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Published: July 22, 2011

Crawford and Devon, 76 years ago

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

The modern intersection is bordered by buildings and a golf course, in some senses a benefit to urban wildlife, but hardly suitable for Upland Sandpipers and the other animal and plant species that used to grace the grasslands that were here 60 years ago.  Today, this is just another stoplight slowing drivers down on their way somewhere. I do not know if the city simply grew straight through this area of gradually filled in from all sides to squeeze the grasslands out, but humans have claimed this land and altered it, so that Upland Sandpipers cannot raise their young near Crawford and Devon anymore.  It highlights how truly important those few Chicago region areas are that Upland Sandpipers still find suitable, and it illustrates how are collections document loss, which is only one kind of change through time.

With 500,000 specimens, the collections of birds have many more than that number of stories associated with them.  Some illustrate new knowledge (e.g., new populations, new species), some represent aspects of the natural history of the species (plumages, migration dates), while others represent the past (e.g. extinct birds).  Below is a photo of a clutch of eggs from our collection.  The FMNH specimen number is 22175 and the eggs are of an Upland Sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda).  They were collected by George W. Freidrich and donated to the museum by his family.  On the left, is the detailed egg slip data that Freidrich wrote about this clutch.  What caught our attention when Dave Willard was cataloguing Freidrich’s collections was their date 1934 (May 28th) and even more so their location, near the intersection of Crawford and Devon.  As the crow flies (or the Upland Sandpiper flew), these eggs were collected only 2 miles from my house in Evanston, but they document that, 76 years ago, the landscape around this intersection was very different from the landscape that exists today.  Upland Sandpipers are birds of open prairie and some farm fields, today they only breed in a few scattered grasslands in the Chicago region.  In winter, they fly all the way to the pampas of northern Argentina.  In August in eastern Bolivia, I have seen one appear at water filled rut on a road in forest, but I confess that I have not seen them in the Chicago region.

This egg set, documents a habitat long gone.  To illustrate that, I took them out to the intersection of Crawford and Devon on a cold windy Fall day to take this photo.

The modern intersection is bordered by buildings and a golf course, in some senses a benefit to urban wildlife, but hardly suitable for Upland Sandpipers and the other animal and plant species that used to grace the grasslands that were here 60 years ago.  Today, this is just another stoplight slowing drivers down on their way somewhere. I do not know if the city simply grew straight through this area of gradually filled in from all sides to squeeze the grasslands out, but humans have claimed this land and altered it, so that Upland Sandpipers cannot raise their young near Crawford and Devon anymore.  It highlights how truly important those few Chicago region areas are that Upland Sandpipers still find suitable, and it illustrates how are collections document loss, which is only one kind of change through time.

John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.

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