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<TITLE>More Wild Things news reports: Eagle-eyed volunteers work to keep hawk count</TITLE>
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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">More good news from Wild Things Conference - in today's Chicago Tribune.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Randi Doeker</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Chicago - Cook Co.</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>
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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">--------------------</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Eagle-eyed volunteers work to keep hawk count </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">--------------------</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Citizen scientists flock to Illinois Beach State Park to keep track of migrating birds of prey that converge here</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">By William Mullen</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Tribune staff reporter</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">February 27, 2005</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Vic Berardi and two dozen of his friends last year collectively spent 695 hours sitting in Illinois Beach State Park, staring into the sky, often in damp, frigid weather, to count 4,184 birds flying so high most could be seen only with binoculars.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Nobody thanked them for their efforts. Not a single taxpayer dime was expended for so much as a cup of coffee for them. It was their fifth annual count of migrating hawks, eagles and falcons that every autumn funnel through a narrow air corridor over the park, a vital part of a database on the continent's raptor populations.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Their group, the Illinois Beach State Park Hawk Watch, is one of 178 public and private organizations that make up the Chicago Wilderness consortium. Those organizations rely largely on 11,000 volunteers who, like Berardi and his friends, do much of the research, restoration and protection of remarkable expanses of wilderness areas still found within Chicago's urban sprawl.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Saturday that volunteer work was celebrated at "Wild Things: A Chicago Wilderness Conference for People & Nature" at Northeastern Illinois University. It was an all-day event with more than 100 workshops in which volunteers and professionals traded information on monitoring frogs, gathering seeds of rare plants, taking water samples from streams, counting birds and other work to preserve natural areas.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Berardi, 51, a Gurnee plastics executive, dedicates most of his spare time to counting raptors or persuading fellow enthusiasts to give up their time to do the same.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">For decades, there was only one annual count of migrating raptors in the U.S., begun in 1934 on a Pennsylvania ridge called Hawk Mountain.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The Hawk Mountain watchers in the 1960s raised a national alarm after seeing a steep decline in several raptor populations, especially the national symbol, the bald eagle, which nearly went extinct. Alarmed biologists soon found the villain, widespread use of DDT, which was promptly banned.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Now a national network of more than 100 raptor-monitoring sites have linked together, creating a continental database on populations that could prove invaluable as an early warning system for a future environmental disaster.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The fact that there are areas for wild hawks and eagles to be spotted in the Chicago area goes to the heart of the idea of Chicago Wilderness, which manages and protects 260,000 acres of publicly owned wild native habitat in the city and suburbs.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">It is a treasure almost unique in the world's major metropolitan areas, an artifact of the foresight of early 20th Century Chicago civic leaders who created an elaborate system of county forest preserves and park systems to rescue wilderness remnants not yet flattened by development.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"If you look at a dot map of where rare plants and high quality forest and prairie survive in Illinois," said Steve Packard, director of the Audubon Society Chicago region, "there is very little Downstate, but big concentrations in Chicago area."</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Chicago Wilderness was created in the 1990s by non-profit conservation organizations partnering with government agencies in an arc from southern Wisconsin through the Chicago area to northwest Indiana that own the 260,000 acres.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"We are a much-talked-about model for the world for the incorporation of nature into the life of the metropolitan area," said Packard.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"We have globally rare ecosystems incorporated into our urban life here. People can walk out their doors and see endangered orchids, rare breeding birds, even coyotes in their back yards.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"For a great many preserves, , volunteers do most of the work and most of the science.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"It magnifies many times what existing government-supported professionals could do. A great many species populations would now be extinct around here if not for this volunteer work."</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Chicago Wilderness divides volunteer work into four categories to match people with their interests and abilities, he said.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">More than 700 citizen scientists are trained to do census work of everything from birds and frogs to endangered orchids. Thousands work year-round in native prairies, wetlands and woodlands hacking out invasive foreign plants and gathering seeds and planting rare native plants. Others train to become docents, guides who take school and community groups into protected wild areas. Still others specialize in advocacy, preparing and presenting legislative proposals and writing articles and letters.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The hawk watchers led by Berardi fall into the category of citizen scientists.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">A birder since finding a robin's nest as a small boy growing up on the city's North Side, Berardi had to give up birdwatching, which requires good hearing, in his teens after suffering hearing loss from playing guitar in a rock band.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">In the 1990s, he learned that raptors are much more secretive and much quieter than songbirds. Instead of good hearing, studying raptors relies most on visual observation. He was hooked.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">At the time, the Hawk Migration Association of North America was beginning to build the nationwide network of raptor-migration observation posts, manned mostly by volunteers.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">None was in Illinois, and the geography and autumn atmospheric conditions around Illinois Beach State Park are such that migrating birds of prey from the north converge there as they head south, making the park an ideal observation post.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Many northern raptor species migrate to warm southern weather between the end of August and the end of November. Traveling thousands of miles over many weeks, they rest at night and each morning rise high into the atmosphere with a minimum of physical exertion by riding updrafts of warm air.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Berardi and a college biology instructor organized the first three-month migration watch in 2000 and enlisted and trained others on identifying birds by species, age and sex.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Many days not a single hawk or only one or two stragglers fly over the counters.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The payoff for Berardi and his colleagues are the days when atmospheric conditions are ideal, and hundreds--sometimes thousands--of hawks, eagles and falcons pass by.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"One of the most amazing experiences we've had was the single day in 2003 when we counted 3,500 broad-winged hawks, flying en masse in a steady stream," he said. "That's magic for us."</FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>
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