Rock Springs Nature Center hosts Earth Day clean-up, walkings, bird-banding

“We’re doing it for the Scouts, but we’re also doing it for the environment,” said his papa, Jared Rubsam. “I got you out of bed this morning, didn’t I?” he contributed to Isaak.

“I said, ‘It’s time to relax, Dad,’” joked Jaydan Rubsam, Isaak’s older bro. “He’s like, ‘We’re going to a river cleaning,’ and I said, ‘Are you serious?’”

The river clean-up belonged to Rock Springs’ 42nd yearly “Festival of Spring,” with a complete schedule of activities for the day that marketing professional Ashton Nunn said were moving forward regardless of the cold temperatures and threatening skies. Those activities consisted of a bird walking, a flower walking and an Earth Day event walking in the afternoon, bird-banding in the early morning led by Millikin University Professor Travis Wilcoxen, canoeing, Heirloom Garden Tours at the Homestead Prairie Farm, a discussion by the Illinois Raptor Center, and trips of the Trobaugh-Good House with guides in duration outfits.

“This is our busiest (Festival of Spring) since COVID hit,” Nunn said. “We’ve got a great deal of neighborhood companies coming out today. A number of them canceled due to the fact that of weather condition and other things, however we still have a lot of them coming and we’re truly delighted about it.

The river clean-up is a main function of Earth Day activities, said Alysia Callison, director of programs and services.

“We do this to keep our waterways clean,” she said. “We are lucky that we have the Sangamon River that runs through our property here at Rock Springs, and there’s a lot of trash that ends up moving along that waterway. All the streams, runoff, everything ends up in the river. It’s good to get out there and periodically clean up trash not just for our benefit, to make the water cleaner for us to enjoy, but especially for the wildlife that lives here and in it. There are a lot of species that can’t tolerate pollution, whether that be chemical or physical pollutants, to make sure we have healthy waterways.”

“(We’re here) to clean up the planet to make sure the planet doesn’t get destroyed,” said Cannon Gray, who included his grandma, Julie Sanderlin. Both reside in Warrensburg. “I used to live over here (near Rock Springs).”

“Trash is a big thing in my conscience,” Sanderlin said. “I just can’t stand to see trash lying around, so I decided to come out and clean up trash and make a difference.”

The bird-banding activity was held early since that’s the very best time to come across birds, Wilcoxen said. He’d established netting in the woods near Rock Springs’ primary building and he and a few of his trainees and interested lookers-on inspected the internet every couple of minutes in order to launch and band any birds captured in it. Most of the birds were white-throated sparrows, who concern Central Illinois on their migratory journey from the southern United States and spend a couple of weeks here prior to moving further north, he said.

“It’s an opportunity to track what species are moving through this area,” he said. “We’ve done this consistently for almost 10 years now. It’s interesting to say if there are different species. We actually had a bird that we banded here in 2018 that we captured at the Raptor Center property in 2021. Because we’d banded it, we knew exactly where we saw it the first time, where it came from, and of course it had made migration at least a couple of times.”

A sparrow that was at least 4, as that a person was, is an effective bird who has actually prevented predators and made its living, which’s motivating. Wilcoxen said his trainees typically take blood samples from birds they capture while banding, in order to develop what’s healthy and typical for numerous types, and to study nutrition and habits. One example is whether a bird experiences the very same tension the 2nd time it’s captured as it does the very first time. Unlike human beings, who can develop their own tension psychologically, a bird does not have the high-end of believing excessive, he said, due to the fact that they’re hectic enduring. Such discoveries can help in dealing with human tension.

Jacques Nuzzo, program director for the Illinois Raptor Center, which has its own bird-banding station, was on hand for the bird-banding and said the center prepares to begin comparable research studies on wild raptors. When the center gets a hurt raptor, they take blood, too, however they typically do not understand what’s typical or healthy for every single types. A bird with a damaged wing has that apparent injury, however understanding why the bird was susceptible might be important details. An underlying health condition might explain it and potentially add to discovering methods to minimize ecological elements.