Imagine, if you will, a piercing scream slicing through the spring night. Its sharp intensity carries beneath the developing canopy of vegetation in the forest preserve to a back yard where children are playing. The scream blends with the shrieks of the children and then it is gone.
Had it been there at all? Had the sound so full of desperate outrage really been part of the young night?
But there it is again, and this time, near the edge of a willow thicket, a fox jerks its head up and points a black nose in the direction of the scream.
And in another back yard, a man hears the sound as he moves a lawn sprinkler. A puzzled frown crosses his face, and he listens as the scream starts again and then stops abruptly.
Then only the gentle night sounds of frogs and twittering birds fills the warm air. The man shrugs and sets the sprinkler in place.
So it plays out: another moment in the shared existence of people and creatures in a suburban setting. The scream had issued from the throat of a half-grown cottontail rabbit as it died in the needle-like talons of a great horned owl.
In its seeming violence, the rabbit`s death was an occurrence as natural as the unfolding of a new leaf. And in the decibels of the gentle creature`s scream there was eloquent expression of the elegant struggle to survive that encompasses all things.
Now in the suburbs, man dominates that struggle with a heavy-handed claim, and the bulk of the land has gone to the hard, sharp-angled things that mark civilization. Roads, buildings and parking lots sprawl everywhere and present a keep-out message to the other life forms.
And they read it, within limitations. Instinctively the creatures know that most of them cannot survive on asphalt surfaces and in basement window wells, so they retreat to the edges, but only to the edges. And there they make their stands, claiming their own bits of the Earth and shuffling in natural rhythm to an ecological version of ”This Land Is My Land.”
So we have in the suburbs this natural sharing, and while it is often more confrontational than the scream in the night, it seems to work amazingly well. The creatures, with their wonderous adaptive qualities must get most of the credit for that, but humans also can take a modest bow.
While some creatures would have prevailed without them, much of the wildlife in Du Page County owes its existence to the system of forest preserves that county residents support. A survey some time ago showed that the preserves, with some 18,000 acres of land, were home to at least 177 bird species, 27 mammals, 13 reptiles and 9 amphibians.
With some of those species numbering in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, frequent interplay with humans is inevitable. Rare is the suburban dweller, for example, who has not had the adventure of a cottontail rabbit in the back yard. Rabbits, which occupy an important link in the wildlife food chain-the owl`s supper-are so prolific that a pair of them and their offspring would increase to 350,000 in five years were it not for predation and mortality from other causes.
The rabbits proclivity for procreation has, in fact, brought on a policy change at Willowbrook Wildlife Haven, a center for nature education and wildlife treatment operated by Du Page County on Park Boulevard in Glen Ellyn. The haven no longer will accept uninjured baby cottontails, in part due to limited resources, overcrowding and the difficulty of providing a precise diet, but also because the young cottontails are better off left alone.
Lou Strobhar, curator at Willowbrook said the cottontails, along with many other wildlife young, have a better chance to survive if they are left in their natural habitat.
”People who pick up the animals have their hearts in the right place,”
Strobhar said, ”but they do not understand that many wildlife young are left alone by their parents for long periods.”
Willowbrook is the official crossing of paths between humans and other creatures, and each year some 12,000 to 14,000 calls are made by people who have questions regarding wildlife. Many of the calls concern nuisance wildlife, and Strobhar and her small staff, with the help of volunteers, respond to endless questions about raccoons raiding garbage cans, woodchucks under decks, oppossums in garages and a multitude of other things.
Hundreds of injured birds, animals and reptiles are brought to Willowbrook by concerned citizens. The creatures are treated, rehabilitated and returned to the wild whenever possible. The haven also has a display of wildlife made up of specimens that are incapacitated in some way that would not allow them to survive in the wild.
On a recent day at Willowbrook, wildlife biologist Daniel Ludwig was assisting in the repair operation of a snapping turtle`s jaw.
”It had to be wired shut, temporarily,” Ludwig said, which somehow seems to illustrate part of the complex relationship between people and animals: The injury was obviously incurred because of people-a motorist in this case-but the turtle`s only chance for survival was given back to it by other people.
Ludwig said that an inventory of the county`s natural habitat is now being made. ”Once this is completed,” he said, ”we will formulate plans for the maximum benefit of wildlife.”
A survey several years ago showed that the majority of Du Page County residents wanted the forest preserves to remain preservation oriented rather than develop tennis courts and other recreational facilities.
”Most people are concerned about wildlife,” Ludwig said. ”They care about it, as demonstrated in such things as bird feeding.”
Strobhar agrees. ”I think there is a very positive attitude,” she said. ”There may be an occasional person who is disgruntled over some wildlife problem, but the great majority of people are anxious to live in harmony with wildlife.”
”The problem most often is a lack of information about the creatures, and that is where we come in,” Strobhar said. ”Our main job is to educate people about the ways of wildlife.”
Because they are bigger and more visible, Ludwig said that Canada geese and deer get a lot of attention, but plans for the future will take into consideration the welfare of all species.
Some of the problems caused by geese are well known, particularily their tendency to drop natural fertilizer on lawns and golf courses.
”Many suburban areas are having the same problem,” Ludwig said, ”and it is a predictable one. We plant all of this bluegrass for lawns and create decorative ponds, and the goose is a grazing animal that needs water so it adapts to the situation very readily.”
Some trapping and transplanting of geese has been done by the Illinois Conservation Department, but an overall long-term solution to goose problems has to involve the federal government because it is a migratory bird.
Deer sometimes cause problems with their appetites for decorative shrubbery and by leaping out into heavy traffic, and as they become more numerous, these problems will accelerate. Like the geese, they adapt readily to the mix of wild and developed area.
Du Page County, along with much of the rest of the country, has just come through what Strobhar calls the ”silly mallard season.”
”They try to nest everywhere,” she said. ”We once received a call about a house where a door had apparently been left open and a mallard hen went inside and laid one egg in the dining room and another in the living room.”
It is somehow a pleasant surprise to learn that beaver inhabit as populous an area as Du Page County. They were reintroduced into Illinois starting in 1930, having been nearly extinct in the state since 1900, and now prosper in several Du Page County preserves.
Perhaps that pleasant feeling has something to do with an assessment made some time ago by a trio of University of Wisconsin biologists who wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ”Unique as we may think we are, we are nevertheless as likely to be genetically programmed to a natural habitat of clean air and a varied green landscape as any other animal.”
”The specific physiological reactions to natural beauty and diversity, to the shapes and colors of nature-especially to green-to the motions and sounds of other animals, such as birds, we as yet do not comprehend,” the scientists wrote. ”But it is evident that nature in our daily life should be thought of as part of the biological need. It cannot be neglected in the discussions of resource policy for man.”
So it is to live in Du Page County, with the owls and the occasional scream of a dying rabbit.
