“It just happened,” said Bluebird Recovery Project (BBRP) founder Joan Harmet when asked how the program she started in Jo Daviess County flourished for over 30 years. It seemed an unlikely way to describe the beginnings of a conservation success so great that it brought a species back from the brink of extinction in northwest Illinois.
In the mid to late 1970s, the decline of bluebird populations across North America was gaining widespread attention from scientists and concerned citizens from the United States and Canada. Bluebirds, along with other cavity-nesting birds, were losing habitat to development and large-scale agriculture at an alarming rate. Bluebirds in north¬west Illinois were not immune. In the early 1990s, Joan Harmet, a passionate conservationist who had recently moved to Jo Daviess County full time, decided to do something about it.
With knowledge gained from classes and volunteer work at The Morton Arboretum and Chicago Academy of Sciences in the 1980s, Joan and a small group of lifelong friends formed the Jo Daviess chapter of the Natural Area Guardians and held the first meeting of the Bluebird Recovery Program in 1993.
“We were a group of young, retired, vigorous nature-lovers who met, researched, built and sold nest boxes, and spread the word about the plight of the bluebird. We found plans for the Peterson nest box, which was a new design thirty years ago, and Randy (Downing) organized men from the GTA to build them. We sold them out of an empty lot in Elizabeth. There was no chance to think about it, we just did it. People like Grace Storch and Bob Todd, avid supporters who were always there for the bluebirds from the start, kept joining,” Joan explained.
A capstone moment for the group was organizing and hosting the North American Bluebird Society’s 23rd annual conference at Chestnut Mountain Resort in Galena in 2000. It took 100 volunteers, all of whom had a role, to pull it off. “We had a full day of field trips, and a welcome hog roast at the GTA on the first day. Dick (Harmet), my number one helper, was in charge of the buses. The next day featured breakouts and a keynote with renowned avian ecologists, other scientists, as well as nationally known experts on birds and nature. The conference was a huge success with people still commenting about it to this day,” Joan said.
At the time Joan founded the BBRP in 1992, there were 166 monitored nest boxes in Jo Daviess County that fledged 231 bluebirds. The year prior to the conference, those numbers had risen to 591 boxes fledgling 1296 bluebirds. “Certainly, the bluebirds were here but we helped them thrive by getting so many people involved – it just had its own momentum. That is what I am most proud of, that we pulled it off,” Joan said.
Today, the BBRP can credit over 30,000 bluebirds being fledged in Jo Daviess County thanks to Joan and the many other volunteers who dedicated themselves to their survival over the past thirty years. JDCF is now seeking a group of new monitors as the work of caring for our area bluebirds’ transitions to a new generation. If you are interested in joining JDCF’s Bluebird Recovery Program, please contact our volunteer coordinator, Ginni Yarbrough, at volunteer@jdcf.org to get started.