Those Christmas trees with the drooping ornaments and cast-off needles can find a new home at the rookery in Baker’s Lake, and encourage the endangered black crown night herons to nest and stick around the man-made sanctuary.
The herons love the pine trees that are piled up this time of year, while the great blue herons, American egrets and cormorants prefer the heights of the telephone poles that protrude from the mud and peat island in the middle of the shallow lake off U.S. Highway 14 and Hillside Avenue in Barrington.
The restocking is done by the Cook County Forest Preserve District, which owns the lake, and Citizens for Conservation. Volunteers and staff from the Crabtree Nature Center pull trees onto the lake, usually in late January when it is frozen over. They are ferried to the island on snowmobiles operated by forest preserve police. More volunteers install the trees for the birds.
“The reason that we do this is to provide a nesting structure for the black crown night herons,” said John Elliot, the forest preserve’s education manager.
The rookery dates back 20 years or so when a grant was used to design the artificial sanctuary. Citizens for Conservation, a volunteer group that works to protect and restore native plant and wildlife areas, led efforts to restore the island as its trees died and it was learned that endangered birds lived there.
“When the natural trees collapsed, this encouraged them to stay,” Elliot said.
The sanctuary was installed with hollow tubes in the mud bottom to be used to hold natural trees where the birds could migrate, said Elliot, who said the lake was designated as a nature preserve in 1984. While the rookery restoration was completed in March 2000, said Sam Oliver, staff director of the conservation group, the idea had been hatched to bring trees as replenishment. Early on, the trees came from holiday lots that didn’t sell everything, but then people started leaving them near the lake, she said.
Elliot said people should call the conservation group or the nature center rather than just drop them off.
“They usually have way more trees than we can put out there,” he said. But the trees do their job.
“I think it’s been a positive thing, and it’s pretty cool to see the birds,” Elliot said.
The rookery is home to about 1,700 birds on the 112-acre lake.
“It’s the ultimate recycling project,” Oliver said.
Residents are asked to call Citizens for Conservation at 847-382-SAVE (7283) if interested in contributing a tree.
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