Rare breed of squirrel sighted in Springfield
SPRINGFIELD -- A conservation group is hoping to draw attention to a rare mammal living along a bike trail near Veterans Parkway in Springfield in hopes of improving its chances for survival.
The Franklin's ground squirrel, known from only a handful of locations in Illinois, persists along the Wabash bike trail within sight of businesses like Menard's and Bed, Bath & Beyond.
The sighting of a rodent, however rare, rarely brings the kind of excited phone call made last July by Vern LaGesse, president of Friends of the Sangamon Valley, an environmental stewardship organization and land trust.
"I'm sitting next to the bike trail in a lawn chair watching a Franklin's ground squirrel," LaGesse reported to his wife, Charlene Falco.
He was following up on a report from Falco, who thought she saw one while riding her bike on the trail.
Franklin's ground squirrels were thought to be a prairie species that disappeared along with the grasslands that once covered 60 percent of Illinois. But today, scientists like Ed Heske, a mammalogist with the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, aren't so sure. Especially when the rare critters turn up along roadways, bike paths and railroad right of ways that have little or none of the prairie component left.
He says the ground squirrels seem to prefer open grassland with grass knee-high or higher and scattered trees.
Central Illinois is at the southeastern end of the Franklin's range, which extends northwest through the Great Plains and into Canada. It is listed as a threatened species in Illinois.
In the last few years, Illinois Department of Natural Resources staffers have seen the ground squirrels along Robbins Road, the Wabash Trail and near Camp Butler National Cemetery, according to Keith Shank, who coordinates endangered species consultation for the DNR.
Jenny Duggan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois researching Franklin's ground squirrels, said she knows of only a few locations where live ground squirrels have been found in the past five years in the state.
"It's a pretty big deal what you've got there in Springfield," she said. "They are really hard to find."
Duggan said she usually finds them in taller grasses than the closely cropped grass along the Wabash Trail.
In Springfield, the animals have managed to endure years of transition from a rural landscape to shopping and residential areas, in addition to the railroad beds conversion to a bike trail.
"There is nothing in the literature to suggest they are found in urban areas," Shank says of the animal's choice of habitat. "But what if that is the only habitat around, and that makes it essential?"
Raised roadways and railroads are preferred because they are higher and stay dry during the ground squirrel's hibernation.
And prairies planted to benefit the Franklin's don't always fulfill their expectations.
Old crop fields returned to prairie often are too wet, and the ground squirrels don't use them.