Old Christmas trees make new homes for Baker’s Lake birds

Citizens for Conservation volunteers and numerous Cook County Forest Preserve police and Crabtree Nature Center staff made the annual trek across Baker’s Lake in Barrington to deliver Christmas trees to the island’s heron rookery.

The trees create a nesting habitat for the hundreds of heron and cormorant families that will make the rookery home this year.

Some years the trees are dragged across the ice behind snowmobiles. But during more mild winters, like this past one, the ice never gets thick enough for safe passage and the trees are taken across by boat in the spring.

Volunteers arrived at 9 a.m. April 4 and moved the trees — donated by a Christmas tree seller or collected by the village of Barrington from residents — out of the parking lot road so the boats could get to the launch area.

Nine CFC volunteers then boated to the island to remove last year’s Christmas trees and throw them in the water around the island. Boatload by boatload, they unloaded more than 150 new trees and placed them upright in tubes, leaned them against structures, or tossed them around the perimeter to create additional ground level nesting sites. Great egrets in particular favor nesting on the perimeter trees.

Most of the volunteers left by noon, but four stayed on the island to finish pruning cavities in the trees large enough for a black-crowned night-heron nest, and to install the last of the three new prototype nesting structures designed for great blue herons.

By 2 p.m. the parking lot was empty of trees, boats and cars and the island looked like a miniature evergreen forest. The great egrets and double-crested cormorants flying and swimming around the lake during the workday had already returned to the island.