Thursday, March 29, 2007

The U of I’s Wildlife Medical Clinic & Vet Med Open House

Note: I am still researching and writing EA each week, but other people will be voicing the spots until April 17, 2007. I'm running for a seat on the Champaign Park District board, so my voice can't be on the radio without opening up the same amount of time for other candidates.

Dee Breeding from WILL-AM 580 narrates this week's installment.

--Rob


Listen to the commentary
Real Audio : MP3 download

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 when 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 of 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.

You can learn more about the Wildlife Medical Clinic by attending the U of I Veterinary Medicine Open House this Saturday, March 31st. There you can meet the birds of prey that are the Clinic’s permanent residents, as well as some of the staff and volunteers who care for clinic patients.

Hours for the Vet Med Open House are 9 to 4 on Saturday; click here [http://www.cvm.uiuc.edu/openhouse/] for details.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Return of the American Woodcock: The Other March Madness

Note: I am still researching and writing EA each week, but other people will be voicing the spots until April 17, 2007. I'm running for a seat on the Champaign Park District board, so my voice can't be on the radio without opening up the same amount of time for other candidates.

Dee Breeding from WILL-AM 580 narrates this week's installment.

--Rob


Listen to the commentary
Real Audio : MP3 download

Many people take the arrival of robins as a sign that spring is on the way. For others, a more important indicator is the return to Illinois of a bird called the American woodcock. Indeed, for some birders, the return of woodcocks is March madness.

The woodcock belongs to the shorebird family, whose more familiar members include sandpipers and plovers. But unlike its cousins, the woodcock prefers habitat composed of moist woods, open fields, and brushy swamps. You won’t see a woodcock poking along beaches or mud flats the way other shorebirds do. Indeed, the woodcock is so secretive and so well camouflaged that unless you witness its courtship display, you’re likely to see one only if you come close to stepping on it, and it flushes.

On the ground, the woodcock’s appearance suggests that it was constructed by a birdmaker who didn’t pay strict attention to the shorebird blueprint. It’s a plump bird, about eleven inches long altogether, although its bill accounts for three of those inches. This bill is highly sensitive to help the woodcock detect vibrations made by earthworms underground, and it features a flexible tip that can be opened to grasp worms even while the rest of the bill remains closed.

A woodcock’s eyes bulge out, like black stick-on doll-eyes that are attached in the wrong spot—just a little too high up, and too far back on its head. Odd as it may look, this arrangement allows the woodcock a super wide field of vision—nearly 360 degrees—which is quite a useful adaptation for a bird that spends so much time with its nose to the ground.

Appearances aside, what endears the woodcock to birders is the strange and elaborate courtship ritual that the males perform at dusk and dawn in the spring. Many people have written to depict this behavior, although none so eloquently as Aldo Leopold, whose book, A Sand County Almanac, has inspired and shaped the modern conservation movement.

This is how Leopold describes what he terms the “sky dance”: The bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky. Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy.

The woodcock’s aerial feats are accompanied by equally captivating intervals of strutting and vocalizing on the ground. This may seem like the stuff that television nature shows are made of, but it’s happening right now, in our part of the world.

If you would like to see the sky dance for yourself, you can join members of the Champaign County Audubon Society for a woodcock walk at Meadowbrook Park in Urbana next Wednesday, March 21st. Participants will meet at the Meadowbrook Park parking lot on South Race Street at 7:00 p.m., and likely be out until dark. For details visit the “Field Trip” page at the Champaign County Audubon Society website.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

The Illinois State Geological Survey’s Three-dimensional Mapping Effort

Note: I am still researching and writing EA each week, but other people will be voicing the spots until April 17, 2007. I'm running for a seat on the Park District board in Champaign, so my voice can't be on the radio without opening up the same amount of time for other candidates.

Dee Breeding from WILL-AM 580 narrates this week's installment.

--Rob


Listen to the commentary
Real Audio : MP3 download

Can you describe the landscape of Illinois in a single word? Most people just call it flat. But don’t be fooled by the smooth, relatively featureless surface of our state. We live atop many complex layers of geological material, deposited here over the underlying bedrock as glaciers advanced and retreated in the past million and a half years.

While most of us don’t give it a second thought, the Illinois State Geological Survey, which is based in Champaign on the U of I campus, is working to create three-dimensional maps that depict these subsurface layers in cross-section. [Click to visit ISGS mapping pages.] At the lowest levels the slices on these maps show layers of bedrock. Moving up toward the surface, they display the thickness and location of various layers of sand, gravel, clay and silt.

Now, you may think that three-dimensional maps of what’s underground have little to do with everyday life. But to understand their importance, you need look no further than some of the natural resources that enable us to live as we do.

Take water, for example. About a third of Illinois households, farms, businesses, and industries obtain this necessity from groundwater aquifers, a point that is being driven home for many people as water-guzzling ethanol plants seek to tap into them. We can’t begin to make reasonable calculations about how much water is available from aquifers without an accurate understanding of the geology that defines them.

In addition to providing important information about natural resources, the State Geological Survey’s three-dimensional maps will provide information about potential hazards as well. In southern Illinois, geologic maps can help identify areas where sinkholes and mines would make development dangerous. Along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, geologic maps can help identify areas prone to landslides. And throughout the state, geologic maps can help minimize the impacts of waste disposal by providing information about how well potential landfill sites are suited to contain pollution.

As you might imagine, mapping the subsurface geology of the state at a scale detailed enough to facilitate planning decisions is expensive, and at the current rate of funding we’re looking at another hundred years or more before the job is finished. But making decisions without good geological information can be even more costly. When wetlands mitigation projects are located on sites that don’t hold water, or test wells for water supplies are drilled in the wrong places, we wind up spending more than we would have needed to invest for good information up front.

While the geologic mapping project is a high priority for the Illinois State Geological Survey, it is but one of many current programs there. You’re invited to learn more about everything the Survey does at its annual open house this Friday and Saturday, March 9th and 10th. The open house takes place in the Natural Resources Building on the U of I campus in Champaign. It features information and exhibits that appeal to children of all ages, as well as adults. Click here [http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/isgshome/openhouse/openhouse-2007.htm] for more information about the open house..

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Illinois Big Tree Program at U of I Extension

Note: I am still researching and writing EA each week, but other people will be voicing the spots until April 17, 2007. I'm running for a seat on the Park District board in Champaign, so my voice can't be on the radio without opening up the same amount of time for other candidates.

Dee Breeding from WILL-AM 580 narrates this week's installment.

--Rob


Listen to the commentary
Real Audio : MP3 download

Picture a sycamore tree that’s 119 feet tall, as tall as 13-story building. Now make the trunk of your tall tree wide, 31 feet around at chest height, so you would need five friends with you in order to touch your hands together in a circle around it. Then give your giant sycamore a crown that spreads out to an average width of 134 feet, 15 feet wider than the tree is tall (and more than wide enough to cover the lots many of us live on). As you might have guessed, such a tree does exist. It stands on private property in Christian County, and it is the champion of champions on the Illinois Big Tree Register [pdf link].

The register is one component of the Illinois Big Tree Program, which is based in the U of I’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and coordinated by extension forester, Jay Hayek. The goal of the Big Tree Program is to identify the biggest individual of every species of tree native to Illinois, using a scoring system that takes into account height, girth, and crown spread. At the same time, however, the Big Tree Program is also very much about people—promoting a greater awareness of trees as a natural resource in Illinois, and encouraging people to get out and enjoy them.

To help people get connected with the Big Tree Program, Hayek has established a web site for it. There you can read how big tree measurements are taken, obtain a form to nominate a tree, and view the list of 125 current state champions. Entries on the list include measurements, of course, along with information about where each tree is located, who nominated it, and when it was certified.

The tallest tree on the list reaches a height of 165 feet, which is 46 feet taller than the overall champion. It’s a red oak found in Dixon Springs State Park, near the far southern tip of the state. The champion listed with the thickest trunk is a baldcypress tree that measures 34 feet around, which grows in the Cache River State Natural Area, also in the far south.

Residents of central Illinois may be interested to know that Sangamon County is home to eight champion trees, more than any other county in the state. These include a 98-foot-tall American elm and an 88-foot tall silver maple. The state champion trees closest to Champaign-Urbana are a shingle oak and a yellow buckeye located in Danville. Both of these trees grow on private property, but they can be seen from the street at the addresses listed for them on the Big Tree Register.

If big trees interest you, you might consider joining the network of certified Big Tree inspectors that extension forester Jay Hayek is working to develop throughout Illinois. Volunteer inspectors participate in a one-day workshop where they learn to measure and certify Big Tree Champions using fairly simple equipment and straightforward math. Hayek envisions training enough inspectors to check out reports of potential champions anywhere in the state, and to help make sure champion trees are recertified every 10 years.

Click here to for further details about the Big Tree Program at University of Illinois Extension.