Therkildsen Field Station at Emiquon to host lecture on mallards

The University of Illinois Springfield’s Alfred O. and Barbara Cordwell Therkildsen Field Station at Emiquon (formerly the Emiquon Field Station) will be hosting a public lecture titled “Monitoring mallard movements in the Illinois River valley and beyond” on January 26 at 6:30 p.m. The lecture will be presented by Danielle DeVito and Curt Kleist, waterfowl research technicians with the Illinois Natural History Survey of the Forbes Biological Station in Havana.

The program is free and open to the public; reservations are not required.

DeVito and Kleist will discuss how mallards use the Illinois River valley as stop-over sites during fall migration. They will present capture methods, details about marking procedures such as attaching radio transmitters to mallards, and the multiple methods they use to track the ducks on a day-to-day basis. They will also present results from their research using the technology of radio-telemetry in other parts of the country.

The Therkildsen Field Station at Emiquon is at The Nature Conservancy’s Emiquon Preserve, located between Havana and Lewistown near the Dickson Mounds Museum. Entrance to the field station is on Prairie Road, located off Illinois Rts. 97/78, approximately one-and-a-half miles north of the Dickson Mounds turnoff. A sign will be posted at the turnoff.

A map is also available online at www.uis.edu/emiquon/about/images/mapToTNCEmiquon.jpg or as a Google map at https://edocs.uis.edu/kmill2/www/map-simple-edocs.html.

For more information, contact Hua Chen, interim director of the Therkildsen Field Station at Emiquon, at hchen40@uis.edu or 217/206-8339.