Winter 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 1999.]

The Amateur and the Pro:
Science at the Grass Roots

By Sheryl De Vore

Citizen — a native member of a nation, an inhabitant of city or town.

Scientist — an expert in the study of the systematic knowledge of the world.

From the biologist with a doctoral degree to the 16-year-old girl who is learning to band her first bird, a growing number of us are playing large and small roles in the development of conservation science.

In an unchained sense of the word, all humans are "scientists," gathering facts and performing experiments on the Earth. And in the young, tender world of ecosystem restoration, opportunities abound for new ideas. Indeed, some of yesterday's amateur scientists inspired some of the techniques used today to restore our native ecosystems.

Citizen scientists collect data that professional and volunteer stewards can use to help make good decisions about the managment of conservation lands. Citizen science also offers us a chance to return to our human-ness as we immerse ourselves in prairies, woodlands and wetlands — counting Baltimore checkerspots, red-headed woodpeckers, blue-spotted salamanders, and adder's tongue ferns.

What follows are profiles of six Chicago Wilderness citizen scientists, each exploring, contributing, and having a wild time.

Dennis DeCourcey: Taking Flight — From Mentor to Mentor

In one of his earliest photos, Dennis DeCourcey is wearing diapers and feeding a baby mule. He now directs the Chicagoland Bird Observatory, where he still cares for young animals, but in another way.

Dennis and the volunteers he trains are banding birds and gathering data to help determine how to stop the decline of certain populations of birds. "This is where I can make the most effective contribution to the natural world," says Dennis. "I can also train people who can make contributions later on."

When Dennis was 11 years old, he met his first bird banding teacher, Zella Schultz, who led a bird walk he attended. "She took me under her wing for the next five years," says the Brookfield resident.

In high school, Dennis worked on conservation issues with the local Audubon Society. He also played oboe in the band. After graduation, he joined the US Navy where he played oboe for nearly five years.

But the call of the wild was too strong, and soon Dennis was working as a zookeeper and later as curator of birds at the Brookfield Zoo. In 1990, Dennis, 51, and his wife, Leslie, founded the Chicagoland Bird Observatory.

Bird banding is used worldwide to study the movement, survival, and behavior of birds. Banders capture wild birds, then place uniquely numbered metal or plastic bands on their legs. Banders record where and when each bird is banded, how old it is, its sex, and other information, which then gets sent to a central site. When banded birds are later captured, released alive, and reported from somewhere else, scientists can reconstruct an individual bird's movement. For instance, banding has shown scientists that some species go south by one pathway and return north by another.

Last spring, Dennis worked at Goose Lake Prairie in Grundy County, IL, banding Henslow's sparrows, a declining grassland species. This research will help scientists understand what happens to Henslow's sparrow populations when grasslands are burned.

The Observatory, based in Brookfield, IL, is one of some 300 stations worldwide participating in a program called MAPS, Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship. "With this program, as small as a 2 percent change in population can be recognized," says Dennis.

His youngest volunteer, Nellie Carlson, began banding birds at the Observatory when she was 11 years old. "When you have a little tiny creature in your hand and can find out all this information, it's amazing," says Nellie, now a 16-year-old high school sophomore who wants to study zoology. "Banding birds helps us know about nature and how it's changing."

For more information or to get involved, call (708) 387-9265 or e-mail chibirdobs@earthlink.net.

June Keibler: Caretaker of Plants and People

Inside a blooming eastern prairie fringed orchid June Keibler finds what looks like a tiny, yellow, chicken drumstick. It is a pollinium, the pollen-bearing structure of this frilly flower, which she removes with a toothpick to transfer to another orchid in a process called hand-pollination.

"These orchids need human help," says June, a 54-year-old former physical therapist from Dundee, IL, who cares not only for humans but also for wild plants. Most of the populations of this federally threatened plant are too small to attract the hawk moths that pollinate this species. "Through the federal orchid recovery project, we hope to expand the existing populations as well as create new ones," June says. "To do that, we need a consistent census of where the orchids are and a consistent seed source. And we need volunteers to do the many hours of field work required to make this program work."

Fifteen years ago, in between working and caring for her children, June began volunteering to cut brush and collect seeds at workdays in McHenry and Kane counties.

She then learned about a draft recovery plan for the orchid written by Marlin Bowles of the Morton Arboretum for the US Fish & Wildlife Service. The plan lists projects for scientists and volunteers so that the endangered plant can eventually be "delisted."

"The plan involves protecting sites and expanding the existing populations by restoring habitat," says June who coordinates volunteers on the project. "Like many prairie plants, the orchid needs sunny, open areas. So we are clearing brush and burning."

June works with 60 loyal volunteers, many active for at least five years. Every summer they pollinate the small populations of these plants, and every fall they collect and disperse a portion of the seed to carefully selected possible new sites. They also census populations and this year began the exacting task of collecting demographic information, including plant heights and numbers of blooms per plant.

"This project requires a team approach and every individual is important," says June. "If this works, it has great potential for demonstrating how we can save other endangered species."

Chris Kuehl: Family Values Mushroom

On a recent family trip, Chris and Ken Kuehl and their 13-year-old daughter, Anna, discovered an interesting mushroom they could not identify. The lamp in their hotel room became a makeshift mushroom drying machine.

"Mushrooms are cool. They come in so many shapes and sizes and colors, and they have seasons. There are little tiny ones and great big ones. You can cut them in half and they change colors."

That's Mom talking!

Chris, 42, the volunteer steward at Green Lake Savanna near her house in Homewood, IL, is working with Field Museum botany curator Dr. Greg Mueller to catalogue northern Illinois fungi.

"We photograph them, collect samples, take measurements, make a spore print, dry them, box them up, and bring them to the Field Museum," says Chris. She also collects environmental information such as what types of trees are growing with the fungus. Trees and certain types of fungus depend on each other for some of their nourishment.

Evidence exists that the mushroom population in Europe is declining.The same could be happening in North America. "But we have no baseline data," says Chris, "so that's what we're gathering."

Her daughter, Anna, may be one of the scientists who repeats this study 10 or 20 years from now. "I just like to go out and play in the woods, but Anna is really hooked, even on the toxicology aspect of fungus," says Chris.

Chris has also taken her knowledge to James Hart Junior High School in Homewood, where she works as a secretary. "I take students on a kind of 3-D Where's Waldo excursion to find mushrooms," she says. "We need to start them young. If they appreciate it, they'll want to save it."

Doug Taron: Butterfly Network

Doug Taron stood in a New England cranberry bog 20 years ago, watching hundreds of bog copper butterflies flitting in the rare habitat. "That changed the way I thought about butterflies," says Doug, who leads the Butterfly Monitoring Project of the Volunteer Stewardship Network. "All butterflies are not created equal. Some are tied to specific habitats."

That knowledge is important as land managers restore natural areas. "Recently we've had a challenge in Cook County to some of the techniques of habitat restoration," says Doug. "People wondered how animals were being affected by prescribed burns and removal of invasive plant species. They specifically worried about butterflies."

For example, the question was posed: if we weed out wild carrot, a non-native species that is eaten by native black swallowtail butterflies, will we lose the swallowtails? "The butterfly monitoring network has shown that if you remove wild carrot, you're not removing black swallowtail," says Doug. "Black swallowtails use golden alexander and rattlesnake master," native prairie species.

"That information was gathered by our volunteer butterfly monitors," says Doug, whose interest in butterflies began when he was six years old. But while earning his PhD in biochemistry, Doug had little time for his hobby. When Doug moved to Chicago, he expected "there would be no nature here, just buildings, suburbs, and agriculture."

Near his home in Elgin, however, he discovered Bluff Spring Fen, and at the Fen he discovered the Baltimore checkerspot, a butterfly he hadn't seen since childhood. Doug began collecting data, and before long he was leading a first-of-its-kind butterfly monitoring program.

Recently Doug left his job as a biochemist at Amoco Corporation to become the curator of biology at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum of the Chicago Academy of Sciences. There he will make butterfly monitoring data available to scientists worldwide for research.

"Volunteer butterfly monitors have gathered a huge and remarkably sound body of data," says Doug, "and that can make a positive contribution."

Ken Mierzwa: Building a Constituency of Volunteers

Ken Mierzwa listened to a scientist at a recent biology conference complaining that volunteers couldn't always be trusted to provide good research data.

Ken rose to speak.

Volunteers, in fact, had collected seven years of useful data on amphibians and reptiles in the Chicago Wilderness region, Ken said. "Once volunteers understand how to identify the flora and fauna and how the sample protocols work," he said, "they can do a fantastic job."

Indeed, though Ken is now a 43-year-old senior ecologist and associate at TAMS Consultants, Inc. in Chicago, for many years, he did science solely as a volunteer, collecting influential data on amphibians and reptiles in northern Illinois.

Ken learned about local flora and fauna when a neighbor biologist taught him how to identify frogs and salamanders. He then went on to operate a printing business, but he never forgot the joy of finding tiger salamanders and spring peepers in vernal ponds.

One dreary winter, Ken decided he needed some "green space." He went to Ryerson Woods in Lake County where he found a blue-spotted salamander beneath a log. He mentioned his find to the staff, and within a few hours he had become a volunteer.

Ken immersed himself in the world of amateur herpetology, surveying populations at various preserves in Will, Lake, DuPage, and Cook Counties. "At some point, I realized this was more fun than what I was doing Monday through Friday," he says. So in 1990, he began working at TAMS, an engineering and design firm that, among other things, prepares environmental impact statements and assesses, develops, and oversees wetland mitigation projects.

"One of the reasons I chose this route was because I can help see that development is done in an intelligent and responsible way," says Ken. TAMS recently helped clinch the acquisition of the Clark and Pine East Nature Preserve west of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. This 200-acre, state-dedicated nature preserve supports 18 species of amphibians and reptiles, a high number compared with other sites in the region.

Ken, also a serious nature photographer and marathon runner, continues to work with volunteers, collecting data on reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. With a current focus on if and why amphibian populations are declining, Ken leads two teams of amateur herpetologists and doctoral candidates in amassing distributional and abundance data. One team studies Spears Woods in Cook County forest preserves; the other gathers data in a remote 6,000-acre area of the Missouri Ozarks.

In addition to other published works, Ken's findings have been reported in the two chapters he wrote for the recent book, Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians (University of Iowa Press, 1998).

These teams of professionals and amateurs will be vital to the conservation of Midwestern amphibians. "From a practical standpoint," Ken says, "the resources aren't there to gather the data we need to protect open space. The only way to do that is to build a constituency of volunteers."

Rich Hyerczyk: In the Company of Lichens

Rich Hyerczyk was wandering through a forest preserve 14 years ago when a friend asked him, half jokingly, if he went to the woods to find himself.

Rich has found himself — hanging out with some half plant/half fungus types. These days, when Rich is not working as a draftsman, he's usually hunched over some tree with a hand lens identifying lichens.

Rich says that, while he was content working as a draftsman, he also felt drawn to something intangible, the Earth perhaps. At age 32, he enrolled in botany program at the Morton Arboretum where his first course was on lichens.

"I didn't even know what a lichen was," recalls the Chicago resident. "And I figured botanists knew everything there was to know about lichens."

His teacher, Dr. Gerould Wilhelm, convinced him the opposite was true about this curious organism in which fungus and algae live together, meeting each other's basic needs.

Since then, Rich has taught several courses on lichen identification, and has written papers on lichens that have been published in the Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science and Erigenia, the journal of the Illinois Native Plant Society. He's also nearly halfway done with the major task of cataloging the lichens of the Cook County forest preserves.

"You can go on a hike in the woods and spend your whole day finding interesting things in one square meter," says Rich.

Like many volunteer scientists, Rich often works with volunteer stewards as they assess restoration needs on conservation lands.

"Jerry (Wilhelm) really encouraged us in the botany class," Rich says. "He said there's not enough time and resources for the professional to do this, but with their help, citizen scientists can do it. If I can do it, anyone can do it."

Wilhelm concurs, and goes a few steps further. "Yes, the data are valuable in their own right," he says, "but these extraordinary, gentle people are even more valuable. Some of the most important conservation scientists among us, both professional and volunteer, are the field people who have come to know the faces of the living things, who understand plant and animal responses to our behavior, and who help land managers make good judgments, day by day, and site by site. They are helping us become native parts of our native landscape."