Did you know that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) is the second-largest landowner in Cook County? The detention basins, treatment plants, Chicago-area waterway system and other important habitats are owned, leased to them, or leased to others by them.
Many of these lands are important to birds and birders. Techny Basin, the Calumet Water Treatment Plant, Melvina Ditch, the banks of the Chicago and Calumet rivers … these are places birders use regularly.
We’d like to collect the knowledge of the birding community and share it with MWRD staff and commissioners to improve habitat for birds where we can. Our first step is to reach out to the birding community to be sure we have a complete picture of which places are well-used by birds. We will prepare a report of the top 5-7 most important spots, but we’d like to know as much as we can about MRWD lands and birds - which birds nest there, which migrate through, who birds there, what are the names of eBird hotspots, are there any management recommendations you can make, etc. Some of these lands are managed by the MRWD and we can make management recommendations. Others are lands that we might convince conservation organizations to lease and care for. We have established a good working relationship with the MWRD over our work at Techny Basin and we hope to continue it.
Please share what you know about these lands on this form. And please ask your birder friends to share information too. We’d like information about all MWRD sites, not just the top 7, so please don’t hesitate to share about several sites where you bird. You might be thinking, "I have a site I'd like to suggest, but I'm not entirely sure who owns this parcel." Fret not! This is a link to an interactive map of all the different parcels owned by the MWRD: https://gispub.mwrd.org/leasingproperty/. Using this map, you can verify whether your parcel is MWRD owned or not. Also, if you’d like to look over the MWRD’s previous survey of birds and other taxa, take a look. We hope to build on this work.
Photo: Spotted Sandpiper in grass at Techny Basin by Jeff Bilsky.