Owls and bats and coyotes, too
Throughout the Chicago metropolitan region,
more Illinoisans are getting
an up-close look at nature.
And more often, they're welcoming the experience
by Alf Siewers
A dusty road through an old industrial wasteland leads to the Hegewisch Little League's ball field, built on old steel mill slag in one of Illinois' worst-polluted urban areas.
But in the twilight, when the parking lot security lights come on and Little League organizer Larry Wedryk sits with kids in the bleachers, it's not the homer in the gloaming but nature they see.
"They come out of what we call the swamp, the bushes and weeds and underbrush, come flying out of nowhere and there they are, all this wildlife," says Wedryk. Raccoons, foxes, rabbits, herons, sandpipers, opossums, red-tailed hawks. They have all paraded through, above and around the Chicago field and parking lot that at night becomes a "wild kingdom" for Wedryk and his buddies. And don't forget the big snapping turtle behind the left field bleachers.
This adaptation of bird and beast in the Lake Calumet region on the city's southeast side, an area sometimes written off as irreparably damaged by the industrial revolution of the last two centuries, testifies to an unfolding story -- two, really: nature's continuing resourcefulness, and the evolution of relations between wildlife and people.
This is not a local story only. Throughout the Chicago metropol-itan region, more Illinoisans are getting an up-close look at nature. And more often, they welcome the experience -- even when it comes to wildlife's less cuddly representatives. Soccer moms are learning to build houses for once-maligned bats.
Neighbors are going to bat for coyotes. And "citizen scientists" have armed themselves with clipboards and are tracking critters large and small, furry and slimy, through wood and field, vacant lot and back alley.
But Hegewisch is as good a place as any to start this tale.
The economic shifts of the past couple of decades swept industry and people out of the region. And nature has been moving back in. Even the lake sturgeon has been spotted once again trying to come up the formerly heavily polluted Calumet River to spawn. At the same time, a sea change in environmental perspective is underway in some quarters. The melancholy late-20th century search for the mythical native Lake Calumet thismia plant has been tempered by a recognition that surviving Chicago-area ecosystems, though damaged and abused, are powerfully resilient.
Rising public interest in still-viable flora and fauna has encouraged the resurgence of remnant habitats. As have government-funded efforts to preserve, even restore, abandoned spaces. Just last month, Gov. George Ryan and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley unveiled a joint public-private plan aimed at revitalizing a 6,000-acre tract in the Lake Calumet area. The state will contribute $20 million to the effort, the city $14 million. The project calls for another $6 million from the federal government and $28 million from corporations and foundations. The idea is to blend new commerce into the natural environment, restore wetlands and establish a center that will highlight the region's industrial past and natural history.
Situated between North Woods, Great Lakes and prairie belt, under a major global butterfly and bird flyway, built on an old complex of marshes that (together with the Kankakee River valley) once rivaled the Everglades in size, this is one urban region with a lot of natural history. Neighboring Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, for example, recently was ranked almost as rich in species as the Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains national parks, though only a fraction of their size.
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 12---Also available in PDF
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 13---Also available in PDF
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 14---Also available in PDF
And ironically, though it has meant habitat destruction on a large scale, the region's very urbanness has served to protect some species on a small scale. While relatively homogeneous farming throughout most of the state has reduced flora and fauna drastic-ally, Chicago-area preserves, parks, suburbs and industrial wastelands have become dwindling havens of biodiversity. And while more delicate species continue to lose ground to urban sprawl, others seem to thrive. Deer, beavers, coyotes and Canada geese, for example, were once thought virtual goners in the area, but are now increasing in city and suburban environments where they've accommodated to human-related food sources. In some cases, their populations now exceed those of presettlement times.
There's been accommodation by human inhabitants, too. "It seems there are more and more situations coming up where people are trying to become involved with more animals that are out of the norm of bunnies and cardinals," says Ders Anderson, greenways coordinator for the Openlands Project of Illinois and an organizer of the Friends of the Fox River group. Those bat houses, for example, are designed to draw flying mammals for insect control. And there are other more nebulous reasons to attract, or not repel, nature. When a coyote ate a poodle in suburban Inverness, some residents opposed the call to trap the coyotes on village lands for the simple reason that they liked hearing them howl.
For any number of reasons, practical and otherwise, over the past decade thousands of volunteers have accepted the call of wildlife habitat projects in northeastern Illinois. Regional coalitions in developed areas along the urban crescent that sweeps north from Lake Calumet to McHenry County have organized community leaders around wildlife issues.
"It used to be that people thought of wildlife as either pests or pets, and there is much more of a sense now that nature can 'be' in the metropolitan area, that they are not pests and they are also not pets, that they are really wild," says Stephen Packard of the National Audubon Society's Chicago region office and a key mover in the Chicago Wilderness habitat coalition.
Still, all is not peaceable in the urban wildlife kingdom.
With more people living closer to other mammals pressed for space, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources' tally of animal nuisance complaints from people has gone "up, up and away," doubling in the past 10 years, according to state wildlife biologist Bob Bluett. In 1999, the department received reports of 67,057 complaints (most of which involved extermination efforts by permit-holding individuals and agencies), 86 percent in the nine counties of the greater Chicago region, most of those involving raccoons, squirrels, skunks and opossums.
Further, Chicago-area forest preserve districts and municipalities have had to resort to sharpshooters to take down hundreds of surplus deer each year, a highly controversial policy, but one that naturalists generally advocate on grounds that the lack of natural predators for the resurgent species can lead to overpopulation and threaten native ecosystems through overgrazing.
Although deer and coyote controversies in particular tend to polarize neighbors who find wildlife in the backyard -- pitting sentiment against fear -- Bluett, Anderson and others dealing regularly with human reactions to wildlife say they also are witnessing the emergence of a more mature attitude toward wild animals among a growing portion of the public. This emerging ethic is shaped in part by greater emphasis on ecological education in schools and ubiquitous TV nature programs and by the increasing number of volunteer restoration and monitoring projects that touch suburban and city neighborhoods. There is, they say, a better understanding of ecosystems as wholes in which the balanced health of wildlife populations is part of the potential riches of the region.
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 15---Also available in PDF
There are actual riches to be made, too. Realtors, and politicians, have taken note. That trend is reflected nowhere better than in Chicago's wildlife and ecosystem policies. Under Mayor Daley's administration, nature -- and, of course, good schools -- is now seen as the ticket for keeping the middle class in the city. The postwar suburban boom proved people like to live near nature, or at least their definition of it, and in the postindustrial era, the city sees an opportunity to best the suburbs at their own game.
"It's a new kind of ecotourism, really," explains Chicago Environmental Commissioner Bill Abolt, former director of the suburban Northwest Municipal Conference. Among other projects, the city is developing a new network of neighborhood nature centers and working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to restore urban riverbanks.
City Hall's new sense that wildlife are members of a metropolitan ecological polity is reflected in two recent acts: the creation of a mayoral wildlife advisory committee, and Chicago's ratification this year of the Urban Conservation Treaty for Migratory Birds with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, making the city only the second one nationwide (after New Orleans) to do so. Chicago and the federal agency each pledged $100,000 to improve urban bird habitats; the agreement was signed along the lakefront, where in recent years skyscrapers have become nesting grounds for peregrine falcons (elected the official city bird). During the ceremony, Jamie Rappaport Clark, director of the federal wildlife service, hailed Chicago as "the O'Hare of migratory birds."
More symbolic, perhaps, of the political importance of urban wildlife, the city also is encouraging downtown building owners to dim Chicago's skyline during migratory seasons to avoid luring birds into lethal window crashes.
And that brings us back to Lake Calumet. An important flyway stop, the region is a repository of state endangered or threatened avian species. Formerly, only a few bird enthusiasts and community activists such as University of Illinois at Chicago geographer emeritus Jim Landing knew about it. Today, a sophisticated and accelerating coalition of agencies and community groups is taking action to help clean and preserve the wetlands that provide wildlife for nocturnal human audiences in the Hegewisch Little League bleachers.
With property available and increasing interest in natural habitats and wildlife, Anderson says effective community leadership is working with city, county and state leaders on a number of initiatives. The Paxton landfill has been cleaned up, a comprehensive study of other sites
in need of preservation is moving forward, the Burnham greenway trail from Chicago to the Lansing-Indiana border is falling into place, Illinois-Indiana meetings are revving up on the future of restoring Wolf Lake, a coalition is working to found a national heritage corridor for the Calumet River system (like the one along the Illinois & Michigan Canal), and the Department of Natural Resources has designated the area one of its key "eco-partnerships" of local groups and agencies.
Much work, especially toxic cleanup, remains to be done, and the future of delicate habitats, including a heron rookery, remains uncertain.
But Anderson argues that all of this activity in the Calumet region would have been unheard of 10 years ago.
Such efforts are under way elsewhere, too. Through the state natural resources department's EcoWatch programs, volunteers, community (often schools) and environmental groups are monitoring key species in rivers, forests, wetlands and prairies so that scientists and land managers can track the health of local ecosystems. About 2,000 volunteers and 13 AmeriCorps field trainers are involved statewide. In recent
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 16---Also available in PDF
years, the lion's share of these volunteer efforts (about a quarter to a third) have occurred in heavily developed northeastern Illinois.
A new component of the project, UrbanWatch, run by the Field Museum in the Chicago area, is the first program in the nation specifically designed to monitor city wildlife. It systematically melds volunteers with scientifically designed methods of data collection. It also will use a CD-rom and Web site to train what is expected to become a much larger pool of urban wildlife and plant monitors.
About 60 "citizen scientists" were trained for the new program in the past year; a second class of some 100 more completed training recently. They are assigned such sites as golf courses, cemeteries, vacant lots, parks and preserves, where they periodically walk a route, noting the presence or absence of certain species of animals and plants.
Much of the wildlife monitored through this program consists of smaller organisms, including snails, slugs, butterflies and beetles, important indicators of habitat health.
Nor is this the only effort involving volunteers in habitat projects that stress the interrelation of humans and biodiverse wildlife in urban areas. Since the late 1980s, thousands of volunteers in northeastern Illinois have been involved in prairie and savannah ecosystem restoration spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy, a private nonprofit group. A key sign of the success of that effort has been the return of butterflies and Cooper's hawks in area preserves.
In addition, the Chicago Wilderness eco-partnership in northeastern Illinois, which now involves 107 agencies and organizations, and publishes a magazine with 7,000 subscribers, is spotlighting and marketing formerly diverse and isolated efforts to renew wildlife habitats. A regional biodiversity recovery plan and a new Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission book, Protecting Nature in Your Community, are among the early fruits.
One of the region's latest biodiver-sity efforts is the Audubon Society's Habitat Project. Using private and public funds, the project launched a volunteer frog monitoring program, in coordination with similar existing bird and butterfly monitoring networks in the Chicago area. The goal is to develop data that scientists and land managers can use to nourish better bird-related ecosystems in built-up areas.
Marcy Andersen, a hospital worker in St. Charles, signed up with her daughter to listen to frogs for the Audubon program. It's become part of their family routine. "We get to sites a half hour after dark -- moist warm weather conditions are best -- and go give it a listen. And then we record what the sky color is, the wind speed, general weather conditions, temperature," Andersen recounts. "Then we sit quietly and listen for a while, and try to discern all the different frogs that we can, and keep them separate from the birds and ducks and cars."
Trained through the program to identify specific frog calls, Andersen takes with her into the night in her neighborhood's suburban "wilds" a cell phone, thermometer, journal, flashlight, and a chart of frog sounds and names. She had no previous experience in such volunteer or scientific work, but since she joined the program, she has identified one frog species that was thought to have been extinct in Kane County.
Illinois, which experienced some of the quickest human changes to ecosystems of any region in world history during the 19th and early 20th centuries, also became an important early nursery for the new science of ecology.
Jens Jensen, the Danish-born landscape architect whose influence shaped many of Chicago's parks, as well as the region's forest preserves and the Indiana Dunes parkland, saw healthy wildlife ecosystems as also healthy human ecosystems.
In a 1920s plan, he envisioned preserving and renewing a patchwork of farmland and natural habitats on Chicago's West Side that would build a communitarian ethic among the residents. "Some day," he wrote prophetically, "the West Side will feel betrayed, and will feel the loss of park and playground, which it needs for a healthful development of hundreds of thousands of workers who have found their homes there."
This century's plans for the Calumet region are every bit as ambitious. The
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 17---Also available in PDF
area's wetlands were once an "icebox" for native peoples, an integral part of their way of life, Potawatomi Indian historian Jerry Lewis of Crete notes. Today, their remnant wildlife offers some hope for a Grail-like renewal of an industrial wasteland, a better balance between humans and nature.
Still, Thomas Anton, a Winnetka-based environmental consultant, recognizes that any children of his will likely not be able to observe in the wilds of the Chicago area, as he did in high school, such species as the Massasauga rattlesnake, teetering on the edge of extinction in Illinois.
On the one hand, Anton says, "in Cook County's forest preserves, we've lost only five of the presettlement reptile and amphibian species. To still have 33 of them left, let alone the adaptable mammals, in such an urbanized county, I think that's cause for hope. But if I get married some day and want to show my son a Massasauga, I will never be sure I would be able to do that. The generation we're handing nature off to is going to be vastly more enlightened, but will remember less to enjoy."
The loss will be greater than a few species. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that the wildness of fairy tales is more important to adults than to children because it reminds us of a universe larger than ourselves. Likewise, urban encounters with wildlife offer that possibility to Illinoisans. Nature connects us to our past, as well as our future.
Alf Siewers studies and writes about landscape and culture at the University of Illinois in the wilds of Champaign-Urbana.
July/August 2000 Illinois Issues 18---Also available in PDF
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