Farmer Bob Conro looks forward to the return of  the Swainson's hawks, when once again he can watch them swooping down behind his hay baler to pounce on stirred-up rodents. If all goes well, these hawks will be back from their winter grounds in Argentina by mid-March, building nests near the tiny village of Hampshire in western Kane County. But both the hawks and Conro face an uncertain future.

	Photo by Bill Horn

The hawks are the centerpiece of a debate over the future of this rural landscape of dairy farms and horse pastures. The conflict is emblematic of land-use planning negotiations throughout northeastern Illinois, as municipal officials try to decide how to balance residents' wishes to protect their small towns and countryside with business plans for new subdivisions.

The decisions will have immediate impact on the state-endangered Swainson's hawk (Buteo swainsoni) — one of Illinois' most threatened creatures. The gnarly, picturesque bur oaks and rolling morainal hills that characterize the area around Hampshire hold the nests of the only known breeding pairs east of the Mississippi.

Once so ubiquitous throughout North America's tallgrass prairie regions that up until the 1930s some people considered it a nuisance, the Swainson's hawk has been on the decline nationally. Audubon lists the hawk as one of only five birds of prey on its national WatchList, attributing falling populations in large part to habitat loss. Development and "fenceline-to-fenceline" farming practices are major culprits, because they eliminate the oak groves the birds need. Endangered in Illinois, the hawk is somewhat more numerous west of the Mississippi, where its principal food is ground squirrels. When not breeding, the hawks depart from the typical raptor diet of meat and eat mostly insects: grasshoppers, dragonflies, moths, and beetles.

Bob Conro's farm features the bur oak groves in which the hawks build their nests. Photo by Jack Shouba.

Birders describe the hawk as elegant, with long, pointed wings underlined in white and black, and the ability to soar gracefully to nearly invisible heights. After gorging on late summer grasshoppers, the bird heads south for the winter in flocks — as large as ten thousand individuals — by taking advantage of thermals and air currents. Many migrate more than 6,000 miles, making the Swainson's hawk our longest migrating raptor after the peregrine falcon.

Biologists have counted as many as five pairs of the hawks nesting near Hampshire. They have basic questions ranging from the size and characteristics of their foraging area, to how many young are produced long-term, to why the Illinois hawk population has seemed to be so stable over the past 30 years. Even if land is set aside for the hawk somewhere else, scientists are not sure just how much is needed to offset loss of habitat to new subdivisions, or whether the hawks would even relocate.

"The problem is fragmentation," says birder and author David Johnson. "You mitigate here, you mitigate there, and pretty soon there's not enough open space for the hawk to hunt."

Although birders have been monitoring the hawk for years, birder and biologist Bob Montgomery would like to see a more formalized network of study by scientists and volunteers. "We know that they've been hanging on in this location since at least the early 1970s," he said. "We know that there were five pairs when they were first discovered, but it's still only five pairs today."

	The hawks' survival may be tied to the rare Franklin's ground squirrel. Photo by Joe Nowak.

If this incredible raptor is to survive, so must the rare Franklin's ground squirrel, says biologist Bill M. Strausberger, a researcher at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Strausberger wrote a letter to Hampshire officials in December expressing his concern about what he claims may be the state's largest ground squirrel population. "The hawks' reproductive rate is directly proportionate to the abundance of ground squirrels," he said, citing his yet unreleased study of the Hampshire region. The study asserts that the squirrels serve as one of the Hampshire hawks' primary food sources during breeding.

Strausberger's concern is a personal one; he grew up on a farm in the nearby hamlet of Plato Center, spending summers in fields watching the hawks and squirrels. If the squirrels, which spend half the year underground and can be difficult to find and verify, are indeed plentiful near Hampshire, disturbance of their elaborate burrow networks could seriously disrupt the population — and potentially that of the Swainson's hawk.

Until recently, the hawks had gone virtually unnoticed by most residents. But as developers began approaching Hampshire officials with ideas for new subdivisions, the presence of the birds caught the imagination of dozens of local citizens — homemakers and farmers, horse breeders and conservationists — who have become unlikely activists. A newly organized local group, Citizens After Responsible Expansion (CARE), is trying to persuade village leaders to adopt policies that will allow some development yet still protect the rural character of the town and maintain homes for the hawk.

"We realize that we're not going to keep development out of our area completely — that's not our goal. But if we are going to grow, we want to do it responsibly and want to do as little damage as possible," said Frances St. George, a member of CARE. The group gathers on Sunday nights at a local church to plan strategy, design T-shirts, and write letters, flyers, and press releases.

Many who live in Hampshire feel deeply rooted to the land. One CARE member, Phyllis Treadwell, traces her ancestry to a time before the village's origins. Her great-great-grandmother was part Native American, a Shabbona of the region, and her great-great-grandfather homesteaded the first farm in Hampshire Township. Treadwell today lives in a home built by her great-uncle Horatio around 1885. "As you can see, I get real stressed out when we talk about development out here," she said. "People think they own land, but we're just caretakers of it. Right now, though, we're not doing a very good job."

"Our main thing is to let people know how much of the wonderful countryside we have, and these wonderful trees," said Barbara Burton, a member of CARE who has lived on 16 acres with her husband and horses for the last 20 years. "It makes us all environmentalists to think that we're going to lose our farmland, and we're just tickled pink that people are interested in what's going on out here."

Indeed, publicity generated by the group drew about 100 anxious people to a hearing in a school gymnasium just days before Christmas. For more than four hours, people sat on folding chairs awaiting their chance to testify against a new comprehensive plan for the village. Residents charge that the proposed plan seems to endorse several new subdivisions that would quickly swell Hampshire's population from 3,000 to at least 15,000 people and bring traffic, pollution, and lights at night, spoiling views of the stars. (They point out that in 20 years, Hampshire's population is expected to grow to 50,000 under the currently proposed plan.) Residents further complain that they were left out of the planning process, while just a few well-connected business owners were courted.

"Sure, I understand why people feel that way," said Jack Gray, chairman of the village planning commission. But, he said, the public hearings on the proposed comprehensive plan are designed to seek input from residents. It's not clear, however, what the commission will do with the outpouring of opposition voiced by essentially all who spoke.

"This is not an easy time," Gray acknowledged. "A lot of these people who are complaining are my neighbors and friends." The plan commission is expected to make a recommendation in early spring to the village board on whether to approve the new comprehensive plan.

The debate in Hampshire and other towns, say regional land planners, is due to the lack of a cohesive regional land-use strategy that balances the divergent interests of conservationists, residents, and developers. In Illinois, development and land-use decisions are made piecemeal, one municipality at a time, in a politically charged process.

"There is no regional development plan or state development plan" that regulates growth and development, said Charlie Wheelan, director of policy and communications for Chicago Metropolis 2020, an organization of civic and business groups that advocates responsible growth. "We need some sort of regional council or some mechanism so that municipalities cooperate in a binding way."

Kane County's own 2020 land resource management plan recommends preserving agricultural areas and concentrating growth around existing urban centers, but towns have no obligation to follow it. Rural residents were recently buoyed to hear, however, that the county itself has begun buying development rights to farms in an effort to protect them from sprawl.

The Swainson's hawks' breeding territory, circled above, falls squarely in a band of predicted sprawl.

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"The prevailing sentiment in western Kane County is to resist sprawl and follow the current 2020 plan, and we're hoping to avoid congestion and the waste of some of the best agriculture land in the world," said Richard Young, a respected land planner who is a consultant to the Forest Preserve District of Kane County.

"The question is, will that be enough?" said Phil Bus, executive director of development for Kane County, where the population is projected to grow from its existing 450,000 residents to 700,000 by the year 2030. "In the meantime," he said, "you have something here that's kind of neat — Franklin's ground squirrel and Swainson's hawk." Like many others, Bus wonders what will happen to these rare animals and the farms that sustain them if development is rapid and unchecked.

Farmer Conro loves the Hampshire hawks almost as much as he loves the dairy farm that his family has tended for a century. Like other members of CARE, he worries that new development could drive the hawks from the oak trees that line his dairy pastures, and crowd his tractors from the roads.

With their efforts, Hampshire's concerned citizens have joined an emerging network of people whose varied interests converge on basic questions about quality of life. Their challenge will be to use these community resources to connect development with tradition, economics with nature.

"We're doing what we think is important," says Conro, "and we'll hold out as long as we can."