Chicago’s True Nature: Black History Month Event at RU on Tues 2/27

DATE & TIME:
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
4pm –6pm

LOCATION:
Roosevelt University
Sullivan Room
Auditorium Building 2nd Floor (AUD 232)
430 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605

RSVP:
Please register at:
forestpreserves_blackhistorymonth.eventbrite.com

You’re Invited to a Celebration of Black History Month!

The Chicago area is known as a crossroads of diverse cultural groups and ideas. Less commonly known, is the biological diversity of our region. Varied ecosystems are home to native plant and animal species thriving within the Forest Preserves of Cook County.

With nearly 70,000 sprawling acres of wild and wonderful wilderness, the Forest Preserves is a regional asset which improves our quality of life, but not everyone is aware of or has the opportunity to enjoy the benefits that come from spending time outside. The Forest Preserves and its partners recognize the challenge of ensuring that everyone has access to nature and are working to better engage communities of color and grow public stewardship of nature.

Please join us to hear about both the historical and contemporary connections between environmentalism and the African American experience and how we can work together to protect nature and ensure that it is welcoming and accessible to all.

A panel discussion will follow thought-provoking presentations by Brian McCammack, professor at Lake Forest College and author of the new book Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, Veronica Kyle, Chicago Outreach Director with Faith in Place, and Arnold Randall, General Superintendent of the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Kimberly N. Ruffin, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt University, will act as moderator.

Light refreshments will be served. Hardback copies of Professor McCammack’s book Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago will be available for sale for $40 each (cash or check).

The event is free but space is limited, and registration is required. For directions and transportation information please visit www.roosevelt.edu/campuses/maps-directions

This event is co-sponsored by Roosevelt University and the Forest Preserves of Cook County.

Speaker Bios and Abstracts:

Veronica Kyle directs all of Faith in Place’s Chicago outreach programs, with a particular passion for those related to Sustainable Food and Land Use. She is responsible for the creation of the Migration & Me Program which came about as the result of the realized concern that there were not enough people of color, mainly brown and black people, who were visibly engaged in available extracurricular outdoor activities, stewardship, and Earth care.

Brian McCammack is the author of Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest College, where he teaches courses on environmental history and politics. Landscapes of Hope recently won the 2018 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History. In Landscapes of Hope, he examines the deep connections to nature that black Chicagoans forged in the first half of the twentieth century. The Forest Preserves of Cook County were particularly notable in this regard because African Americans not only sought out leisure there despite racial segregation and intimidation, but the labor of young black men in the Civilian Conservation Corps also helped improve and even build areas like the Skokie Lagoons.

Arnold Randall is the General Superintendent of the Forest Preserves of Cook County. The Forest Preserves of Cook County, established over a century ago, is one of the oldest and largest urban conservation districts in the United States, managing nearly 70,000 acres of diverse habitat across Cook County and offering recreation and education programs for audiences of all ages and from all walks of life. But preserving nature today in the nation’s second largest county comes with its own particular challenges – a lack of funding, climate change, and an urban population often out of touch with nature. The Forest Preserves is actively working with partners to provide a variety of programs that link diverse and urban populations with nature, including a Conservation Corps job training program and robust camping program at five new campgrounds.

Kim Ruffin is an Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt University, author of Black on Earth: African-American Ecoliterary Traditions (U. of Georgia Press, 2010), and nature-loving Certified Forest Therapy Guide.

 

Wildness: Relations of People and Place

Wildness 2017 UofChgoPThis March saw the publication of the new book Wildness: Relations of People and Place, edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), an environmental humanities project sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature. Part 3 of the book, entitled Urban Wild, includes an essay I co-wrote with Mr. Michael Howard, a Chicago community leader, conservationist, and environmental educator: “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side: Stories of People and Nature at Eden Place Nature Center.”

I’m fortunate to have been part of this wonderful project, which began with a writer’s retreat in September of 2014 in Crested Butte, CO, featuring writing workshops by the award-winning scientist and nature writer, Robert Michael Pyle (whose own essay follows a poem by none other than the legendary Gary Snyder). My interviews and writing sessions with Mr. Howard at Eden Place in 2015, and the three semesters I’ve worked there with my students each fall since 2014, have made getting a sense of this special place in the world an immensely gratifying experience. Thanks to Gavin and John for shepherding this project through its publication!

From the book’s promo page on the Univ. of Chicago Press website:

Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.

Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)
Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)

This book charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. As they show, far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin.

From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from the amazing adaptations of animals and plants living in the concrete jungle to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed urban industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.

Visit the Center for Humans and Nature’s Wildness website for upcoming events and a series of related short films, including one of Michael Howard and Michael Bryson talking about Eden Place.

Eden Place video for WildnessClick on the image above to go to the video interview of Michael Howard (pictured) and Michael Bryson at Eden Place Nature Center.

City Creatures: Wildlife in the City

City Creatures book coverTomorrow afternoon my SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics class at Roosevelt University’s Chicago Campus proudly hosts a special presentation entitled “City Creatures: Urban Biodiversity in Chicago” at 3:30 p.m. in Roosevelt’s LEED-Gold Wabash Building, Room 1214. Dr. Gavin Van Horn of the Center for Humans and Nature will discuss his recent book, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness (University of Chicago Press), published in November 2015; and then engage in dialogue with my students and the RU community about urban biodiversity from the perspective of the environmental humanities.

Dr. Gavin Van HornDr. Van Horn is the co-editor of City Creatures and is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature, as well as editor of the widely-read City Creatures blog. His work focuses particularly on how place-based values are developed and strengthened in dialogue with local landscapes. He continues to explore cultural perceptions of wildlife; place-based ethics; endangered species recovery, ethics, and policy; and the values involved in ecological restoration projects, community gardening, and wildlife management.

This special event is free and open to the public, and is hosted by students in SUST 340 Policy, Law, & Ethics. A limited number of signed copies will be available for purchase ($30 cash) and discount order forms will be available.

Videoconference Option: For those who cannot attend in person, the City Creatures event will be video- and teleconferenced live via Zoom as well as recorded, so that you may watch and/or listen from anywhere in the world. Login information is here:

Topic: City Creatures at RU Presentation 11 Apr 2016
Time: Apr 12, 2016 3:30 PM (GMT-5:00) Central Time (US and Canada)

More on City Creatures from The University of Chicago Press website:

We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—but we are just one of thousands of species that call the urban landscape home. Chicago residents knowingly move among familiar creatures like squirrels, pigeons, and dogs, but might be surprised to learn about all the leafhoppers and water bears, black-crowned night herons and bison, beavers and massasauga rattlesnakes that are living alongside them. City Creatures introduces readers to an astonishing diversity of urban wildlife with a unique and accessible mix of essays, poetry, paintings, and photographs.

City Creatures image 3The contributors bring a story-based approach to this urban safari, taking readers on birding expeditions to the Magic Hedge at Montrose Harbor on the North Side, canoe trips down the South Fork of the Chicago River (better known as Bubbly Creek), and insect-collecting forays or restoration work days in the suburban forest preserves.

The book is organized into six sections, each highlighting one type of place in which people might encounter animals in the city and suburbs. For example, schoolyard chickens and warrior wasps populate “Backyard Diversity,” live giraffes loom at the zoo and taxidermy-in-progress pheasants fascinate museum-goers in “Animals on Display,” and a chorus of deep-freeze frogs awaits in “Water Worlds.”

City Creatures image 2Although the book is rooted in Chicago’s landscape, nature lovers from cities around the globe will find a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to a new world that has been there all along. Its powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout will help readers see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.

Sustainability and Biodiversity at the Field Museum

Last Monday, as a warm 60+ degree (F) day enveloped downtown Chicago in a splendid preview of spring, my students and I hiked from Roosevelt’s Gage Building in the Loop to the lakefront, where we strolled southward to that great edifice of natural history and biodiversity, the Field Museum. Once there, we met up with Carter O’Brien, the Museum’s sustainability manager (who basically created the job over a number of years after spearheading the FMNH’s recycling program). Carter gave us a comprehensive walking tour of the museum’s grounds, community garden, and loading dock.

SUST 210 visits the FMNH with Carter O'Brien (front left), the museum's sustainability manager (aka "green guru")
SUST 210 visits the FMNH with Carter O’Brien (front left), the museum’s sustainability manager (aka “green guru”)

Along with many of staff and researchers at the FMNH, Carter has spearheaded the museum’s efforts to green its practices in energy consumption, waste management, food service, recycling, transportation, exhibit design, and gardening. Despite being an institution dedicated to studying and conserving the world’s rich trove of biodiversity, the Field Museum until recently was not at all sustainable in its own operations, an irony not lost on environmental advocates such as Carter and many of his museum colleagues. Now the FMNH is a recognized leader in transforming old buildings into sustainably-managed facilities, as it recently garnered a LEED Gold rating on its operations and maintenance from the US Green Building Council, only the 2nd existing museum building in the US to do so, and it has just received a $2 million grant to redevelop its grounds within Chicago’s famed Museum Campus in ways that enhance biodiversity, water conservation, and public education.

Carter brought us inside through the seemingly ancient (and surprisingly small) loading dock, thorough a phalanx of heavy doors, narrow passageways, and claustrophobic elevators (all part of the FM’s 19th Century charm), and to the Botany research division, one of the four major research/collections areas of the museum. There we met up with the equally ebullient Dr. Matt Von Konrat, who has many titles at the museum but is best known as an early land plant botanist (which means he studies mosses and liverworts both here and abroad) and the Head of Botanical Collections at the museum.

Dr. Matt Von Konrat in the Botany Collection at the FMNH (photo: M. Wasinka)
Dr. Matt Von Konrat in the Botany Collection at the FMNH (photo: M. Wasinka)

Dr. Von Konrat was kind enough to set up a sampling of preserved plant specimens from the Museum’s vast collection, which when arrayed on a huge wooden table represented a journey of 500 million years of land plant evolution. Many of these examples had special significance as type specimens, which are recognized as being archetypal examples of the species that are used for benchmarking certain key identifying characteristics.

Photo: M. Wasinka
Photo: M. Wasinka

One plant, a particularly tiny moss, held special significance in a recent court case about Burr Oak Cemetery scandal  in the far South Side Chicago neighborhood of Dunning. Cemetery caretakers dug up several hundred human remains and dumped them in a mass grave in order to sell additional plots in the cemetery over a several year period. The moss was part of forensic evidence analyzed by Dr. Von Konrat that proved the involvement of cemetery employees in this heinous crime. The story illustrates the profoundly important role that environmental evidence can play in forensics, and the potential value in aligning the study of botany (and sustainability) with that of criminal justice.

After both of these splendid tours, my students and I ventured forth into the public area of the museum — its exhibits, naturally! — where we inspected the notable (and LEED Gold certified) conservation exhibit, Restoring Earth, which documents FMNH efforts to conserve natural and human communities in South America as well as restore local prairie, woodland, and wetland ecosystems here in the Chicago region.

Photo: M. Wasinka
Photo: M. Wasinka

Encountering the Wild: Meditations and Musings from Crested Butte, Colorado

On a hike outside of Crested Butte CO, Sept 2014, during the Relative Wild writers' workshop
On a hike outside of Crested Butte CO, Sept 2014, during the Relative Wild writers’ workshop

This past September, I joined a group of writers convened by Gavin Van Horn (of the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago) and John Hausdoerffer (a professor at Western State Colorado University and the director of WSCU’s Headwaters Project) for a much-anticipated writers’ retreat in the beautiful mountain town of Crested Butte, CO. The idea was to gather invited writers together to shares conversation, ideas, outlines, and initial jottings as a means of kicking off a new book project to be co-edited by Gavin and John called The Relative Wild. As they describe it, this is a collection of stories and essays that

will explore how human and ecological communities co-create the wild. The “myth of the pristine” — that nature is most valuable when liberated from human presence — is quickly being supplanted by “the myth of the humanized,” the assertion that nothing is untouched by human influence, and therefore one may embrace ecosystem change, even extreme changes, as “natural.” We suggest that both of these myths deserve equal scrutiny, and that one way to do so is by celebrating the common ground of the relative wild: the degrees and integration of wildness and human influence in any place.

Slate River valley near Crested Butte, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)
Slate River valley near Crested Butte, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)

Having participated in a previous CHN writer’s retreat at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for the forthcoming book City Creatures (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015), I know firsthand how extraordinary an opportunity it is to take time out from the busy schedule and harried demands of ordinary life to mingle with talented and creative writers all focused on a common project. The fact that the Relative Wild gathering transpired in a beautiful mountain setting at the autumnal equinox was even better. Over the course of two and a half days, we had many great conversations, took hikes in the stunning mountains and valleys outside of Crested Butte, ate meals together, used quiet time for writing and reflection, and engaged in several productive and inspiring writing workshop sessions led by the esteemed naturalist and prolific nature writer, Robert Michael Pyle.

My planned contribution to the book will be co-written with Mr. Michael Howard, the Executive Director and founder of Eden Place Nature Center in Chicago, and is tentatively entitled “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side: Stories of People and Nature at Eden Place.” What follows below is an example of the writing we were assigned to do at writers’ workshop. Here, Bob Pyle challenged us to closely observe and meditate on our immediate surroundings and experiences in Crested Butte that weekend, and to write about them as evocatively as possible. Whether or not we connected these observations to our planned essay/story topics for the book was optional. His writing prompt — to start with the phrase, “Encounter, here . . .” — was both deceptively simple and (for me) highly challenging. This is what I wrote.

Three Encounters (in response to Bob Pyle’s writing prompt)
by Mike Bryson

Encounter: Crest Butte, CO

Aspen forest (M. Bryson
Aspen forest (M. Bryson)

September 21 — We leave our lodge on foot here in town, walk for what only seems to be a few blocks (hardly far enough to go anywhere at home), and suddenly, we’re on a mountain trail. We hike high above the winding Slate River, through intermittent stands of turning-gold aspen. I gawp at the massive bulk of Mount Crested Butte, Gothic Mountain, the interplay of rock and tree line, the contrasting beauty of the valley, the rich topography that is overwhelming in its newness and scale.

The damp, rich, loamy smell of the forest, though, makes just as strong an impression. Aspen leaves are scattered on the trail, gold, green-dappled, as beautiful as mountains. My companions, old friends and new, chuckle at my boyish “golly gee” reaction to this place. I am a rube in this wilderness, as stupefied as a farm boy in New York City.

September 22 — After dark, I gather six aspen leaves of varying size and hue, each jeweled with perfect drops of rainwater. I blot them dry in my room, press them between the pages of Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers without End. It’s comforting to know that my wife and children will consider this a worthy gift upon my return.

The central IL landscape: Daniel farm, Woodford County, fall 2013 (L. Bryson)
The central IL landscape: Daniel farm, several miles southeast of Metamora, Woodford County, Oct 2013 (L. Bryson)

Encounter: Metamora, IL

Reeser family reunion at the Mennonite Heritage Center, east of Metamora in central Illinois’ Woodford County. The heart of Illinois farm country, just northeast of Peoria, soils built by centuries of deep-rooted prairie growth, decay, regeneration. Corn and soybeans now dominate this quiet land, the rolling soft green hills of the Mackinaw River valley belying the fact that this is in part a built environment, made and maintained with tractors and chemicals. The ditches and streams here are as vulnerable to nitrogen runoff from the seasonal applications of anhydrous as Oh-Be-Joyful Creek is to heavy metal contamination from the Daisy Mine upstream of Crested Butte, Colorado.

After our family’s potluck dinner and visiting with elderly relatives over rhubarb pie and weak coffee, we walk over to a half-acre prairie restoration dedicated to my great-great-great grandfather, Christian Reeser, a Swiss-German immigrant who lived and farmed to age 104. Once much of Illinois looked like this. Tallgrass prairie: 1/100th of one percent remains.

Encounter: Chicago IL

September 17 — Eden Place Nature Center, in the Fuller Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Michael Howard and I sit and talk in the trailer that serves as office, classroom, conference area, and tool shed at Eden Place, a 3.4-acre farm and nature center wrought from the desecration of an illegal waste dump in the middle of a residential area in one of Chicago’s poorest, smallest, most isolated, and most polluted neighborhoods. Outside, goats bleat, chickens fuss and cluck, two ponies graze quietly.

Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)
Eden Place Nature Center, Sept 2014 (M. Bryson)

The early stages of an oak savannah and prairie restoration take up the north half of this refuge, the only bona fide nature center on the entire south side of the city. Modestly sized and brightly painted barns stand against the tall concrete embankment of the railroad that runs along Eden Place’s western border. Exhaust-streaked trains, passenger and freight, clatter by at short intervals. Too often, freight lines stop and idle here, engines rumbling, diesel fumes thick in the air. Raised-bed gardens sport squash, beans, peppers, tomatoes, herbs.

“What is this book supposed to be about again?” Michael asks. “Remind me. I’m sorry — this has been a long week.” He is exhausted by his new job at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, but relieved to have stolen a few rare moments of down time at Eden Place. An oasis in the city.

“The Relative Wild,” I reply. He nods, looks thoughtful.

“When we created Eden Place,” he said, “the thought was this: if we build it, the wild will come.” And so it has over the last fifteen or so years. Red-tailed hawks. Migrating songbirds. Raccoon, opossum, skunk. White-tailed deer, seen in the damp mist at two in the morning. Urban wild amidst an imposing hardscape of pavement and gravel, humble houses and gritty vacant lots, cut off and bounded by physical barriers of twelve-lane expressway, railroads, abandoned industrial yards. Build it, the man says. The wild will come.

Crested Butte, CO
September 23, 2014

Biodiversity in the News: the Practice of Biology in Modern Times

Daniel Molloy working in Sleepy Hollow Lake, Athens NY (photo: L. Mann/APO)
Daniel Molloy working in Sleepy Hollow Lake, Athens NY (photo: L. Mann/APO)

This past week I’ve come across two fascinating and instructive news articles about biologists in NY and IL doing important research in different contexts, with instructive lessons for how we conserve biodiversity in the face of urbanization and invasive species. Today’s NY Times‘ Science Times section features this piece on Daniel P. Molloy, a biologist at the New York State Museum who has spent his career studying and developing environmentally-safe biological controls for invasive species, such as the notorious zebra and quagga mussels that plague the Great Lakes ecosystem.

David Bohlen in his office (photo: Tom Handy, IL Times)
David Bohlen in his office (photo: Tom Handy, IL Times)

The other story, from my own state of Illinois, appeared on Feb. 6th in Illinois Times (Springfield) — a long feature article on the work of H. David Bohlen, who has studied the bird populations of Sangamon County in Central IL for a continuous 40-year period and just released a massive two-volume report on his research. Bohlen is a biologist with the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. His 2013 report, “A Study of the Birds of Sangamon County, Illinois, 1970-2010,” can be found here as pdfs (Volume 1 and Volume 2).

The valuable work of these two scientists illustrates several points about the impact of biological research in conserving biodiversity and making ecosystems more sustainable. Molloy’s research strives to find and implement natural biological controls (such as a species of bacteria) for invasive species, not just to effectively mitigate their impacts on the food chain but also to avoid using chemical toxins and further polluting freshwater aquatic systems as a means of “saving” them. His work also demonstrates the increasing prominence of microbiology in sustainability science, which is also a key starting point for developing biofuels (itself a really hot topic!).

Bohlen’s field-based research method, by contrast, is a throwback to the organismal field studies of natural history that were common in the 19th century but have largely fallen out of favor with the biological mainstream’s emphasis on cellular- and molecular-level work. Yet Bohlen’s phenomenal 40-year record of avian biodiversity in a representative Midwestern farm county shows how the land use changes resulting from decades of urbanization and industrial agriculture have negatively impacted the diversity and abundance of bird species in the Illinois landscape. It also illustrates what you can accomplish by walking around, observing, and recording systematic phenological data over a long-term timeframe.

Verlyn Klinkenborg Publishes Final Column for “The Rural Life” in the NY Times

klinkenborgOne of my favorite journalists, commentator and essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg, published the final piece for his long-running column, “The Rural Life,” in today’s New York Times. His wise and observant prose-poems about his small farm and the nature that inhabits it were among the pieces of writing I most relished amid the dreck and disruption contained within the daily news.

Klinkenborg’s artful and well-wrought column will be greatly missed by many, I’m sure. I’m reprinting today’s essay in full here.

Farewell

By

The first Rural Life appeared on the editorial page nearly 16 years ago. This is the last. This seems a good season to leave, with a long winter ahead, the wood stove burning, and plenty of hopes and plans for the coming year. When The Rural Life began, I didn’t imagine that it would last so long or chart so many changes in my life. Nor did I imagine that it would find so many good readers. But it has, and I’m grateful for that.

As for the farm, it will go on much as it has. The horses will stand broadside in the sun or paw the snow looking for last year’s grass. The roosters — two of them now — will breast the bright morning air as always while the hens go about their business. The dogs — two of them now, again — will chase each other through the snow. I’ll be fixing fence and hauling wood and feeding out hay and chopping ice in the horse tank when the power goes out. And I’ll be doing what I’ve always done: watching the way one thought becomes another as I go about the chores.

But what about your farm, the one you’ve pictured while reading The Rural Life all these years? I know, from talking to readers, that it’s far bigger and more orderly than mine. It has fewer rocks and richer soil and fences that somehow magically stay taut. It reflects who you are as surely as my place reflects who I am. And it seems to be just about anywhere, wherever there’s open land and some woods and enough time to walk the fence line. I’ve always wished that I could visit the farm that readers imagine I live on. It sounds like a very nice place.

I am more human for all the animals I’ve lived with since I moved to this farm. Here, I’ve learned almost everything I know about the kinship of all life. The only crops on this farm have been thoughts and feelings and perceptions, which I know you’re raising on your farm, too. Some are annual, some perennial and some are invasive — no question about it.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned here, on these rocky, tree-bound acres, was to look up from my work in the sure knowledge that there was always something worth noticing and that there were nearly always words to suit it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/opinion/farewell.html

Spring Sparrows in Joliet

After my sandwich break today while telecommuting from the Joliet Public Library’s Black Road Branch location, I took a postprandial stroll through the marsh at the Rock Run Forest Preserve, which is just to the west of the library.

Song Sparrow (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
Song Sparrow (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Heard one of my favorite sounds of spring: the three-part call of the song sparrow, one of the most eloquent of North America’s songbirds. He might have an understated appearance, this little brown songster — but what a voice! Here’s some info on this aptly-named species, Melospiza melodia, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where you can hear the song yourself and learn more about its biology.

Better yet, get outside where some woods meets a lake, a river, or a clearing, and you’ll probably spot a song sparrow perched on a shrub or a small tree. Or, like me, hear it first.

Getting the Kids Outside

Today’s the last day of winter here in 2013. Not a bad opportunity to go outside and look around, if I can carve out some time in between helping the kids with homework after school, running errands, grading papers, and making dinner. But it’s worth trying!

Here’s a short essay, my second contribution to the City Creatures blog project, that riffs on the value of kids, urban nature, and everyday encounters with the wild in our yards, alleys, and neighborhoods. I like the ending the best, for it features a poem by my 5th-grade daughter, Lily.

Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge Proposal Wins Federal Approval

This past week saw some great news this week for citizens of the greater Chicago region as well as southeast Wisconsin. The US Dept of the Interior has announced the approval of the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, a constellation of planned open spaces and conservation areas that will link existing green spaces in NE Illinois and SE Wisconsin. It will be the closest wildlife refuge to the Chicago area, and is a future boon for regional ecotourism, land preservation planning, and sustainable economic development.

The map above depicts the original study area of the proposed refuge. According to the USFWS Division of Conservation Planning, it “includes the refuge Study Area boundary in black plus conservation lands currently owned by the State of Illinois, the State of Wisconsin, counties in both states, non-governmental organizations, land conservancies, and private individuals. Because land ownership is dynamic, some existing conservation lands may not be shown and some areas may have changed in status since this data were obtained.”

This somewhat more schematic map below, which was distributed widely via the media, shows the now-authorized boundaries of the new refuge, and clearly depicts the donut-shaped collection of open space and protected lands (including future conservation areas) that straddles the Illinois-Wisconsin state border.

What makes the Hackmatack Refuge unique within the longstanding national wildlife refuge system is its close proximity to a major metropolitan area (and therefore millions of potential visitors per year) and the fact that it will be composed of a mosaic of present and future protected landscapes, rather than a single contiguous parcel of federal land. For more information on the scope and significance of Hackmatack, see this news article from the Daily Herald, the Friends of Hackmatack website, and US Fish & Wildlife Service’s official webpage for the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge.