Acknowledgments
How do you update a 20-year-old book about the status of bird species in a place you have not lived for 20 years? I asked myself this pointed question when the SIU Press asked me if I would update my 1996 book. For more than a year I convinced myself it was impossible. Eventually, I realized it was possible because of three sources of information. First, I still knew the most skilled and active birders in southern Illinois, Dan Kassebaum and Keith McMullen, who also kept track of important sightings by other birders across the region. Second, two sources of the most important records are easily available: field notes published quarterly in Illinois’s state birding journal, The Meadowlark: A Journal of Illinois Birds, and data contributed to eBird. eBird launched in 2002, yet did not gain much traction until about 2010. Since then it has become a fundamental part of the birding culture, which includes archival of bird observation data as well as photos and sound recordings. Fortunately, a few active birders have been using eBird in southern Illinois. Their contributions to eBird have been a key component of improving the accuracy and completeness of this book. Yet, interesting observations sometimes do not make it into either The Meadowlark field notes or eBird. Southern Illinois records may be interesting to birders within our region, yet not that surprising from the perspective of the whole state, so field notes editors sometimes omit useful Southern Illinois data and it is never published in The Meadowlark. Similarly, not everyone uses eBird yet (Why not? It is so easy). Therefore, one needs help from birders who are still active in the area to be sure useful records are not overlooked. To that end, the aforementioned Dan Kassebaum and Keith McMullen reviewed the updated species accounts and helped ensure the book is as complete as reasonably possible. Steve Bailey did some key leg work in tracking down page numbers for published field notes. Ted Wolff and Ron Bradley generously provided access to journals. Thank you to all the observers who submitted their records to the field notes editors and to the eBird reviewers who volunteer their time to keep the eBird data as free of errors as possible. Any errors of incorrect inclusion or omission in this book are my own responsibility.
As an academician at a large land-grant university, little fanfare is generated by revising a local bird book you published as a kid. No national media outlets beg for an advanced copy. No media embargoes are negotiated. Still unanswered are my email requests for an interview with Oprah. Yet, this work has been important to me personally. I value giving knowledge back to the place I was raised. Some may view knowledge about birds as esoteric. One of my favorite stories about arcane knowledge involves sitting in a dentist chair. Having selected a new dentist in the town to which I just moved, we engaged in the usual bit of chit-chat prior to any dentistry being conducted. The dentist wanted to know where I worked, how long I had been in Oregon, if I had kids. The usual questions. When I told him I was a professor and studied birds for a living, he replied “Birds? Well, that seems awfully specialized.” I had no time to reply before a sharp shiny tool was inserted into my mouth and started picking my teeth. I lay there in the dentist chair, staring up into that excessively bright light thinking “And you, sir, study teeth. Teeth of only one species of mammal for that matter. I study all birds. I would say you are the one who is a specialist.” Of course, my next thought was, never irritate someone who already has a sharp piece of metal in your mouth.
I do not view knowledge of birds as esoteric. To many of us, calling birds unimportant is like saying art has little value. Or, worse, de-valuing God’s creation. Who are thee to judge the value of His works? Birds are amazing indicators of environmental health. Consider the rebound, after the elimination of DDT, of eagles, pelicans, ospreys, peregrine falcons, cormorants, terns, and hawks. Their populations suffered because we poisoned the environment. Only, we could not really tell what we had done, until birds told us. Consider now the decline and near disappearance of shrikes. We have poisoned them somehow, even if we do not yet know exactly how. It is so. On the positive side, consider the remarkable boom in numbers of Henslow’s Sparrows after implementation of grassland conservation programs across Illinois. That boom sends a strong signal that the reason Henslow’s Sparrows were rare was that they had nowhere to live. If we value grassland birds, we must value and protect their habitat. If we value living in a land rich with wildlife, healthy fish, and clean water, having people around who know and understand birds and the environment is never of marginal value.
All that philosophizing leads me to recognize I have benefitted tremendously from a long list of teachers. From grade school in Carterville, middle school at Giant City, high school in Carbondale, to college at Southern Illinois University and University of Illinois, all of my formal classroom work was done in Illinois. Nearly 100 teachers have educated me directly. Their knowledge did not originate with them, so indirectly the number of teachers for me, and all of us, is unthinkably high. Education is not simply a transfer of knowledge, but also a socialization process informing us how to acquire new knowledge, how to process and evaluate information and how to treat other human beings with respect. To all of my teachers, thank you for being a person who wanted to give back to their community by educating people and improving society.
In addition to my teachers, my family has been instrumental in supporting my love of birds. My mother never told me studying birds was a stupid idea or would never earn me a living. Having been a professor for a couple decades now, I know that not all kids who like birds gain that type of family support. I think my mother learned a lot about birds, too, as she listened to me ramble over the years. I recall one winter day when I took her birding. We stopped at a local wetland and I spotted a bird I was surprised to see there in January. I pointed it out and, rather smugly asked, “What do you think it is, Mom?” I handed her the field guide. Within about 15 seconds she found the bird and said, correctly, “a winter Dunlin.” I was surprised, yet very pleased! My wife, Tara, has supported me in every way as well. She calls me a “legacy leaver” because I highly value leaving knowledge for future generations. To me, that is what putting knowledge to use is all about: making it available to other people. Thank you both for not seeing a deep, abiding knowledge of birds and a drive to share that knowledge as useless or esoteric.
The story of this book would be incomplete without sharing why the book has been published the way it has. About a week before the manuscript due date with SIU Press I received a message from them that times were bad at the Press and that they would have to charge me $3000 to publish it. Paying someone that much money to publish this book was not going to happen. I have been publishing science for nearly 30 years now. Most of the public does not understand that it is routine for academic journals to charge authors page fees, sometimes running into the low thousands of dollars to offset the costs of publication. I, and a growing number of scientists, have never understood why we do all the work and the publisher makes all the profit (royalties are often a 90/10 split favorable to the presses). Consequently, to make a long story short, no one found the money to help SIU Press offset their costs to publish this book, so they officially declined. Although their decision was deflating to me after several hundred hours spent re-working and updating the book, the decision led me to find other options. For help in that process, I thank Tara for being patient and helping me make smart decisions. I think, in the end, the publication of this book as a dynamic resource on the internet raises the profile of the book and makes it as widely available as possible, which gives me great pleasure.
Moving forward, thank you for appreciating birds. I encourage you to share your observations by archiving them in eBird. What seems routine and boring to you now will probably be of great interest to someone else someday. Our view of what is normal is pretty much completely wrong. We do not live in normal times nor in normal landscapes. While I was preparing this book, I read accounts of Audubon, Widmann, Ridgway and others who observed birds in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I am sure they thought their sightings were “just the usual birds.” Those mundane birds included Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, large flocks of Wood Storks, Swallow-tailed Kites, and many other birds that all of us would be stunned to see today. What is to say that 50 or 100 years from now, a lot of what is reported in this book, including birds that you see everyday, will still be here? Do the future a favor and archive your observations in eBird. Follow the recommendations I provide in this book to do a great job of leaving behind your own important legacy of bird data from Southern Illinois.