Eleanor Downing, 102

Highland Park bird-bander

July 07, 2001|By Sean D. Hamill, Tribune staff reporter.

Georgialee Colby remembers well visiting as a child her Aunt Eleanor Downing's home in Highland Park.

There was Mrs. Downing's piano playing prowess and her skill in the kitchen that wowed the family at reunions. But it was the strings running through openings in the windows to cages outside that Colby remembers most about her aunt's home.

"They were there to catch birds. And they caught everything from sparrows to hawks," recalls Colby, now 69.

It was the 1930s then, and Mrs. Downing and her husband, Paul, were beginning their hobby of bird-banding--capturing birds and tagging them with an identifying leg band. The hobby would gain them a measure of fame in 1952, when a chimney swift tagged at their home was later found in Peru. The tag confirmed a suspicion held by ornithologists that chimney swifts spent their winters in Peru after summering in northern Illinois.

The hobby was a byproduct of the love the Downings shared for decades.

"All they ever talked about was bird-banding," Colby said with a laugh.

Mrs. Downing, 102, died Saturday, June 30, after a long illness in Mather Pavilion nursing home in Evanston.

Mrs. Downing was born in Blaine, in Boone County. Her father was a pastor in the Methodist Church. It was in her father's church that she met her future husband, inviting him to dinner in the family home.

After they married in 1928, the Downings lived in several northern Illinois towns over the years before settling in Highland Park in the mid-1930s.

In the early days of commercial radio, Mrs. Downing put her musical skills to work, winning a contest to play the piano with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on WGN radio. She also taught piano and organ for years on the North Shore.

Mr. Downing first picked up bird-banding, Colby said, but Mrs. Downing dived right in with him, much as they shared the operation of the Downing Floor Shop in Highland Park.

"She ran the store, and he did the floorwork," Colby recalled.

Arnie Buck, a family friend, said that the Downings' floor store was probably the only one in the state that also sold birdfeed, and that they were probably the only homeowners in Highland Park who purposely left their garage door open in the hope that barn swallows would nest there.

Mr. Downing had been president of the Illinois Audubon Society for nine years. With his wife, he formed the William I. Lyons Bird-Banding Council, a coalition of fellow enthusiasts that was named for the man who had schooled the Downings in the hobby.

Mr. Downing died in 1974 at age 77.

"The Downings were real outstanding people and well respected in the bird-banding community," said Bob Montgomery, who works with the McGraw Wildlife Foundation and worked with the Downings in the 1960s and 1970s.

Their constant tagging of tens of thousands of chimney swifts, among other birds, over the years led them to notice the birds' decline because of the chemical DDT. They helped fight for laws that eventually banned DDT's use in the U.S., and they both lived to see the swifts' population return to its usual size.

In 1975, the Illinois Audubon Society named its research library after the Downings.

There were no immediate survivors.

A service will be held Saturday in Rockton, Ill.