Spring 2001

by Debra Shore

"I have always envied dogs their noses. Imagine being able to walk into a room and instantly know not only who was there but who just left."

So began one of Jerry Sullivan’s many columns called "Field & Street" written for the Chicago Reader. Who could not be instantly and delightfully engaged by such an opening?

Jerry continued that column by saying, "When I was a kid reading stories about mountain men and cowboys and Indians, the expert trackers were the people I admired most. The stories usually had at least one guy who could look at a patch of bare rock and tell you that six men had walked across it less than an hour ago, that two of the men were left-handed, and that one had a slight astigmatism. To be able to observe and interpret subtle signs seemed a wonderful gift. Other kids wanted to be the fastest gun alive; I just wanted to follow a trail." (January 25, 1991 "Field & Street")

Jerry Sullivan, writer, naturalist, avid birder and gardener, thespian and balladeer, died on December 2, 2000 of colon cancer at the age of 62.

At the time of his death, Jerry worked as outreach naturalist and associate director for land management with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. He was widely known and loved for leading bird walks, for habitat restoration and monitoring, and for his writing, which he did with fluency and humor. He is the author of the Atlas of Biodiversity, published by Chicago Wilderness in 1998, and wrote three features for Chicago WILDERNESS magazine, as well as several books and magazine articles.

With his wife, Glenda Daniel, he was editor of the Chicago Audubon Compass for many years. But he is perhaps most widely known for his "Field & Street" columns spanning more than 10 years, beginning in 1984. (His byline was absent for several years in the early 1990s during a temporary displacement — Jerry would have said ‘derangement’ — to Seattle. But Jerry and Glenda returned to Chicago, his heartland, because the nature was more interesting and, as Daniel put it, "the mountains got in the way of the view.")

Jerry Sullivan wrote about Chicago Wilderness before there was a Chicago Wilderness in the formal, organizational sense because he knew that rare nature in a metropolitan region would need care and sound management to survive. Moreover, he wasn’t merely funny. Jerry wrote courageously and wisely about difficult topics like deer management, burning the woods, and thinning trees to have healthy ecosystems. He wrote about the people who taught him about birds and sedges and salamanders. And he wrote about the dragonflies and kestrels and bur oaks that taught him about living with and loving nature.

As I re-read many of Jerry’s columns preparing to write this tribute to him, I found myself laughing out loud. What a gift.

A Jerry Sullivan Sampler:

• "The beginning of a breeding bird survey is like the beginning of a love affair. You just know that this time it’s really going to work. Other springs may have yielded the banalities of robins and redwings, but this is certain to be the year of Cooper’s hawk nests and hummingbird fledglings." (March 30, 1990 "Field & Street")
  
  
• "I suppose there is no really good time to sprain a toe, but for a birder the end of April is particularly bad. Here I sit, chained to my heating pad, my gait reduced to a painful hobble, while hosts of extraordinary rarities stream through Chicago on the spring migration. And the older I get, the more I am aware of the unalterable fact that I am only going to get a certain number of springtimes to enjoy this spectacle. I can’t tape this show for later replay. If I miss it, I miss it forever." (May 3, 1991 "Field & Street")
  
  
• "Spring is happening right outside my windows. Unfortunately, I seem to be spending all my time inside my windows. I get a few glimpses. A great blue heron flew over my backyard. Robins have built a nest under our eaves where the drainpipe makes a 45-degree turn. A wasp tottered around my office windowsill for a couple of days and then expired. My guess is that she had come out of hibernation without enough energy to fly. The fact that wasps overwinter in my office is a fairly clear measure of my housekeeping.
  
  "People are always complaining about spring in Chicago, and with good reason. Our early May snowstorms, our endless days of northeast winds blowing clear, clean, icy air off the lake. After you’ve gone through a winter, spring can drive you crazy.
  
  "When it’s 70 today and 34 tomorrow I tell myself spring is about change. A dreary succession of warm days is summer. But when the cold goes on and on I start to get anxious. I begin thinking about doomsday. This will be the year when summer doesn’t come. When thousands of Illinois farmers will watch their own corn wither in the fields after a hard freeze in early July. Back in the late 70s journalists were able to find actual scientists whose analysis of the data on the early Pleistocene could be manipulated in such a way as to at least mildly suggest that a mile-high wall of ice would reach Chicago in four to six weeks." (April 30, 1993 "Field & Street")
  
  
• "Our suspicion is that black-crowned night-herons have been nesting along the North Shore Channel. This bird is on the endangered list in Illinois. We have three known colonies around Chicago: Lake Calumet, Lake Renwick near Plainfield, and Baker’s Lake in Barrington. There are two other colonies along the Illinois River south of Peoria and another two near East Saint Louis. And that is it for the whole state.
  
  The North Shore Channel brings water from Lake Michigan into the North Branch of the Chicago River. It is part of the system that turned the river around, directing its flow to the Illinois River rather than to Lake Michigan .... Birders have seen the herons regularly along the channel throughout the breeding season, so on July 1, Alan Anderson, Allen Feldman and I loaded my canoe on top of my car and set off to paddle the channel in search of them.
  
  Alan suggested that we start at the lake and paddle all the way to Devon Avenue, since this would cover the area where most of the sightings took place. So we drove into the Sheridan Shore Yacht Club in Wilmette Harbor, unloaded the canoe, and put it in the water. We weren’t sure we would be allowed to do this, since the yacht club is a private place. But we followed the golden rule of gate crashers — always act like you know what you are doing — and got under way without incident.
  
  Unfortunately, things took a rather bad turn immediately. We paddled around the clubhouse and discovered that an enormous building sat athwart the channel dead ahead. The building houses the machinery that controls the flow of water out of — or into — the lake, and it also contains the controls for the lock that would allow boats to pass into the channel. Our problem was that this lock is no longer in operation. So, doing our best to act like none of this was a surprise, we hauled the canoe out of the water and portaged around the building.
  
  Now, I should have known this building was there. I’ve seen it before, and I’ve even written stories about the structures that control our river. I need to start reading my own stuff more carefully.
  
  The portage turned out to be rather long. Sheer concrete walls bracketed the channel beyond the lock, so we couldn’t put in there. We climbed some steps up out of the deep cut that holds the channel and found ourselves carrying the canoe through the golf course. Golfers gave us bemused stares. I said, "You haven’t seen a river around here anywhere, have you?" But I was thinking, "I may look ridiculous, but at least I’m not playing golf."
  
  The water level in the channel is a good 15 to 20 feet below ground level, but we eventually discovered a narrow path down the steep slope and slid the canoe down to the water. But even before we got launched, we knew we were too late. We saw two immature black-crowned night herons sitting on a steel railing on top of the sheer concrete walls just beyond the locks. They had already left their nests. We would see no young birds screaming to be fed and no trees spattered with the whitewash of several months’ accumulated droppings. We would, in short, not be able to verify nesting by black-crowned night herons. But it was a lovely day for a paddle, so why not enjoy ourselves?" (July 17, 1992 "Field & Street")

Enjoy himself, Jerry did. His booming laugh, his wit and voice, will endure through his writing, his stories. "His greatest gift," wrote one of his admirers, "is an ability to draw us into an interest of aspects of nature we never imagined could catch our fancy." Thank you, Jerry. We miss you.

Debra Shore is editor of Chicago Wilderness.