Illinois Needs Updated Water Law

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It’s not unusual for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to receive calls from well-meaning citizens asking whom they should contact for a permit to take water out of a stream. The answer to this question might surprise you—it’s no one. Although there are highly developed state and federal regulations concerning what can be discharged into Illinois waterways, our state has only very old, very vague rules about taking water out of them.

According to Wayland Eheart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the U of I, this lack of specific regulations spells trouble as the demand for surface water in our state grows. It both sets the stage for conflict among users of surface water, and threatens water quality, since the levels of pollutants allowed in wastewater discharges are calculated with reference to historical low streamflows.

The rule that applies now in Illinois is known as riparian doctrine. It allows those who own land adjoining a waterway to use a “reasonable” amount of water from it. What constitutes a reasonable amount? Riparian doctrine does not say. But in a future where the demand for surface water could outstrip supply, it would be terrible public policy to have such a fundamental question decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts.

Eheart offers the following scenario to illustrate how a shortage of surface water might come about in the not-so-distant future. Say this year’s drought is followed by another dry year, or two, or three. Under such circumstances, farmers who had not previously irrigated their crops might install irrigation equipment, which is very expensive. That means taking water from streams that are already under stress in times of severe drought. But it also creates an incentive to take water from streams even in times of moderate drought, since the highest cost associated with irrigation—buying the equipment—would already have been paid.

According to Eheart, a typical center-pivot irrigation rig covering a hundred sixty acres can consume water at roughly the same rate as a small town. This is because, by design, little of the water used for irrigation is returned to its source. In contrast, much of the water used by households and industry flows back into waterways after having been treated.

The state water withdrawal law Eheart envisions would avert conflicts between users by allocating each a percentage of the available flow in a stream, and establish priorities for types of water use in times of scarcity. Eheart emphasizes that such a law would protect all water users, including farmers. As he points out, there is nothing in current law that would prevent a factory upstream from putting a pipe into a river and effectively turning a downstream farmer’s irrigation equipment into idle scrap metal.

Eheart also envisions implementing a market for water withdrawal permits, which would allow farmers and industries needing more water to trade for permits with others needing less.

The complexities of developing new laws to govern the withdrawal of surface water in Illinois make it tempting to leave well enough alone. But if we want such laws to achieve a fair balance among the needs of all users and the needs of aquatic ecosystems, we would do well to get them enacted before conditions change for the worse.

Welcome Back, Otters!*

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Today I want to celebrate more than four thousand, six hundred reasons for conservation of rivers, lakes, and wetlands in Illinois. You see, four thousand, six hundred was the estimated population of river otters last year in areas where they had been reintroduced by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources in the mid 1990s. That number led scientists to deem the river otter population “widespread and secure,” and to remove them from the list of “state threatened species.”

That’s a remarkable thing to be able to say about an animal with a history like that of the otter in our state.

At the time of European settlement, river otters were common throughout Illinois, but their numbers declined steeply during the nineteenth century, due to habitat loss and unregulated hunting and trapping. By the beginning of the twentieth century, sightings of river otters were rare, and when the species was listed as state endangered in 1989 it is estimated that there were fewer than a hundred river otters in Illinois.

How did we get from fewer than one hundred animals to more than forty-six hundred in just fifteen years? Conditions for rivers otters in Illinois had become favorable again even when numbers were at their lowest. Pollution in state waters had been greatly diminished thanks to the Clean Water Act, and that had allowed populations of fish, the otter’s main food, to rebound. In addition, beavers had come back in the state. Otters favor abandoned beaver dens for housing, preferring not to dig their own, and they also take advantage of the pools and wetlands beavers create for fishing.

Given these conditions, all the Department of Natural Resources had to do was just add otters. Between 1994 and 1997 a total of three hundred forty-six otters that had been trapped in Louisiana were released in appropriate habitat throughout Illinois. The current number of forty-six hundred otters indicates that these animals found everything they needed to make themselves at home. Besides multiplying so quickly, they have surprised biologists by taking up residence even in highly developed landscapes, including the Chicago area.

If you’re familiar with river otters, you know they are fascinating creatures. Strong, graceful swimmers, they are capable of remaining under water for three to four minutes, and traveling as much as a quarter of a mile in that time. In winter they bound through the snow and then slide on their bellies. Otters are also both curious and nearsighted, which is part of an adaptation that allows them to see well underwater, and which also explains why they sometimes come very near people and boats to investigate them.

The successful reintroduction of river otters in Illinois will allow more of us the opportunity to see them for ourselves in years to come, and that’s cause for celebration. But we should count this success as only one step on the road to the ecological recovery possible in our state.

*Credit an Illinois Department of Natural Resources Press Release for this title and the bad pun therein.

Urbana's Big Grove Oaks

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When we think about the landscape of central Illinois prior to European settlement we tend to think “prairie:" tall grasses and wild flowers adapted to life in unevenly drained soil subject to burning on a fairly regular basis.

And prairie is most of the story. But it is not the whole story.

Groves of trees intruded on the prairie here and there, especially on the eastern edges of rivers and streams, which created natural breaks to prairie fires driven by winds from the west.

Such groves were dominated by fire-resistant species of oak, and interspersed with hickory, ash, walnut, sugar maple and linden trees as well.

Prairie groves were quite hospitable to humans compared to the prairie itself, offering game, shelter, and respite from some of the discomforts of life in the open. They were preferred sites for Native American villages, and the first places to be settled by Americans of European descent coming from the east.

One of the largest of these timbered areas in our region was called by settlers of the early nineteenth century the Big Grove.

As it was mapped in the original survey of the area in 1821, the Big Grove covered about 10 square miles. Its western edge roughly paralleled the Saline Branch, the stream that drops into Urbana from the north and runs through Busey Woods and Crystal Lake Park before turning east toward St. Joseph. Along its southern edge the Big Grove extended to about where Urbana’s Main Street runs today.

If you’re familiar with Urbana and the locales just north and east of the City, you know there’s no forest left that would merit the name, “Big Grove,” most of the wood from those trees having gone into houses, fences, farm implements and fires long ago.

But here’s the cool thing. Some trees that began life in the Big Grove still stand in Urbana today.

You can touch them. Heck, you can hug them. They’re the kind of trees that elicit that response from people.

Near the corner of East Main and Maple Streets, a Bur Oak that predates the Declaration of Independence rises more than eighty feet from the yard outside Long’s Garage. This tree’s limbs spread as wide as it is tall, which tells us that it grew up in a relatively open area, the meeting zone between woodland and prairie.

Farther from the center of town on East Main, a still larger Bur Oak can be seen on the eastern edge of the site of the Quaker Meetinghouse that was completed last year. We know this tree to be roughly two hundred forty years old now, based on calculations made in 1976, when the International Society of Arboriculture recognized it as a “bicentennial tree.”

The “bicentennial tree” and the oak at Long’s Garage are both commemorated with stone markers and plaques that were set up by the Urbana Tree Commission in 1976.

Greater numbers of oaks that predate European settlement can be seen—and hugged—at Urbana Park District sites. The oldest and largest trees in Crystal Lake Park and Busey Woods are relics of the Big Grove, as are ten or so of the trees at Weaver Park, now being developed on East Main.

Special thanks for assistance with today’s piece to Bob Vaiden of the Illinois State Geological Survey, Derek Liebert of the Urbana Park District, and Mike Brunk, City Arborist for Urbana.

Batteries and the Environment

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You probably don’t give it much thought, but I bet you’re surrounded by batteries.

I’ve got one in the watch on my arm, and there’s one in the cell phone in my pocket. The computer has one to keep time when it’s shut down. My radio takes six of the big D cells to work when the power goes out, and there are at least ten batteries of various sizes in assorted flashlights around our house. There are 9-volts in the smoke detectors, and rechargeables in the cordless phones and power tools. And let me not even mention the batteries we have in toys.

There are old batteries in a jar waiting to be recycled, and new batteries in a drawer waiting to be used.

I enjoy the convenience of batteries. But like many other people, I am also concerned with the environmental consequences of using them. So this week, I did a little digging on that question. Here’s what I found.

Disposable household alkaline batteries, the ones we use most, have changed greatly for the better over the past twenty years. The biggest concern with earlier generations of these batteries was the mercury they contained, which could make its way into the environment if they were incinerated or wound up in a landfill. In response to public concern and subsequent legislation, manufacturers have reduced the use of mercury in disposable alkaline batteries by ninety-eight percent.

If you’ve ever wondered what good it does to express your concern about the environmental impact of consumer products, just take a look at the way some batteries are now marketed. I’ve got double A’s that boast “0% mercury and cadmium added” right on the side.

Although today’s alkaline batteries are far less harmful in landfills than their predecessors, it’s still preferable to recycle them when that’s possible. Unfortunately the only opportunity most of us have for recycling disposable alkalines is the occasional EPA hazardous waste collection day.

An even better option, from an environmental perspective, which also turns out to be cheaper in the long run, is to invest in rechargeable batteries to replace alkalines for household use.

In contrast to alkaline batteries, the Nickel-Cadmium, or ni-cad batteries in cordless phones and power tools are still full of materials that should never wind up in an incinerator or landfill. But thanks to the federal law known as the Battery Act of 1996, it is much more convenient to recycle them than it used to be. The Battery Act requires that ni-cad batteries be easily removable from the devices they power, and it also prompted manufacturers to set up a system for recycling ni-cad batteries.

When rechargeable ni-cad batteries die, it’s important not to throw them away, but rather to take them back to the store where they came from for recycling.

The same rule also applies for the little button type batteries in our lives, the ones in watches, hearing aids, and calculators, for example. These batteries ought to be recyclable through the businesses that sell them. When that’s not the case, it’s worth keeping them for an EPA hazardous waste collection day.

Is there life beyond replaceable batteries? It seems so, at least if you’re willing to do a little winding. I recently came across an ad for flashlight that’s charged by a hand crank. How well it works I don’t know yet. But if someone from my family is listening, and feels inclined to get me a gift anytime soon, I’ll be sure to report back.

Watching for Raptors in Winter

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Talk about coincidences.

Monday morning I took advantage of a break in the rain to bike from my home in Champaign to my office on campus at the U of I. As I approached a vacant lot on White Street just east of First, five crows swooped in to land in a leafless silver maple tree, where another crow was already perched, calling as though his life depended on it. The others took up the cry with equal fury, rocking back and forth and bobbing their heads in the direction of a midlevel branch.

There sat a red tailed hawk, miserable from a night of rain, her wet feathers buffeted by the wind, now under assault by six angry crows. The hawk was clearly agitated by all the attention, but she stayed put, and after a bit, the crows moved on.

The coincidence involved with this hawk sighting is that I was on my way to the office to write this radio piece about looking for birds of prey in late fall and winter. It may be a lousy time of year for other outdoor activities, but it’s a great time to see hawks, falcons, owls, and even eagles—the meat-eating birds known collectively as raptors.

This incident also illustrates much of what I intended to say about looking for birds of prey.

First, it shows that paying attention to the behavior of other birds can help you to see raptors you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Any time you’re outdoors and you hear an excited group of crows or blue jays, take a minute to see what’s causing the stir. Crows and jays make it their business to track and harass birds of prey whenever they encounter them. Find the center of their attention, and you may well find a hawk or an owl.

The behavior of birds being hunted by hawks can also alert you to their presence. Cooper’s hawks, for example, often prey on the birds that congregate at backyard feeders. So if you’ve got a yard full of sparrows that goes suddenly still, look up. There could be a hawk soaring overhead, or perched in a tree nearby. And if the small birds at your feeder all take flight together, look to see whether a cooper’s hawk has zoomed in to grab one.

My Monday morning hawk sighting also illustrates the point that you need not make special trips to see raptors, especially when the leaves are off the trees. If you look out for birds of prey you have a chance to see them anytime you step out the door, even in urban areas. Red tailed hawks, cooper’s hawks, great horned owls, screech owls, and American kestrels all have adapted to life in built up human environments. In our area numbers of these birds are steady to increasing, thanks to the 1972 ban on DDT.

You can see even more birds of prey with a little bit of looking. Winter travel provides excellent hawk watching opportunities, since the grassy strips along highways are such good habitat for the small mammals that hawks and falcons often eat. Of course if you’re driving you’ll want to keep your eyes on the road, but if you’re a passenger you can spot raptors by scanning the tops of fences, road signs, and power poles, where hunting birds might perch.

All of this is really to say you don’t have to turn on the Discovery channel to see birds of prey. They live among us, and this is a great time of year to look for them.

Wild Turkeys in Illinois

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With all of the Thanksgiving Day press devoted to domestic turkeys—how many we’re going to eat this week, how best to cook them, etcetera—you probably weren’t aware of this fact, but we’re living in the age of the wild turkey. That’s according to Patrick Hubert, a wildlife ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Says Hubert, “It is a good time to be alive if you are a turkey, turkey hunter, or turkey biologist in Illinois.”

This has not always been the case.

Wild turkeys were abundant in Illinois prior to European settlement, but their numbers declined steadily during the 1800s due to over-hunting and the clearing of forests, which are a necessary component of turkey habitat. The state legislature closed turkey hunting in 1903, in an effort to preserve the remaining populations. That measure proved to be too little too late, though, and by 1910 wild turkeys had been eliminated from Illinois altogether.

Some turkey habitat was regained as marginal farms in the southern and western parts of the state were abandoned and returned to forest during the first half of the twentieth century. This fact gave hope to state efforts at turkey reintroduction, which began in 1959. The birds involved in this program were obtained from other states where turkey populations had already rebounded in exchange for animals that were doing well here—Canada geese, largemouth bass, bobwhite quail. From the 1970s through the year 2000 Illinois also transplanted turkeys from areas where they were thriving to suitable habitat that had not yet been re-colonized.

Illinois now boasts wild turkeys in just about every habitat that will support them, and recent estimates put the state population at 135,000. Harvests by hunters break records from one year to the next, with this year’s spring take statewide surpassing fifteen thousand birds.

Whether you hunt them or appreciate them from a distance, wild turkeys are fascinating birds. For one thing, they’re big. Adult males, or gobblers, measure about four feet from bill tip to tail tip and weigh from seventeen to twenty-one pounds on average. Hens are smaller, measuring closer to three feet long and generally weighing from eight to eleven pounds, but they are still large birds. Despite their size wild turkeys can also be very fast when they need to be. They can hit speeds up to twenty-five miles per hour running, and they can fly at speeds of up to fifty-miles an hour in short bursts to escape from predators.

While most of us weren’t noticing their comeback, grain farmers were developing the suspicion that wild turkeys were damaging crops. A recent study by researchers in Indiana exonerated them on that charge, though.

Turkeys had been tagged as suspects because they show up during daylight hours in corn and soybean fields where crop damage has occurred at night. The real culprits turn out to be deer and raccoons, whose nocturnal activity accounted for ninety-five percent of the damage in the fields studied. The suspect turkeys, it turns out, were dining on waste grain and insects.

Would the wild turkey have made a better national symbol than the bald eagle? Most people know that Benjamin Franklin thought so. I’ve never been able to see that myself, but I take great pleasure in knowing that they’re back to stay in Illinois.

A Pitch for The Illinois Steward

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If you are curious about the natural world of Illinois, or maybe thinking about a gift for someone who fits that description, I’ve got a magazine recommendation for you: The Illinois Steward. The Steward is published quarterly, and it’s an education and outreach effort of the U of I and affiliates that promote natural resources stewardship.

The slogan of The Illinois Steward—“discovering our place in nature”—quietly asserts that people are part of the natural world. By extension, it implies that our well-being is bound up in the well-being of the land community that we inhabit, wherever we live.

Should you pick up a copy of The Illinois Steward the thing you are likely to notice first is the photography. In any given issue it seems there is at least one photograph that you’ll think can’t have been taken in Illinois. Sometimes that’s a picture of a thing you don’t usually associate with our state, like an ancient bald cypress tree. Other times it’s the perspective that makes the photo stand out, like a close-up of an insect you step over every day. Photographs of more easily recognized subjects in the Steward—prairiescapes, woodland wildflowers, birds and mammals—are equally striking, the kind I look at and wonder, “Could I frame that?”

Many of the stories The Illinois Steward covers focus on humans as participants in the natural world.

Features in the past year have included an article on the small but growing number of farmers around the state who are rediscovering the potential for growing crops other than corn and soybeans—to their own benefit, and the benefit of the land community. Another article described the mud-to-parks project, which is taking sediment from Illinois River backwaters near Peoria, and using it to reclaim former industrial sites near Chicago. Still other articles describe the pleasures of various outdoor activities from hunting for morel mushrooms to working to restore prairie and other natural areas.

In addition to articles that highlight human activity, The Illinois Steward also promotes understanding and appreciation for the nonhuman residents of Illinois—spiny soft-shelled turtles, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, and the rest.

The look of The Illinois Steward is distinctive. It employs striking photos and drawings as components of the stories it tells, but it’s not so visually busy that the design becomes a distraction. The people who work on The Steward are passionate about their subjects, and passionate about communicating what they know and what they discover about Illinois.

If you have not picked up a copy of The Illinois Steward before, you should know that the current, Fall 2005, issue is something of a departure. It is produced entirely with essays, photos, and drawings by students from a U of I course on communicating nature, that was taught by members of the Steward staff and contributors last spring.

You can order The Illinois Steward by phone through their subscription office at (217) 333-3650. Or follow this link to learn more at their website:

http://ilsteward.nres.uiuc.edu/

Illinois State Geological Survey Field Trip and Guide to Geology of Starved Rock and Matthiessen State Parks

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What does a geologist do?

That’s the question that Mike Chrzastowski used to begin his first talk of the day on a field trip conducted by the Illinois State Geological Survey at Starved Rock and nearby Matthiessen State Parks this past October. Chrzastowski was one of a team of geologists leading the trip, which was designed to acquaint participants with the geology, landscape, mineral resources, and biodiversity of the area surrounding these two scenic and popular state parks.

In answer to the question of what geologists do, I and other field trip participants generally agreed they looked at rocks. Chrzastowski allowed for that, but he emphasized another aspect of their work. “Geologists,” he said, “tell stories.”

And stories were the order of the day. As we stood atop Starved Rock itself, a hundred twenty-five feet above the Illinois River, Chrzastowski told how torrents of meltwater from lakes formed by retreating glaciers—flows more powerful than today’s Mississippi River—had cut down through the surrounding plains to create the Illinois River Valley as we know it.

At another stop, we stood beneath Council Overhang, a fifty-foot high natural amphitheater in the side wall of Ottawa canyon with such perfect natural acoustics that our guides didn’t have to raise their voices to be heard. There we learned how the layers of sandstone and dolomite visible in the cliffs of the park formed hundreds of millions of years ago, as ancient seas repeatedly flooded the area and then receded.

We also learned how the three-sided box canyons opening out to the river valley had come to be, formed by small streams from the surrounding uplands cutting farther and farther back into the cliff face over time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the cliffs and other rock formations at Starved Rock are spectacular enough to look at without knowing anything more about them. But for me, the pleasure of learning how they came to be made the experience all the richer.

The Illinois State Geological Survey will host two more field trips on the geology of Starved Rock and Matthiessen State Parks in spring of 2006. There is a twenty-five dollar fee for the trips, which are capped at a hundred participants, and advance registration is required. More information about State Geological Survey field trips and how to sign up for them is available at the Survey’s website

If you’ve got plans to visit the parks I’ve been talking about before spring, or field trips just don’t grab you, you might be glad to know that the Survey has also recently published a book about them. It’s called Time Talks: The Geology of Starved Rock and Matthiessen State Parks, and it’s available at the Starved Rock Visitors Center and through the Survey’s public information office in Champaign.

Time Talks is a concise, clearly written, beautifully designed guide intended to help park visitors read the landscape for themselves, and it tells many fascinating stories.

Of course, that’s one thing geologists do.

Illinois State Geological Survey
http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Update, and Talk by Tim Gallagher

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Most of us will likely never lay eyes on an ivory-billed woodpecker, the magnificent bird that was presumed extinct for sixty years and then rediscovered in 2004.

Tim Gallagher has. He is the author of The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and he’ll be in Champaign tomorrow to give a public talk.

Gallagher was one of the three highly credible witnesses who went into an Arkansas bayou in February 2004 looking for an ivory-bill and saw one. Their sighting led to fourteen months of highly secretive, intensive searching, which resulted in six more sightings and a few seconds of compelling video footage before the story was made public this past April. Since then, painstaking analysis of audio recordings made in the search area has provided even further proof that the ivory-bill lives.

Part of what makes the news about the ivory-bill so exciting is that it is such a cool bird. At approximately twenty inches long and with a wingspan of thirty-three inches, the ivory-bill is North America’s largest woodpecker, notably bigger than the pileated woodpecker, its widespread and relatively common cousin. The ivory-bill’s body has been described as coal black, and it sports extensive white patches on its wings, along with a lightening-bolt shaped white stripe on each side. The ivory-bill’s tall crest, with its slight forward curve is black on females, and blood red on males. Both male and female birds display a brilliant yellow eye and the three-inch-long, chisel shaped, ivory colored bill that gives this bird its name.

Prior to European settlement, ivory-bills inhabited the vast bottomland forests of the American south, from the Atlantic to Texas and Oklahoma, with the northern boundary of its range extending into southern Illinois and Indiana. As these ancient forests were destroyed over the past two hundred years, the ivory-bill declined, with sightings in the twentieth century concentrated in old growth remnants, especially in Florida and Louisiana.

The rediscovery of the ivory-bill in the place where it was found represents a victory for everyone interested in the preservation and restoration of wildlife habitat. The Arkansas bird was sighted in a national wildlife refuge in an area targeted for further conservation by the Nature Conservancy and the state because it represents a unique habitat, the southern bottomland forest, now nearly gone.

Writing for the New York Times this spring, James Gorman articulated well the role of conservation efforts in the ivory-bill’s astonishing comeback. He wrote, “It wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t luck. And it wasn’t simply the resilience of nature, although that helped. The reason for the astonishing re-emergence of a mysterious bird is as mundane as can be. It is habitat preservation, achieved by hard, tedious work, like lobbying, legislating, and fundraising.”

Could the ongoing restoration of swamps and floodplain forests in southern Illinois bring the ivory-bill back to our state? It’s a long shot. But the ivory-bill’s re-emergence in Arkansas provides us a glimmer of hope, and a reason to redouble our own efforts to protect and restore wild places.

If you would like hear the latest on the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker from someone who has been at the center of it, come to the talk by Tim Gallagher tomorrow, Friday, November 4th. He’ll be speaking at 4:00 p.m. in Room D of the Law Building on the U of I campus in Champaign.

Enjoying Spiders

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Halloween is upon us, the one time of year people put up spider webs at home instead of taking them down. It’s also a great time to celebrate and explore some of the things that creep us out. Like spiders.

Since children are usually a little more open to these subjects than adults, I’ve enlisted the young naturalists from my house, Jane and Will, to help out with today’s show.

Let’s start with the basics. Kids, are spiders insects?

Both: Nooooo.

How can you tell?

Jane: Spiders have eight legs; insects have six.

Will: Yeah, and spiders have only two body sections; insects have three.

Jane: Besides that, all insects have antennae, and most have wings.

Will: Spiders don’t.

There are more than five hundred species of spiders found in Illinois, more than three thousand in North America. The big ones like tarantulas, orb weavers, and wolf spiders tend to get the most attention, but they represent only a small portion of the spiders all around us.

And spiders are all around us. In an often-repeated bit of wisdom, which I pass along here without scientific confirmation, you’re never more than three feet from a spider.

Spiders thrive in and around buildings, on trees, in grass, under rocks, and in caves. There’s even a spider that lives most of its life under water, using air bubbles trapped in silk to breathe.

Kids, does this mean we’re in constant spider danger?

Both: Noooooo.

Very few spiders are aggressive toward humans. When they bite people it is usually because they have become trapped next to the skin, either in clothing or bedding. This is not to say a bite from a spider can’t be serious. In Illinois, both brown recluse spiders and black widows can deliver a bite requiring medical attention. As a rule, though, people greatly overestimate the likelihood and severity of spider bites. Spider venom is meant for spider prey, which is mainly insects and other spiders.

If it creeps you out to think of how many spiders there are around you, think of how many more mosquitoes, flies, and other pests we’d have without spiders on the scene to eat some of them. Or better still, enjoy some of these cool spider facts.

Jane: Some spiders with fierce names, such as the rabid wolf spider, are really harmless to people. Others, like the black widow, live up to their names.

Will: Trapdoor spiders live in burrows underground. At night they wait by the door and spring out to capture insects passing by.

Jane: Spiders can parachute. As you may remember from Charlotte’s Web, spider young send out a balloon of silk to be carried away in the wind.

Will: A bolas spider swings a strand of webbing like a sticky tetherball to catch moths out of the air.

Is your spider sense tingling yet?

Jane: We sure hope so.

All: This year, think spiders for Halloween.

Illinois Needs Updated Water Withdrawal Law

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It’s not unusual for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to receive calls from well-meaning citizens asking whom they should contact for a permit to take water out of a stream. The answer to this question might surprise you—it’s no one. Although there are highly developed state and federal regulations concerning what can be discharged into Illinois waterways, our state has only very old, very vague rules about taking water out of them.

According to Wayland Eheart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the U of I, this lack of specific regulations spells trouble as the demand for surface water in our state grows. It both sets the stage for conflict among users of surface water, and threatens water quality, since the levels of pollutants allowed in wastewater discharges are calculated with reference to historical low streamflows.

The rule that applies now in Illinois is known as riparian doctrine. It allows those who own land adjoining a waterway to use a “reasonable” amount of water from it. What constitutes a reasonable amount? Riparian doctrine does not say. But in a future where the demand for surface water could outstrip supply, it would be terrible public policy to have such a fundamental question decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts.

Eheart offers the following scenario to illustrate how a shortage of surface water might come about in the not-so-distant future. Say this year’s drought is followed by another dry year, or two, or three. Under such circumstances, farmers who had not previously irrigated their crops might install irrigation equipment, which is very expensive. That means taking water from streams that are already under stress in times of severe drought. But it also creates an incentive to take water from streams even in times of moderate drought, since the highest cost associated with irrigation—buying the equipment—would already have been paid.

According to Eheart, a typical center-pivot irrigation rig covering a hundred sixty acres can consume water at roughly the same rate as a small town. This is because, by design, little of the water used for irrigation is returned to its source. In contrast, much of the water used by households and industry flows back into waterways after having been treated.

The state water withdrawal law Eheart envisions would avert conflicts between users by allocating each a percentage of the available flow in a stream, and establish priorities for types of water use in times of scarcity. Eheart emphasizes that such a law would protect all water users, including farmers. As he points out, there is nothing in current law that would prevent a factory upstream from putting a pipe into a river and effectively turning a downstream farmer’s irrigation equipment into idle scrap metal.

Eheart also envisions implementing a market for water withdrawal permits, which would allow farmers and industries needing more water to trade for permits with others needing less.

The complexities of developing new laws to govern the withdrawal of surface water in Illinois make it tempting to leave well enough alone. But if we want such laws to achieve a fair balance among the needs of all users and the needs of aquatic ecosystems, we would do well to get them enacted before conditions change for the worse.

Walking, Wellness and the Environment

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The most basic form of human locomotion, walking, gets so little respect in our culture, I sometimes wonder we don’t just forget how to do it. As a means of getting from one place to another, it’s a last resort. As a form of exercise, it’s at the bottom of the list. But recent and upcoming activities in Champaign-Urbana and on the U of I campus suggest that walking may be poised for a comeback.

Last week six elementary schools—three in Urbana and three in Champaign—marked the second local observance of International Walk to School Day. This event encourages walking to school as a way of promoting children’s health, reducing fuel consumption and air pollution, and emphasizing the need for safe routes for walking and bicycling.

Now these are all fine reasons to walk to school, but they’re a little heavy on virtue. I would emphasize in addition that it is enjoyable for children to walk to school, and a treat for parents who have the opportunity to walk with them.

The walk to and from school is a great time to enjoy listening to kids. They’re not distracted by books or tv or computers or toys. And parents who are walking with them are free to listen instead of focusing on the demands of driving. In the morning you may be reminded of the kinds of things that kids look forward to in a day, whether that’s time to work on a special project in class, free time in P. E., band, or just what’s on the menu for lunch. In the afternoon, you may find out what children have learned in class, but you’re just as likely to hear what was gross, what was funny, who was mean or nice to whom—the kinds of things that really occupy kids.

Walking to school is also a great way to enjoy the natural world, even in a relatively urban setting. After all, any walk can be a nature hike if you approach it as one. Walking to school gives kids a chance to investigate the ants that sometimes pile up around cracks in the sidewalk, it gives them time to wonder why squirrels chase each other the way they do, and it provides excellent opportunities to smash acorns, kick walnuts, or collect buckeyes.

And on top of that, walking to school is good for kids and the environment.

Of course walking also promotes wellness in adults, and beginning today the U of I is hosting a three-day conference for researchers from around the world who study the connections between walking and health.

Conference organizers also hope to engage the community with a number of “legs on” activities. Chief among these is a massive “Walk Toward Wellness” on the main quad at the U of I tomorrow, which will be led by Chancellor Richard Herman and his wife Susan. Registration for the walk will begin at 11, and the walk itself will start after an introduction by interim Provost Jesse Delia at noon.

So, if you can, walk your kids to school tomorrow, or walk on over to the quad at noon.

Ethanol and the Environment

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It would be difficult to live here in the heart of corn country and not like the idea of ethanol, the corn-based fuel that can substitute for gas in our cars. But as citizens who foot the bill for energy policy and who value a healthy environment for ourselves and our children, we have an obligation to look more closely at what we’re buying when it comes to energy alternatives. As it is currently produced, ethanol delivers far less than the hype surrounding it promises.

Marketers of ethanol term it a “renewable” resource, trading on the idea that it is simply energy captured from the sun made available for use as fuel by distilling grain into alcohol. What most people don’t realize, though, is that large quantities of fossil energy are used to grow corn, and still more is required to power the distilling process. Indeed, whether the system as a whole produces more energy than it consumes is still open to debate. In any case, even under the rosiest scenario, only a fraction of the energy available in a given quantity of ethanol can realistically be labeled “renewable.” The rest is, in effect, repackaged fossil fuel.

Ethanol has also been touted as environmentally friendly, because as an additive to gas it alters the composition of engine exhaust, reducing emissions of certain pollutants. What ethanol does not do is significantly reduce nitrogen oxides, the most important smog-causing tailpipe emission from a late-model car. The best way to reduce smog-producing tailpipe emissions is to reduce the amount of fuel cars burn in the first place.

Beyond that, if we’re going to gauge ethanol’s environmental friendliness, we really need to look past what’s coming out of our tailpipes. The true environmental costs of adopting ethanol as a fuel are in fact much broader. They include the environmental impacts of growing corn, such as habitat alteration, soil erosion, and pollution from pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, as well as the environmental impacts of the distilling process. Ethanol plants have been very slow to adopt air pollution controls, and they use enormous quantities of water, itself a finite resource.

When we’re asked to buy the idea that ethanol represents a homegrown alternative to gas, we are also asked to buy the implication that using it can help free us from the geopolitical entanglements associated with our dependence on oil. But ethanol replaces only about two percent of the gasoline we currently use, and even greatly expanded production will not reduce our demand for oil significantly.

As in the case of air pollution, if we’re serious about reducing our dependence on oil, we can make greater strides toward that goal by adopting higher standards for fuel efficiency.

A special thanks to Walt Robinson from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences for Assistance with today’s program.

Welcome Back, Otters!*

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Today I want to celebrate more than four thousand, six hundred reasons for conservation of rivers, lakes, and wetlands in Illinois. You see, four thousand, six hundred was the estimated population of river otters last year in areas where they had been reintroduced by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources in the mid 1990s. That number led scientists to deem the river otter population “widespread and secure,” and to remove them from the list of “state threatened species.”

That’s a remarkable thing to be able to say about an animal with a history like that of the otter in our state.

At the time of European settlement, river otters were common throughout Illinois, but their numbers declined steeply during the nineteenth century, due to habitat loss and unregulated hunting and trapping. By the beginning of the twentieth century, sightings of river otters were rare, and when the species was listed as state endangered in 1989 it is estimated that there were fewer than a hundred river otters in Illinois.

How did we get from fewer than one hundred animals to more than forty-six hundred in just fifteen years? Conditions for rivers otters in Illinois had become favorable again even when numbers were at their lowest. Pollution in state waters had been greatly diminished thanks to the Clean Water Act, and that had allowed populations of fish, the otter’s main food, to rebound. In addition, beavers had come back in the state. Otters favor abandoned beaver dens for housing, preferring not to dig their own, and they also take advantage of the pools and wetlands beavers create for fishing.

Given these conditions, all the Department of Natural Resources had to do was just add otters. Between 1994 and 1997 a total of three hundred forty-six otters that had been trapped in Louisiana were released in appropriate habitat throughout Illinois. The current number of forty-six hundred otters indicates that these animals found everything they needed to make themselves at home. Besides multiplying so quickly, they have surprised biologists by taking up residence even in highly developed landscapes, including the Chicago area.

If you’re familiar with river otters, you know they are fascinating creatures. Strong, graceful swimmers, they are capable of remaining under water for three to four minutes, and traveling as much as a quarter of a mile in that time. In winter they bound through the snow and then slide on their bellies. Otters are also both curious and nearsighted, which is part of an adaptation that allows them to see well underwater, and which also explains why they sometimes come very near people and boats to investigate them.

The successful reintroduction of river otters in Illinois will allow more of us the opportunity to see them for ourselves in years to come, and that’s cause for celebration. But we should count this success as only one step on the road to the ecological recovery possible in our state.

*Credit an Illinois Department of Natural Resources Press Release for this title and the bad pun therein.

The U of I’s Students for Environmental Concerns

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It’s not unusual to see campus environmental activism portrayed as a thing of the past, a phenomenon of the sixties and seventies. But having recently checked in with the U of I group, “Students for Environmental Concerns,” I’m happy to report that, whether or not they are making headlines, students are working as hard as ever to make positive environmental changes on campus and in the Champaign-Urbana community.

The group, which goes by the initials SECS, is a program of the University YMCA, where it meets, and a UIUC registered organization. It currently boasts somewhere between thirty and forty active members, whose academic interests include everything from natural resources and environmental sciences to English, psychology and civil engineering. In the words of current president Joe Teng, who takes pride in the group’s diversity, “You don’t have to be a hippie to care about the environment.”

You may recall SECS as the group that persuaded the Illinois Student Government to allow students to vote on a two-dollar per semester clean-energy fee back in spring of 2003. The fee, which passed with nearly seventy percent of votes cast in favor, has generated approximately two hundred eighty thousand dollars so far. That money is being used to get the ball rolling on a large-scale project to install one or more wind turbines for generating electricity on the new South Farms.

Currently, on campus SECS is focusing attention on recycling and energy conservation. Members maintain collection sites for ink-jet cartridges, which are then sold in bulk to a reprocessor. Proceeds from this operation are then used to cover the costs of recycling worn out batteries.

SECS is also working to promote energy efficiency on campus, beginning with energy audits of select facilities. The purpose of these audits is to identify what upgrades to existing facilities would have the most impact for conserving energy. In addition, SECS is encouraging University Housing to adopt commonsense conservation practices in dorms—things like energy-efficient lighting, and the use of energy misers on vending machines, which reduce the average electricity consumption of cold drink machines by about forty percent.

In the Champaign-Urbana community, SECS members conduct activities with environmental themes for after-school programs about once a month. These include presentations on topics such as recycling, along with related games and crafts; for example, bowling for plastic milk jugs and creating Halloween masks out of recycled materials.

As I worked on this profile, I couldn’t help but think of a quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” At the U of I, the efforts of Students for Environmental Concerns remind us that such an ethos is alive and well.

The Importance of Rivers and “It’s Our River Day”

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"It's Our River Day"
http://www.state.il.us/ltgov/cleanwater/iord.htm

2005 Vermilion River Paddling Festival
http://middleforkcanoes.com/showdata.php

Celebrate the Sangamon! River Clean-up
City of Monticello - 217.762.2583 or Prairie Rivers Network - 217.344.2371

It’s easy enough to live in our part of Illinois without thinking too much about rivers. They are numerous here, but small and heavily altered, and most of us encounter them only as we drive over bridges. But stop to dip your toes in one and you are connected to a system that makes life here possible.

Statewide, Illinois boasts thirty-three thousand miles of permanently flowing rivers and streams. If you lined them all up they would stretch the length of the state from north to south eighty-five times.

We ask a lot of these waterways. More than seven and a half million people in Illinois get their tap water from rivers or other surface water sources, including reservoirs. We hunt and fish and boat and birdwatch on rivers.

We also depend heavily on rivers for taking water away. Cities and industry combine to discharge millions of gallons of treated wastewater a day into Illinois rivers and streams. These waterways are also essential for carrying off storm water, making it possible for people to live and farm in areas that would otherwise remain too wet for such purposes.

Human uses aside, Illinois rivers and streams are home to amazingly diverse aquatic animal communities, including a hundred eighty-eight species of fish, fifty-seven species of mussels, and hundreds of species of insects. These aquatic communities are, in turn, interwoven with the wider community of animals that inhabits river corridors, everything from painted turtles and tiger salamanders, to otters, osprey, bald eagles, and herons. Indeed, river corridors account for nearly all of the high quality wildlife habitat that remains in east central Illinois.

All of this is a long way of encouraging you to participate in “It’s Our River day,” this Saturday, September 17th. This statewide celebration, championed by Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn and the Illinois River Coordinating Council, calls attention to the roles rivers play in our lives, and encourages citizens to get involved with river conservation.

In Monticello, a number of groups including the city and Prairie Rivers Network will sponsor a clean-up to “Celebrate the Sangamon!” You are invited to paddle the river in a canoe or walk the banks to help remove debris. This clean-up is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. to noon, with check-in at the Monticello City Building.

In Danville, there is a clean-up on the Salt Fork River scheduled from 10 am to 3 pm on Saturday, in connection with the Vermilion River Fall Festival at Ellsworth Park. The festival, which runs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, also includes canoe and kayak rides, along with conservation, education, and recreation booths.

Other “It’s Our River Day” events include clean-ups on the Kankakee and the Mackinaw, and at various sites on the Illinois River. Details and web links for these events and others are available on the
Lieutenant Governor’s website.

So if you’ve got the time, Saturday promises to be a great day on the water.

Speaking of Monarchs

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If you’re wondering whether you’ve been seeing a lot of monarch butterflies in the past couple of weeks, you probably have. Spurred on by cooler, shorter days, monarchs from southern Canada and the northern U.S. have already begun their southward fall migration. At our latitude, peak abundance for monarchs typically occurs between about September 10th and September 23rd, although variations in weather patterns and other factors shift the timing of this event from one year to the next.

If you are a native to Illinois, where the monarch is the state insect, you are probably familiar with some of the characteristics that make it one of the world’s favorite insects.

Chief among these is the fact that North American monarchs migrate, like no other butterflies in the world. Each year, the summer’s last generation of monarchs born east of the Rockies flies south to the mountains of central Mexico, a journey of more than fifteen hundred miles for some. Under normal conditions, migration advances at roughly fifty miles a day, although tagged individuals have been reported to cover close to eighty miles. Monarchs feed on nectar as they move south, and actually gain weight over the course of the journey.

At their overwintering sites, which were only discovered in 1975, monarchs congregate by the millions on Oyamel fir trees, resting quietly from mid November to mid April. As spring advances, the overwintering monarchs begin to mate, and they move north into the Gulf Coast states to lay eggs. The resulting young will become the year’s first generation of new adults. Members of this new generation will then continue the journey north, laying eggs as they go.

How the south-migrating monarchs of the fall locate the same clusters of trees their great great great grandparents left in the spring remains a mystery for scientists.

Monarchs are also memorable for the fact that as caterpillars they feed exclusively on plants of the milkweed family, which contain toxic compounds that make them unpalatable to birds and other would-be predators. Thus the showy bands of white, yellow, and black on the caterpillars and the vivid orange and black of the adult’s wings, are a warning to other animals: “Don’t eat me; you’ll get sick.”

This is not to say that monarchs have it easy. Monarch caterpillars are preyed upon heavily by ladybugs, as well as various other insects and arachnids, despite the toxic milkweed compounds that protect them from birds.

Monarchs are also quite frequently killed by cars. In fact, the first study to document systematically the magnitude of roadway mortality of butterflies and moths anywhere in the United States was conducted by a group including May Berenbaum of the U of I Department of Entomology. Extrapolating from counts of dead monarchs along roads near Champaign-Urbana, they estimated that, statewide, more than five hundred thousand monarchs became roadkill over one week during the course of their study.

Of course, the long-term well being of monarchs as a species depends on habitat. They are especially vulnerable at their overwintering sites, where logging and other disturbances can affect large portions of the population at once. But habitat alteration is also a factor here in the north, where suburban development and the expansion of agriculture leave less and less room for the plants that monarchs depend on.

Environmental Benefits of Mass Transit

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Unless you’re new to town you probably know that the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District—the MTD—has stepped into a hornet’s nest as it has moved to annex newer housing developments in southwest Champaign this year. I don’t mean to take on the legal or political ins and outs of annexation, and I don’t mean to speak for how the MTD operates. But I would like to recall to your attention the environmental benefits of mass transit, benefits that are enjoyed by everyone in the community served, riders and non-riders alike.

When some people take the bus rather than drive in individual cars, we all benefit from cleaner air. You may hear people complain about the exhaust that buses produce. But from the perspective of the community as a whole, the real issue is the per-mile difference in emissions between bus travel and car travel. A bus does produce more exhaust than a car, but it also transports more people. In net terms, bus travel reduces air pollution.

When some people take the bus rather than drive in individual cars, we all benefit from a reduced demand for parking. Of course there’s money to be saved for every parking space that employers don’t have to build or maintain, but there are also important environmental benefits to not building parking, too. By not building parking, we reduce the rate at which land surrounding the urban area is gobbled up, and we refrain from putting additional stress on local waterways with more storm runoff.

When some people take the bus rather than drive in individual cars, we all benefit from reduced congestion on city and campus streets. According to Census figures from the year 2000, the average travel time to work for residents of Champaign-Urbana was 14.6 minutes. That relatively short commute is one of the factors that makes our community such a pleasant place to live, and mass transit helps to make it possible.

Local planners project that over the next two decades traffic congestion will increase to twelve times current levels, given current patterns of new development, which heavily favor travel by car. In other words, unless mass transit plays a larger role in the way our community grows, drivers in Champaign-Urbana will spend more and more time sitting in their cars in the years to come, using more gas, creating more exhaust . . . you know this picture.

Beyond the inconvenience increased traffic congestion means for drivers, it also creates an environment that is hostile to other means of transportation. As streets become more crowded with cars, they become more dangerous for people who walk or bike, in effect creating pressure for them to drive, too.

Clearly, not everyone in our community is going to use bus service to get from place to place. But that does not make the benefits of bus service to the community any less real.

Fall 2005 Allerton Deer Reduction

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I’m a big fan of the natural areas at Allerton Park near Monticello, and I delight in the sight of white-tailed deer there. Like many other people, however, my pleasure in seeing deer at Allerton has diminished over the years, as I have also seen the damage they can cause to natural areas when their numbers explode. That’s why I was happy to learn that the University of Illinois will continue its efforts to trim the deer population there using hunters this fall.

Because this effort has met with mixed reactions, I think it’s worth revisiting why the University’s plan makes sense from an environmental perspective.

Without cutbacks in the deer population, the ecosystems that University of Illinois environmental scientists are working to preserve and restore at Allerton would suffer drastic decreases in biodiversity.

In numbers such as are present now, deer put extraordinary pressure on native plant life. They eat spring wildflowers before they can grow to maturity and reproduce, and they eat emerging tree saplings, preventing natural regeneration of the forest. Deer are especially hard on oaks, which are a key source of food and habitat for a wide variety of songbirds, insects, and mammals.

Under prior conditions there were a variety of pressures on deer populations. Native Americans and early European settlers hunted deer year round to supply food for villages and towns. Wolves also once had an impact on deer numbers, although they are long gone from central Illinois. The amount of food available may also eventually have limited deer numbers in the past, but the food supply for deer at Allerton now is usually super-abundant. If deer don’t find what they want in the park’s natural areas or ornamental plantings, they need only move into the adjacent agricultural fields to find corn, soybeans, and alfalfa.

In severe winters, however, the deer must turn to heavy use of native trees and shrubs.

A well-planned effort using hunters is a cost-effective way of reducing deer numbers for the long-term health of the Allerton ecosystem. At the same time it also provides participants an important form of recreation and puts the venison to good use.

A key point in the University’s approach is to mandate that a doe be harvested first before an antlered deer is taken. This ensures that the reproductive potential of the deer herd is reduced as much as possible. Another key element that the U of I has built into its approach is the use of sharpshooters to take deer for further study of the condition of the herd.

Nonhunters who normally use the natural areas at Allerton for recreation will be inconvenienced for a short while by this hunt. But in the long-run we’ll all be glad of the results.

Summer Is Not Ending

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With almost half of August before us we’ve still got a lot of summer left. But school starts next week, and as my family shifts gears in anticipation of that, there’s time to observe the home environment, so often overlooked amid summer activities that take us elsewhere. The season may not be ending, but it’s beginning to show its age.

At the back of our yard, between the fence and the alley, the progress of the prairie plants we put in this year is mixed. Some, like the rattlesnake master and the prairie blazing star, have devoted their energy to establishing strong roots, developing only enough foliage above ground to forward that purpose. Others, especially the black-eyed susans, flower and spread out, as though they’ve been here forever. Waist high seed stalks have shot up from the clumps of little bluestem, seemingly overnight. And the wisps of prairie dropseed that looked so fragile in May are now sturdy fountains of grass.

The volunteer native plants are also maturing. Pokeberries, so prized by birds that I always let a few grow up, have begun to ripen, and the robins, too heavy for the stems, pluck at the fruit as they ride them down. The giant yellow coneflowers, a river bottom species whose seeds we must have picked up inadvertently a couple of years ago, tower over an untended corner of the yard, some seven feet tall, with flowers just beginning to open.

The season’s age also shows in the behavior of the birds. Sure, the robins still muster a chorus at dawn, but there’s none of June’s gusto in it. And other yardbirds, cardinals and wrens still sing on occasion, but having started back when there was snow on the ground, I think they’re tired. Even the prolific mourning doves, which reared two successive clutches in our hanging flower basket before moving operations to the branch of a hemlock for number three, seem to have had enough. Hummingbirds have begun to buzz the more promising flowers, reminding us to put up the nectar feeder, which slows them down enough for us to watch them.

But this part of summer really belongs to insects. Crickets sing steadily through the night, loud enough to be heard even with the windows closed. Monarchs and other butterflies animate the scene when no breeze is blowing in the heat of the day. Bees and wasps, and flies that look like bees and wasps gather on the prairie flowers, too numerous and varied for us to identify them. And the seldom seen dog day cicadas whirr and whirr and whirr through the day and late into the evening.

At twilight we watch the bats come out to ride their erratic feeding circuits. My wife especially enjoys seeing them for the wildness they represent, even here in town.

Summer may not be ending, but it’s beginning to show its age.

Ethanol and the Environment

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It would be difficult to live here in the heart of corn country and not like the idea of ethanol, the corn-based fuel that can substitute for gas in our cars. But as citizens who foot the bill for energy policy and who value a healthy environment for ourselves and our children, we have an obligation to look more closely at what we’re buying when it comes to energy alternatives. As it is currently produced, ethanol delivers far less than the hype surrounding it promises.

Marketers of ethanol term it a “renewable” resource, trading on the idea that it is simply energy captured from the sun made available for use as fuel by distilling grain into alcohol. What most people don’t realize, though, is that large quantities of fossil energy are used to grow corn, and still more is required to power the distilling process. Indeed, whether the system as a whole produces more energy than it consumes is still open to debate. In any case, even under the rosiest scenario, only a fraction of the energy available in a given quantity of ethanol can realistically be labeled “renewable.” The rest is, in effect, repackaged fossil fuel.

Ethanol has also been touted as environmentally friendly, because as an additive to gas it alters the composition of engine exhaust, reducing emissions of certain pollutants. What ethanol does not do is significantly reduce nitrogen oxides, the most important smog-causing tailpipe emission from a late-model car. The best way to reduce smog-producing tailpipe emissions is to reduce the amount of fuel cars burn in the first place.

Beyond that, if we’re going to gauge ethanol’s environmental friendliness, we really need to look past what’s coming out of our tailpipes. The true environmental costs of adopting ethanol as a fuel are in fact much broader. They include the environmental impacts of growing corn, such as habitat alteration, soil erosion, and pollution from pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, as well as the environmental impacts of the distilling process. Ethanol plants have been very slow to adopt air pollution controls, and they use enormous quantities of water, itself a finite resource.

When we’re asked to buy the idea that ethanol represents a homegrown alternative to gas, we are also asked to buy the implication that using it can help free us from the geopolitical entanglements associated with our dependence on oil. But ethanol replaces only about two percent of the gasoline we currently use, and even greatly expanded production will not reduce our demand for oil significantly.

As in the case of air pollution, if we’re serious about reducing our dependence on oil, we can make greater strides toward that goal by adopting higher standards for fuel efficiency.

A special thanks to Walt Robinson from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences for Assistance with today’s program.

U of I's Wildlife Medical Clinic

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Most of the time, what wild animals need from people is to be left alone. But when an animal is injured by a run-in with a car or a window, or it shows up obviously ill where people can’t get around it, some sort of human intervention is warranted. That’s part of the philosophy behind the Wildlife Medical Clinic located in the University of Illinois’ Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital off of South Lincoln Avenue in Urbana.

The purpose of the clinic is to treat sick, injured, or orphaned animals so that they may be returned to the wild. At the same time, the clinic provides veterinary students and faculty with excellent opportunities to develop their medical skills. The wildlife clinic also seeks to educate the public about Illinois wildlife and veterinary medicine.

When it was established in 1978, the Wildlife Medical Clinic was staffed by just a handful of volunteers, and was able to admit only a limited number of cases. Since that time it has grown steadily, and it now attracts around a hundred volunteers every semester, and admits nearly two thousand cases in a year.

The range of patients admitted to the clinic includes animals as large and formidable as white-tailed deer and coyotes, and as small and delicate as ruby throated hummingbirds. In between, there are hawks, owls, foxes, possums, robins, raccoons, squirrels, and snapping turtles—just about all of the animals common to our region.

Rabbits constitute nearly twenty five percent of all cases at the clinic, the largest proportion of any one kind of animal, although that figure is skewed by the fact that people often bring in entire litters of baby rabbits, mistakenly thinking they have been abandoned. For the record, it is normal for mother rabbits to leave their young untended except to nurse them at dawn and dusk.

After an animal has been admitted to the clinic and provided with initial treatment, it is assigned to a team of eight to ten volunteers—generally veterinary students—who are then responsible for all of the care the animal requires. The clinic has access to the full range services offered in the veterinary teaching hospital, such as x-rays and blood tests, as well as help from specialists in areas such as ophthalmology and neurology.

Although the Wildlife Medical Clinic is staffed by volunteers and operates with space and equipment provided by the College of Veterinary Medicine, it does depend on public support for all supplies, feed, and new equipment.

One week from today, Thursday, August 11th, the U of I’s College of Veterinary Medicine will host a free, public talk to raise awareness about the Wildlife Medical Clinic and other programs sponsored by the College that promote the health of wildlife and human communities globally. Joan Embery, formerly the conservation ambassador for the San Diego Zoo, will talk about highlights of her career and share her insights about how to ensure a healthy planet for both humans and animals.

Urbana's Ecological Construction Laboratory

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When most of us think about saving energy in our homes, we think about turning down the thermostat a few degrees in the winter, and maybe adding some insulation or better sealing windows and doors against drafts. Such measures really can help to cut power bills and keep indoor air temperatures comfortable. But they allow for only incremental reductions in the amount of energy a typical house requires.

To reduce energy use in homes and other buildings more dramatically, we really need to start at the planning stage. If we do that, says German-born Urbana architect Katrin Klingenberg, it’s possible to construct a single-family home that uses ninety percent less energy than that used by a house built to conventional standards. It is Klingenberg’s goal to see housing that meets this higher standard become the norm in the American Midwest.

In spring of 2002, Klingenberg and her husband Nicolas Smith located in Urbana intending to build such an energy-efficient home together. When Smith’s life was tragically cut short, Klingenberg decided to follow through on the dream they had shared, and build the house that Smith had designed. She also established the Ecological Construction Laboratory, or E-colab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing, implementing, and fostering the widespread adoption of highly energy-efficient and sustainable construction techniques.

The remarkable energy-efficiency of the house that Klingenberg built and now lives in is achieved by use of a design and construction techniques based on two simple objectives: minimizing thermal losses, and maximizing thermal gains.

Thermal losses are minimized by sealing the home completely against air leaks, and super-insulating the walls, floor, and ceilings, so that they prevent the transfer of heat up to three times as well as typical new construction.

Thermal gains are maximized by grabbing all of the free natural heating and cooling available. The house’s southern exposure is made up almost entirely of triple-pane windows, so that in winter, when the sun tracks low in the sky, the floor is warmed during the day and then slowly releases heat overnight. Klingenberg’s house also uses a highly efficient air exchanger for ventilation, which provides a constant flow of air from the outside with minimal loss of heating or cooling. Air coming into the exchanger is also conditioned by passing through an “earth tube,” a hundred-foot-long loop of plastic pipe buried six feet below the ground, where the temperature is a constant fifty-five degrees. Klingenberg’s house has no furnace; at the coldest times of year a heating element similar to the one in your hairdryer provides all the supplemental warming that’s needed.

Are you curious about the extra investment required to build a house that’s so energy-efficient it doesn’t need a furnace? Klingenberg estimates that her house cost roughly ten percent above the price of conventional construction, an amount that can be recovered in five years or so of energy savings. Once that initial investment is recouped, all of that money not spent on energy is money in the bank.

The idea behind Ecolab’s current project, a four-bedroom house to be built this year with financial assistance from the City of Urbana, is to extend the benefits of living in a super-energy-efficient home to a low-income family, and to demonstrate that such construction is viable right now, not in some distant future.

An Appreciation for Local Rivers

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For me, summer means time spent on local rivers, fishing whenever that’s possible. But I’m told fishing stories interest only other anglers, so let me tell about some of the other things I’ve come across on the river this year.

On a recent Sunday morning, ten miles upstream from Kickapoo State Park near Danville, a friend and I slip through a patch of forest undergrowth on our way to the Middle Fork River. My friend nearly steps on a wild turkey that’s hunkered down in the brush. Cover blown, the bird explodes into flight, like . . . well, like nothing else I know. Twenty pounds worth of swirling, booming black, on the wing and moving away so fast it’s out of sight before we’ve regained our composure.

Later that morning I’m in the river up to my chest, quietly positioning myself to fish a long, deep pool. Hearing some commotion in the fast water upstream, I turn that way. My brain won’t make sense of the image my eyes submit. A dark brown creature drifts toward me with the current. Curls of a fat, tubular body break the surface of the muddy water in five different places across the stream. There are no anacondas, no alligators in Illinois, but. The image resolves. Not reptile, but mammal, not one creature, but three. River otters, so engaged in games with each other that they are carried to within ten feet of me before they realize I’m not a stump. Heads up high now, they snort with displeasure, and make for the bank. There, they take cover in the tangled roots of a downed tree, peeking out at me in turns to assess the threat I pose, before they move on out of sight in the streamside vegetation.

Family outings involve less fishing, but ample opportunity to enjoy the other pleasures the river has to offer.

Canoeing with my wife and children, we glide past a towering sandy bluff, home to a colony of bank swallows. These birds nest in small burrows they excavate in the vertical face above the stream. There is so much coming and going from the line of little caves that it’s impossible to focus the eye on one spot.

In the shallows a great blue heron squawks as we approach and takes off downstream to avoid us. It seems as though we come upon the same bird time after time for the next five miles, but surely he has circled back behind us at some point, and it’s really his downstream neighbors we disturb.

The gravel bars where we stop to rest or picnic offer delights for everyone. The shells of mussels with names as interesting as their appearance: purple wartybacks, fat muckets, heelsplitters, pistolgrips. There are crayfish and tadpoles, too, fast enough to present a challenge, but not so fast that children can’t catch them.

At this time of year, when travel may take us to places where natural beauty is super-abundant, it’s important to remember that the river corridors of east central Illinois boast high quality natural areas worth exploring and protecting.

Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnakes at Allerton Park

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When you think about the treasures of the U of I’s Robert Allerton Park near Monticello, you probably don’t think of endangered rattlesnakes. But scientists have recently confirmed that the eastern massasauga, a small, shy rattlesnake native to our region still inhabits parts of Allerton Park south of the Sangamon river.

Now, if the word “rattlesnake” brings to mind the monstrous creatures of old westerns, which lay in wait for unsuspecting cowboys, you’ll be gratified to know that the massasauga is a much smaller and more timid creature.

With adults averaging less than two feet long, the massasauga is one of the smallest rattlesnakes in North America. It is often confused with other common, non-venomous snakes but its tail is tipped with a rattle, which it will rattle as a warning when cornered. Other snakes mimic this action by shaking their tails but they do not have rattles.

Massasaugas use a variety of habitats, from old fields and savannas to floodplain forest, marshland and bogs. They are active from April through October, feeding on small rodents and sunning themselves during the day. In winter massasaugas hibernate, either in burrows created by other animals, especially crayfish, or under rock piles.

At the time of European settlement massasaugas were apparently abundant in the northern two-thirds of Illinois, with a range that extended from New York in the east to Ontario in the north and west into Iowa.

Habitat alteration, drainage of wetlands and intentional killing of snakes resulted in a swift decline for massasaugas in Illinois during the 1800s. Writing in 1893, one observer noted, “On the prairies of Illinois, before the country became thickly populated, these reptiles were extremely abundant, and the killing of two or three dozen in a season was not an unusual thing for a farmer’s boy. Now, in that same region, not one is seen in years.”

In 1994, massasaugas were listed as a state endangered species in Illinois, and are currently believed to hang on in only three or four small populations, including the one at Allerton Park.

There have been records of massasaugas at Allerton since the 1930s. Legend has it that rattlesnakes found north of the river, in the vicinity of the house and formal gardens, were moved to the restored prairie on the south side.

Recent searches for massasaugas organized by Eric Smith, a regional Heritage Biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, came up empty until Mosheh Wolf found a baby massasauga in 2000. In 2002, researchers from the U of I and the Department of Natural Resources captured an adult male, nicknamed Al, who was large enough to be implanted with a radio transmitter. In the ensuing years, Al has led researchers to two female snakes, which together have given birth to more than twenty young over this period. Tracking Al has also made it possible for Allerton managers to time their prairie burns so as not to put him and other massasaugas at risk.

Speaking of risk, I would emphasize that although Al is venomous, the risk he poses for people who enjoy Allerton’s natural areas is miniscule. Massasaugas prefer to avoid people, and have proven to be very good at doing so.

A special thanks to Chris Phillips, of the Center for Biodiversity at the Illinois Natural History Survey, and Fran Harty of the Nature Conservancy, for their help with today’s story.

Trees, Green Space, and Human Well-being

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If you think of trees and green space as amenities—things people like, but which they can live well without—researchers with the Human-Environment Research Lab at the University of Illinois would like you to think again. A group that includes both psychologists and environmental planners, they’ve been studying how people’s well-being is affected by the presence or absence of nature in their immediate surroundings for more than a decade.

In their most recent study, conducted on a nationwide scale, psychologists Andrea Taylor and Frances Kuo have found that children with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, or ADHD, experienced a significant reduction in symptoms after they participated in activities in green settings. Whatever the activity—whether it was playing basketball or reading a book—the degree of relief from ADHD symptoms was tied to the greenness of the setting in which it took place, with relatively green settings like tree-lined streets, backyards and parks trumping the indoors or outdoor places that lacked greenery.

The potential use of activity in green places as a treatment for symptoms of ADHD should come as welcome news for those concerned with the some 2 million school-aged children in the U.S. who live with this neurological disorder. Whether a “dose of green” is used in conjunction with or in place of other therapies, it costs nothing and it comes without the side effects of the drugs most commonly used to treat ADHD.

Taylor and Kuo’s findings about the benefits of trees and greenery for the alleviation of ADHD symptoms serve as an extension of previous research by the Human-Environment Research Lab on the role of green spaces in human well-being.

Working primarily in Chicago’s public housing neighborhoods, Lab researchers have compared life in housing units that are identical except for the amount of trees and greenspace around them. There they have found that, all else being equal, trees and greenspace make life better in some very important and measurable ways.

In another study that focused on the connection between greenery and attention, for example, researchers found that inner-city girls who had green views from their windows at home possessed a greater degree of self-discipline than girls who did not. On average, according to the study, the greener a girl’s view from home the better she concentrates, the less she acts impulsively and the longer she can delay gratification. These capacities equip girls to behave in ways that foster success both in school and later life.

Interestingly, this study found that the benefits of a green view from home did not extend to boys, perhaps, the authors speculated, because boys tend to play farther from home than girls.

Other studies conducted by the Human-Environment Research Lab suggest that residents of housing with trees and green space immediately outside experience a host of further benefits: a greater sense of community, a reduced risk of street crime, lower levels of violence and aggression between domestic partners, and a better capacity to cope with life’s demands, especially the stresses of living in poverty.

There is a cumulative message in all of this. As a society, we need to recognize that trees and greenspace are not luxuries, but necessary components of healthy human habitat.

Soy FACE: Technology for Understanding the Impact of Climate Change on Food Supply

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For people who live far from rising seas or melting glaciers, it can be difficult to maintain a sense of the consequences as the world’s climate changes in response to human activity. But for a team of U of I researchers interested in global food supply headed by crop scientist Stephen Long, the stakes are much clearer.

At issue for Long and colleagues is how changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere and the associated rise in average temperatures will affect the planet’s potential for producing food crops in the next fifty to eighty years. These changes, which are in motion now and would occur even if stringent restrictions on emissions were adopted tomorrow, include a fifty percent rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the surface layer of the earth’s atmosphere, a twenty percent increase in surface layer ozone, and a three to four-degree F rise in temperature.

Previous research has suggested that, overall, global food supply will remain nearly constant, despite significant changes in productivity for particular regions. The rise in temperature will depress the global productivity of the major food crops, but this is predicted to be cancelled by the fertilizer effect of rising carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is used by plants with sunlight energy to make carbohydrates and ultimately our food.

According to Long and his colleagues, however, these projections are unrealistically optimistic. They overestimate the benefit to crops of higher carbon dioxide levels, and they have ignored the negative impact of higher ozone levels. The studies these projections are based on are also questionable because they have been conducted in greenhouses, which are well known to be poor indicators of plant responses in the open air.

To make more accurate projections about future food supplies, Long and his colleagues have developed a system for elevating carbon dioxide and ozone to levels anticipated for the year 2050 in the field called Free-Air Concentration Enrichment. This system consists of seventy-foot rings of pipe that pump out different amounts of carbon dioxide or ozone to adjust the atmosphere for the crop growing within them. A computerized control and monitoring set-up allows the system to achieve the desired concentrations of gases remarkably well over the course of the growing season.

Long and his colleagues at the University of Illinois have examined soybeans and corn. Although theirs is the first to examine the effects of ozone, experiments elsewhere have looked at the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on other crops. One in Arizona examined wheat and sorghum, and another in Japan examined rice.

Collectively, these experiments have shown benefits from higher levels of carbon dioxide that are around fifty percent lower than greenhouse studies have projected. That’s like expecting an eight percent return on an investment and realizing only four percent. At the same time, the Illinois study of soybeans has shown a twenty percent yield loss in response to a twenty percent increase in surface level ozone, about what we can expect by the year 2050.

From of a crop science perspective, the shortfalls predicted by these experiments represent a call to action, a challenge to be met by breeding plants suited to the atmosphere of the future, or figuring out ways to bring more land into agriculture. From a broader perspective, they are another reminder that the climate change humans are now producing will pose complex problems for generations to come.

Busey Woods Bio Blitz

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One of the characteristics that defines human beings is our curiosity about other forms of life. Witness the number of birders among us, the way children turn over rocks and roll logs to see what’s under them, the pleasure people take in observing stream life looking down from a bridge.

Such curiosity is the foundation for the Busey Woods Bio Blitz, an event organized by the Urbana Park District in cooperation with more than eighty scientists from the University of Illinois, the Illinois Natural History Survey, and various other institutions. The Bio Blitz will take place over the twenty-four hour period beginning tomorrow, Friday, June 24th, at noon, and ending at noon on Saturday.

The primary purpose of the Bio Blitz is to create a one-day profile of life in Busey Woods, a snapshot that captures everything from the eighty-foot tall Bur Oaks that tower overhead, to the microscopic bacteria at work in the soil below, and all that sprouts, crawls, scampers or flits in between. At the same time, the Bio Blitz is also intended to help people connect with the natural world by providing opportunities to see, hear, touch and smell, and to showcase the treasure that Busey Woods represents.

On the chance you’re not familiar with it, Busey Woods is a fifty-nine-acre natural area just north of Crystal Lake Park in Urbana and adjacent to the Anita Purves Nature Center, which will serve as the base of operations for the Bio Blitz. It’s a remnant of what was called the Big Grove, ten square miles of forest that stood in a sea of tallgrass prairie before the settlement of Champaign County by European Americans.

Busey Woods was saved from development as an industrial park in the 1960s, but it has been impacted by other activity. Some areas of the woods were filled with demolition rubble in anticipation of development, and the Saline Branch, the stream that once meandered through the woods, was diverted into a deepened, uniform channel quite different in character from its original course.

Despite these alterations, Busey Woods is home to a much wider range of life than you might expect. For example, the Bio Blitz team that will be tallying birds anticipates finding some thirty to forty different species, including those common to yards, as well as some that depend on a more forested habitat, such as the great-crested flycatcher or the eastern wood pewee. The team scouring the Saline Branch for fish also expects to count thirty species or more, everything from gamefish, such as smallmouth bass, to carp, channel catfish, suckers, darters, and minnows.

There’s really no contest, though, when it comes to which team will count the most species. That prize will go to the group concerned with invertebrates—insects, worms, protozoa, bacteria—all of the tiny creatures that make life as we know it possible, but which we usually overlook on account of their small size.

For these groups, as well as the groups surveying plants, fungi, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, one of the things that makes the Bio Blitz exciting is the potential for finding something unexpected--a thrush that would normally be in Canada at this time of year, a minnow thought to be gone from the region, or even a new species of some microscopic organism in the soil.

Whatever the Busey Woods Bio Blitz turns up, it affords a fantastic opportunity for people in east central Illinois to get to know the nature of our area.

Again, the Bio Blitz will be based at the Urbana Park District’s Anita Purves Nature Center, and it begins at noon tomorrow and runs through noon on Saturday. For more details please call the Urbana Park District, or visit their website.