way that a half hour of exercise every day is good for the body. More a necessity than a pleasure, there’s pride in having finished. And some rage at the sheer catalog of abused habitats Wilcove reviews. Setting the book aside, I listen at the window, hoping to hear the voice of a Henslow’s sparrow. For a moment, I think I catch the barest wisp of its explosive call. Like a sneeze, from what I understand. Mostly, I suspect I will go on listening, unfulfilled, forever.

Robert Kuhn McGregor, an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues.

Habitat loss is species extermination. Yet we nod to the concept of species preservation without understanding what has to happen.

Illinois Issues May 2000 | 37