Meet Your Neighbors

Mary Alice Masonick:
Green All Over

Mary Alice Masonick can estimate frog populations in a marsh by listening to their calls, calculate the age of living trees, and name the native grasses and wildflowers that have reappeared in the forest preserves. Yet Masonick adamantly insists she’s “one of those people who doesn’t know anything.”

A quiet and unassuming school nurse, Masonick is petite and wiry, a distance runner of 25 years. I caught up with her — no easy task — as she was finishing an afternoon of collecting native seeds in Kane County’s Burnidge Forest Preserve, adjacent to her home in Elgin, Illinois. She is volunteer co-steward of the site, directing volunteers one afternoon a month in habitat-restoration missions drawn up by the Forest Preserve District’s restoration ecologist, with input from Masonick and her co-steward. Today, she’s working on a patch of cut-leaved teasel, an invasive species the volunteers have been removing. “We’re chipping away,” she says.

Masonick is “chipping away” at many things. Every spring, she and her husband Joe serve as frog monitors. Trained by Audubon–Chicago Region, the couple strolls through ten wetland areas three times a season and listen to frog calls after sunset, estimating numbers as well as identifying species. “It’s like a date,” she says.

Their courtship with nature tumbled into the water when the two trained as stream monitors in the RiverWatch program, currently overseen by the Friends of the Fox River. One day a year, they wade through nearby Tyler Creek to collect macroinvertebrates, including the soft larvae of mayflies, stoneflies, and a variety of beetles. (Both invertebrate and amphibian populations are considered key indicators of an ecosystem’s health.) And in another project that casts her as a “citizen scientist,” Masonick monitors two rare native plant species, as part of the Plants of Concern program.

A current of spirituality lies behind her actions. Indeed, Masonick has been a driving force behind the designation of her church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Elgin, as a “Green Sanctuary,” a movement to improve church sustainability and honor the “web of creation.” The church — which seeded an acre of land as tallgrass prairie, with members planting hundreds of native perennials — was the first in the Chicago area to be so accredited.

Masonick’s passion for the natural world has left its mark on her neighborhood as well. After she planted native perennials all around her house, the neighborhood association funded her planting of native species in the development’s cul-de-sacs. She grows excited over the never-before-seen insects that now regularly visit, such as a recent hummingbird moth. “You put in native plants,” she exclaims, “and it’s unbelievable what will show up!” Masonick identified the ecosystem framework where her 1960s subdivision sits as now-rare oak savanna, gauging a neighborhood bur oak at 275 years. When she presented her findings at a neighborhood meeting, she was surprised by how many people expressed support. “It made me realize that there were a lot of people who cared.”

As if that weren’t enough, last year Masonick set up a recycling program at the Kimball Middle School where she works, and also serves as secretary of the local Sierra Club chapter. The mother of two children, 17 and 20, Masonick says she became active not so many years ago, and her efforts started simply with small single-day projects. “I just wanted to help, to be a day helper,” she says. “I didn’t feel qualified. I didn’t know anything.” These days, her full schedule tells a different story.

Her style — working from many directions at a time, seemingly wherever her life intersects with nature — might lead some to exhaustion. But true to her constitution as a long-distance runner, the challenge only seems to give Mary Alice Masonick more fuel.

— Cheryl Collins