Meet Your Neighbors

Ken Brock:
Bird Man of the Dunes

If it’s an early April morning and there’s a south wind sweeping across the Indiana Dunes, chances are good Ken Brock will be leading a band of fellow birders up a lakeside dune to observe the annual hawk migration. No one knows the best birding spots in the Dunes better than Brock, and he’s made a career of sharing his enthusiasm and knowledge with others.

Birds have been a major part of Brock’s life since his grad school days on the West Coast, where a classmate first introduced him to birding. Brock long ago lost touch with that old acquaintance, but he jokes that his friend is “probably now a millionaire, while I turned into Professor Birds in Indiana.” That first casual outing, however, ignited a passion for birds that has enriched Brock’s life in some far more interesting ways.

Born in Texas and educated in California (he holds a PhD from Stanford), Brock arrived in northwest Indiana in 1970 to accept a teaching position at Indiana University Northwest. He served for 34 years on the Gary campus, mainly as a professor of geology.

Brock’s adopted home in the Indiana Dunes was fertile ground for his growing interest in the avian world. Fascinated by the amazing diversity of resident and migrant birdlife here, he evolved over the years from an amateur birding enthusiast to the preeminent authority on birds in the area. That position was affirmed with the release of his Birds of the Indiana Dunes in 1986. He also became a regional editor for Audubon Field Notes, reporting on birdlife in a six-state area of the Midwest.

Brock will tell you that birding has always been fun for him, but it is more than just a hobby. “It sounds like a cliché,” he says, “but birds are a good barometer of environmental quality. Monitoring their movements and keeping track of population sizes can help us recognize changes in the environment.”

Since formally leaving the teaching profession in 2004, Brock has remained true to his twin passions of education and birding. In 2006, he published Brock’s Birds of Indiana, an electronic book that covers all bird species in the state. He is also working on a database of Indiana bird records that will ultimately be available online. The project has required him to research any and all records of bird sightings, ranging from current blog listings to historical accounts. “It goes all the way back to the 1840s,” he says, “when Audubon traveled across pioneer Indiana from the Ohio River to Vincennes and made some important discoveries.”

Brock recently joined the board of directors of the Flora Richardson Foundation, a newly established nonprofit that supports student education in the natural sciences. Among other things, he says, “We intend to make $10,000 grants each year to fund Dunes-related research projects by undergraduate students at each of the four major northwest Indiana universities.”

Brock is also doing some independent research on a local aspect of bird behavior that has intrigued him for years. “The hundreds of thousands of songbirds that migrate through this area each spring travel primarily at night,” he notes. “Some of them, however, also engage in long shore flights during the day. They fly along the crest of the dunes into a head wind. No one knows exactly where they go, or why. I’d like to find the answers.”
Retirement for some is a time to kick back and rest on one’s laurels, but that’s not Ken Brock’s style. For him, each day is a chance to find a new way to continue his lifelong efforts of promoting education and studying his beloved birds.

— Ron Trigg