If you watch the sky in warm weather, you’re likely to see large, soaring birds from time to time. In our part of the country, most of those large soaring birds you’ll see are turkey vultures, which you can recognize from a long way off without help from binoculars or a field guide.

Worldwide, biodiversity loss continues to be one of the worst effects of human activity. But people also capable of restoring habitat and bringing native species back to places where they had been extirpated--witness the story of wild turkeys in Illinois.