Referendum is an easy choice: #VoteYesForestPreserves
Referendum is an easy choice: #VoteYesForestPreserves
It's a no-brainer for all the benefits that the Forest Preserves of Cook County provide us
I’m not sure when I fell in love with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, but it was probably during the winter of 2018-2019. It’s an odd thing to fall for an arm of county government, especially Cook County government, but that’s exactly what happened. The Forest Preserves have something on their more mundane peer agencies such as the Clerk of the Circuit Court, the Recorder of Deeds, and the Zoning Board of Appeals. Though 70,000 acres of prairies, wetlands, and woodlands will do that to a guy.
One way to contextualize the importance of the Forest Preserves is to think of Arches National Park in Utah. Anyone who’s been there knows that this feels like a vast parcel amid the red rocks of the Beehive State. Amazingly the Forest Preserves of Cook County are the same size as Arches, emerald necklaces of vital green space that skirt the urban core of the county.
Pileated Woodpeckers in Illinois were a longtime nemesis for me. I’d tried and tried to spot one of the crow-sized woodpeckers and always came up empty. Pileated Woodpeckers weren’t on my mind when I made an early 2019 trip to Jurgensen Woods, a county forest preserve in Lansing that includes a state nature preserve (as many county parcels do). Then something amazing happened when I found not one but two of these beauties amid a towering stand of oaks. Almost as thrilling as the Pileateds was the preserve itself, a hidden gem that winds alongside the bottomlands of Thorn Creek.
About a month later, and 40-or-so miles away, I was at another preserve on the opposite end of Cook County. Somehow I’d lucked into Paul Douglas Forest Preserve in Hoffman Estates as my territory for a nuthatch count organized by Audubon’s Climate Watch. It was a snowy day and I was surrounded by cold woods, frozen ponds, and utter stillness. I almost dipped on my target species, when I heard the nasal eent sound of a White-breasted Nuthatch deep in the forest. Soon I found two nuthatches and an assortment of woodland birds. (This actually ended up as a story in Chicago Ornithological Society’s The Chicago Birder.)
But the culmination of my forest preserve love might have taken place in 2020, when I moved into a neighborhood that abuts one of the North Branch preserves on the Northwest Side. Now all I had to do was walk about a 100 yards to be surrounded by serenity, only interrupted by planes headed toward O’Hare and the occasional Metra train (hey, we are in a metropolis after all). It was on a cold spring evening, temperatures in the 40s, when I discovered that American Woodcocks love this preserve during migration. It’s not uncommon to hear a half-dozen timberdoodles peenting and displaying in the preserve in March and April.
Now the Forest Preserves of Cook County have a referendum on this November’s ballot so that it may make improvements to the properties, expand them, and hire more staff. It’s a rare opportunity for us as voters to have such a direct impact on most anything, let alone conservation. In fact, the referendum’s the preserves’ first in 100 years of history and will only cost the average homeowner $1.66 per month. It’s a small price to pay for the respite these places provide and the haven that they are for local flora and fauna, many of which are threatened or endangered species.
All you have to do is check ‘yes’ when you see the referendum question on the ballot. The choice here is an easy one. The forest preserves are essential resources in our region, and they deserve our support.
There is much more information about the Vote Yes for Clean Air, Clean Water, and Wildlife in Cook County campaign available here.
Tickling the ivories results in blowback
I took some flak on Twitter last week after posting my skepticism about the existence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which hasn’t been seen definitively in the United States since the 1940s.
Pffft. Cyberthrush has been blogging for the IBWO’s existence for more than a decade. I’m not surprised to receive the criticism, as stated last week this is a hot-button issue in birding.
The below tweet is much more in line with my thinking, after spending 53 minutes watching a frame-by-frame breakdown of a blurry 2020 woodpecker video on YouTube two weeks ago. The solution to the debate is an easy one:
And that summarizes my point. Birders drive all over Chicagoland every day to see, and photograph, the rarest birds. If the Ivory-billed was still around, we’d have a crystal-clear photo by now. Especially since scores of the nation’s best birders descended on the South’s swamps after the 2004 “sighting.” Yes, the habitat is remote and dense, but it doesn’t go on forever. This isn’t 1 million acres or even 500,000. We’re talking fragments of 20,000- or 30,000-acre tracts, sometimes a little more.
Maybe there will always be Ivory-billed Woodpecker believers out there. And at some level, I have to hand it to them for clinging to their dreams. It’s a magical thought to believe that an ancient species is lurking somewhere. But this is a situation where it’s very hard to look at the evidence and determine that its persistence is anywhere near conclusive.