Planning for nature in a city

“Should not the public see to it that every one may enjoy this change of scene, this restorer of bodily and mental vigor, and will not citizenship be better thereby? He who habitually comes in close contact with nature develops saner methods of thought than can be the case when one is habitually shut up within the walls of a city.” – Daniel Burnham, The Plan of Chicago

The Chicago skyline at sunset with lake and grasses in front of it. — Chicago Skyline from Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, photo: Maren Robinson

One of the most livable features of Chicago is the network of city parks and nature spaces and a public lakefront. It is remarkable because the city was designed that way by a small group of urban planners and advocates who wanted keep the lakefront public instead of filled with the houses and high rises of those who could afford the luxury of a lakefront. Daniel Burnham, the architect and urban designer, was one of the major advocates of these green spaces both for civic benefits and well as aesthetic ones. However, manicured city parks were not enough for him. In The Plan of Chicago, which he wrote with Edward h. Bennett, he advocated for nature spaces with forests and trails for public use that were not to be chopped up and tidy but big swaths nature.

“The existing public parks go far in this direction, but not far enough. The spaces to be acquired should be wild forests, filled with such trees, vines, flowers, and shrubs as will grow in this climate, and all should be developed in a natural condition. Country roads and a few paths should run through these forests, but they should not be cut into small divisions. There should be open glades here and there, and other natural features, and the people should be allowed to use them freely.” – Daniel Burnham, The Plan of Chicago

I am, of course, in favor of this view because I share it. When I first moved to Chicago I found myself looking at all the tall buildings, the architectural details and the skyline. However, I soon found that I looked at the negative spaces: the water, the sky beyond the towering architecture. There is solace in knowing that the city ends. It hits the water and can sprawl no further.

A metal pier extends into a blue lake with blue sky and a strong horizon — Lake Michigan from Loyola Beach, photo: Maren Robinson

Similarly, at first I found myself fascinated by people on trains. Their habits and variety. Soon though the pressure of living surrounded by so many others becomes overwhelming. I could see why so many commuters are plugged into head phones or staring at their screens, or staring into that middle distance with the dazed expression of having left their bodies. In the crush of noise and physical contact with strangers we retreat and we deaden our senses to preserve ourselves.

A brown speckled bird with a puffy chest sits on a branch — Hermit Thrush, photo: Maren Robinson

In nature is an antidote to having compressed oneself and one’s senses to live around others. In shutting out the noise of the siren we also seem to silence the call of the robin. When walking into a place that is more wild there is a slow release. Inhale, the smell of leaf litter and wet grasses. The shoulders drop a bit. Were they always held so tightly? The light dapples through clouds and branches. Suddenly the senses expand. Reaching out in new awareness of other living things. The buzz of an insect, the startled flight of a bird in peripheral vision, the rapid tap tap tap tap tap of a woodpecker. All around is life, throwing off oxygen and carbon dioxide. The sap moves slowly in a red willow branch waiting for the right day to burst forth in catkins. A beetle scritches in the earth beneath a dry leaf and a hermit thrush scritches in the leaves for beetles. The human is no longer first, but only part and human concerns are no more important than any other creature scritching for existence.

I think that was what Burnham hoped for, though he left out the part about beetles.

Landscape of sunlight through green tree branches with green grasses and flower — Treelight at Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, photo: Maren Robinson

Nature in dribs and drabs

DSC_0356 (2) Much of the natural life in the city of Chicago is happening in fringe areas. Certainly wildlife use the city parks, golf courses, and cemeteries as both homes and byways and the arteries of our city, the train tracks, the river and the expressways and the scrubby land around them also provide spaces for animals to live and travel.

I have spent most time in areas bordering the Chicago river. Even though parks, houses and industrial parks back on to this waterway, and the river, though much improved, would not be considered clean by any imagination. Animals find homes and passage on the river. Several major parks have now set aside natural areas where a city park gives way to some native plants and paths along the edge of the park. In Horner Park ,south of Montrose Avenue, this takes the form of a new nature area along the river, with paths and native plants. North of Lawrence it follows Ronan Park and River Park past the sewage treatment plant along the north branch of the Chicago river and becomes the North Shore Channel trail. Popular with bikers and dog walkers and runners close to the river it is still a haven for blue herons and black crowned night herons, migratory warblers and small mammals, the passing coyote or skunk.

On Saturday I spotted the young American Opossum above not more than 10 yards from busy Lawrence Avenue (pictured above). It remained calm, almost completely unobserved from its perch in a small tree as dog walkers and a cross-country skier, pedestrians and countless cars zipped past unseeing. (Below, view of Horner Natural Area from the Lawrence Avenue bridge). 30920908127_c49969d1c2_o

Nature fills the available space along this little islands and rivulets of green that pepper the city. Even if I don’t venture to a forest preserve I can count on seeing wildlife if I am willing to go to the river and wait.

The river itself is filled with turtles, mallard ducks and Canada geese and the seasonal outlier, a showy red breasted merganser, a common goldeneye duck diving for food or a red-tailed hawk watching for prey. I once stood well into dusk on the Wilson bridge and watched a pair of American beavers climb the bank, pick choice branches from a backyard hedge, carry the branches back to the river and strip them bare. Around humans and in spite of us, they have found and filled the gaps we have left them. (American Beaver on the Chicago River below).

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Other writers have written of “edgelands,” the places where the city gives way to wilderness amidst a jumble of the detritus of humans and almost wilderness. These narrow patches within a city are even smaller and it is worth taking the time to explore them.

I am often asked by friends who follow my photography where I go on the weekends to see all this wildlife and they are surprised when I tell them it is in the city and often not even in a nature preserve but the dead-end of a street by the river. Discovering nature in a city is about being willing to look for it and listen for it in the most unexpected places until you know where and how to see it. I was walking with a friend in Hyde Park and almost automatically when I heard a call said, “Oh that’s a cardinal.” Then looked until I spotted it on a nearby branch and pointed it out. A block or two later it was a chickadee. He asked what it was like to be attuned to all the life that was around me. I am not sure I know what it would be like not to notice the birds, or the movement of a rabbit in the brush, but I know that I feel more alive when I am aware of these other lives.

Nature and wildness may come in these dribs and drabs in the city, but it is there if we are willing to work to see it.

Amateur Naturalist, Humanist Scientist

35172966040_6396ec9093_o The term naturalist is most often used in a historic sense to describe famous contributors to science: Charles Darwin, John James Audubon or Rachel Carson. In fact, these are natural scientists, biologists. The naturalists who have always interested me are those who are close observers of the natural world in their spare time. The Anglican Curate Gilbert White who closely observed the nature in and around Selborne, in Hampshire England over twenty years and wrote The Natural History of Selborne. Children’s book author Beatrix Potter was also a close observer of nature as shown in her illustrations as well as in the hundreds of detailed illustrations of mushrooms she produced and the paper she attempted to have submitted to the Linnean Society of London at a time when women were not admitted.

Perhaps I enjoy these enthusiastic amateurs because I am one. However, I stake a claim to value of the amateur. It is often amateurs who sustain a wide variety of service organizations for parks and nature areas, who spearhead clean ups and bird counts. The newly popular term is citizen scientists. Volunteers who help collect data or review data. I have participated in several of these projects. Frog and toad monitoring at West Ridge Nature Preserve, bird counts and photos in ebird, and reviewing photos for the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute.

I enjoy contributing in all these projects, but the reason I do it is tied to a deep desire to observe and connect to nature that I learned in my childhood. I grew up in the American west in a family of birders and nature spotters. My father loved nature photography and always had a field guide in the glove box of his pick up truck.

My first science project was a study on the winter feeding habits of house finches (male house finch pictured above) and Cassin’s finches at our back yard feeder. It involved daily bird counts and measuring the amount of food consumed, tracking the temperature, barometric pressure, snowfall, finding the metabolic rates of both finches and finally accounting for a data glitch when a Cooper’s hawk killed a bird and stalked the feeder for a few days suppressing food consumption at the feeder.

So why not become a scientist? I had other loves, literature and theater. As faculty members at university advised me to do science and love these humanistic pursuits on the side and I always retorted why couldn’t I do humanities and pursue science on the side. This is exactly what I have done. As each branch of science becomes more and more technical folks like me step into the breach and bridge the distance between the technical and the beautiful in nature. I know nature in a different way when I have observed it myself. The first time I watched barn swallows removing the poop from the bottom of their chicks and flying out and dropping it far from the nest it answered a gross but necessary question about how the nests stayed clean. (Below is a barn swallow on the nest while not removing poop from a chick.) 36563553085_64cae03c06_o

Perhaps most importantly in these moments of observation I am outside myself. The creature I am observing is more important than me or my concerns and that empathy for nature seems more necessary to me than ever before. Nature has the ability to make us better humans so perhaps a humanist scientists is not so far off. Here is to all the budding naturalists, citizen scientists and humanists who do science on the side.

Chicago nature

35755313220_62648f1ccf_o When I moved to Chicago my greatest sense of lost was the mountains and easy access to nature trails I grew up with in Idaho and Montana. I soon found that Chicago is speckled with nature spots and Chicago wildlife thrives in parks and cemeteries. The past four years I started haunting parks and nature preserves around the city with my camera. All my western wildlife spotting skills meant I learned where birds had nests, or coyotes their dens, or a herd of deer was likely to be found. As I posted photos friends started asking me where I was going to see all this wildlife and I told them I was often within Chicago city limits.

As more and more of the world’s population lives in cities, this blog is a chance to better document the breadth of wildlife that thrives in Chicago often in spite of human encroachment and offer others ways to connect with the nature and wildlife and wild spaces right around the corner. (West Ridge Nature Preserve pictured above)