Topic: Animals

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.

Some people love rabbits. “Soooo cute!!! More bunnies please,” was the response from one friend when I posted a rabbit picture online recently. More people, perhaps, have mixed feelings about them. “Love bunnies, but baby just ate a large butterfly milkweed I bought a few days ago,” added another friend. There are also among us plenty of people who look at rabbits pretty much the same way Elmer Fudd looks at Bugs Bunny; some 60,000 Illinois residents hunt rabbits.

Two kinds of snapping turtles occur in North America, and both can be found in Illinois.

While the population of red foxes has recently declined in rural parts of east central Illinois, the same foxes have thrived in urban areas, where predators are scarce and prey is more abundant

Sandhill cranes that breed in the upper Midwest and central Canada begin gathering in Indiana near the end of September, and their numbers grow until mid- to late November, when they peak at about 20,000. Imagine 20,000 of these majestic birds together in the same place less than half a day’s drive from Champaign-Urbana.

Acorns are everywhere in the fall, as anyone who bicycles where there are oaks can attest. While these seeds may be a minor annoyance on the road, they’re much more interesting and important from an ecological perspective.

Do you value opportunities to catch and eat fish? Swim in ponds or rivers? Opportunities to do these things depend on people to stand up for clean water.

How do you count frogs and toads? Tag along with Rob as he joins a local science teacher to hear what's happening at the Middle Fork River Forest Preserve one night in early July.

Even if the summer heat has limited your time outdoors, I bet you’re still hearing a familiar insect song. It’s the mating call of dog day cicadas, loud enough to rise above the drone of air conditioners and so persistent and widespread that it's almost unmissable

At last year’s plant sale by the conservation group Grand Prairie Friends, nearly 1,400 milkweed seedlings were sold. Why all the milkweed?  It’s the only genus of plants on which the caterpillars of monarch butterflies feed and develop. Knowing that monarch populations are in trouble, people here and across the country are doing what they can to create monarch havens in their own back yards.