CINCINNATI — Jack Stenger holds up his binoculars. He doesn’t go many places without them. Then, before he can finish a sentence, he interrupts himself and points up in the air. He claps when he sees a vulture, then puts the binoculars back up to his eyes.
“Oh, there’s a different one for you,” Stenger said. “A double-crested cormorant.”
That’s a water bird with a hooked bill, in case you don't have the same encyclopedic knowledge of birds. Stenger works for Cardinal Land Conservancy, a nonprofit that tries to preserve natural green spaces in our region.
I contacted them because I wanted to know about the environmental impact of our recent flooding. They brought me here, to a parking lot near Lunken Airport, because Stenger wanted to show me their bald eagles.
See why a local group says birds are the key to understanding flooding:
But that very same flooding kept us from getting all the way to Bortz Nature Preserve, where the conservancy’s bald eagles made a nest and two baby eagles recently hatched.
That didn’t stop Stenger from looking for them.
“Finding those places that are special and undisturbed and undeveloped is getting harder and harder,” said Andy Dickerson, the conservancy’s executive director.
Dickerson wanted to show me how nature can help. But only if we protect it.
“It all depends on the spectrum you’re looking at it from,” Stenger said, standing in tall grass near a floodplain on the city’s east side. "Every gallon of water that is sitting in that flooded bottomland forest is a gallon of water that is not flooding communities downstream."
He says more spaces like this would lessen the damage we see from floods, because natural floodplains give that water somewhere to go.
“And birds are the gateway drug to understanding all that,” Stenger said. “When you have eagles present, it shows you that whole food chain is working.”
Without an eagle in sight, Dickerson opens his laptop and huddles with Stenger near the trunk of their car. He’s showing me a live camera shot of their eagle nest. The baby eagles are eating.
It's something anyone can watch on the group’s website.
Dickerson said they made it available to the public because it highlights the importance of their mission, especially when it floods.
