Ever wonder when the earliest Pine Warbler on record arrived in the Dunes?

What the single largest daily count of Broad-winged Hawk happens to be?

How many times Blue Grosbeaks have been located in the region?

Ask Professor Birds: Ken Brock of Westchester Township, who for 30 years has been birding Northwest Indiana, keeping the avian books, and putting Indiana Dunes on the map as one of the great Midwest hot spots.

A geologist by trade—he taught at Indiana University Northwest for 34 years, so you can ask him about rocks too—Brock literally wrote the book on birds, two books actually. The Birds of Indiana Dunes, now in its second edition, has long since become the Bible of regional birders, while his e-book, The Birds of Indiana, offers a species by species account of every bird recorded in the state and its prevalence by county.

But Brock’s impact on birding goes far beyond his scholarship. He’s also mentored an entire generation of birders, some of them phenomenally talented, and is always happy to tutor the novice just breaking into the racket. You’ll typically find him on Saturdays somewhere along the lake, comfy in his camp chair, monitoring the two-way radio traffic and duly recording the data as his crew—the Lakefront Gang—calls off the species.

On Saturday, at its annual Fall Birding Festival dinner, held at the Hilton Garden Inn, the Indiana Audubon Society honored Brock with its prestigious Earl Brooks Award, presented every year to those persons who advance the conservation of natural resources in the state.

Brad Bumgardner, chief interpretative naturalist at Indiana Dunes State Park and presenter of the award, noted that Brock got into birding by accident, when a colleague of his on the West Coast took him on an outing once. “Ken long ago lost touch with that old acquaintance but he jokes that his friend ‘is probably a millionaire while I turned into Professor Birds in Indiana,” Bumgardner said.

Brock’s interest in birds over the years has dovetailed neatly with his conservation efforts. Among other things, he’s a board member of the Northwest Indiana Migratory Bird Association, which has formed an innovative partnership with the Indiana Department of Transportation to preserve a drainage basin—the now almost legendary McCool Basin at U.S. Highway 6 and McCool Road in Portage—into a spring and fall shorebird habitat. Brock is also a board member of the Flora Richardson Foundation, which supports student education in the natural sciences, and has served on the IAS Indiana Bird Records Committee.

Brock thanked the IAS for the award but gave credit where much of it is due: to the Lakefront Gang, without whose eyes and ears the avian data would be woefully incomplete: Ken “Magic” McCoy, whose uncanny ability to locate the rarest of the rare birds prompted one wag to suggest the value of bronzing his eyeballs; John Cassady, a superb photographer with a marvelous ear for songs, calls, flight notes, and chips; Susan Bagby, the possessor of a fine ear as well; Randy Pals, the “intellectual of the group”; Pete Grube, Brock’s old partner in the field; and Brendan Grube, Pete’s son and perhaps the finest of all the lakefront birders.

So here’s the question, then: what do Brock’s archives reveal about the state of birds in Indiana? Are there more than there used to be or—given development and human encroachments—fewer?

Surprisingly, Brock gave this answer in his keynote address to IAS on Saturday: various indices would tend to suggest, he said, that indeed there are more species of birds annually recorded in Indiana than there used to be.

Among other things, Brock took note of the gradual growth of the Indiana Checklist, from around 330 species in 1898 to 413 in 2008, with a clear spike beginning only 20 years ago, in 1988, with some notable and very recent first-time entries: the Fork-tailed Flycatcher in 2008, for instance, and the Green Violetear, a hummingbird, at it happens only 24 hours earlier, on Friday, Oct. 2, 2009, in Perry County.

Brock also remarked on the gradual growth of the number of species recorded in any given year. In 1980, when he conducted a Big Year, Brock could manage a total of only 286 species. Nowadays a birder can locate that number in a calendar year virtually without breaking a sweat, while Valparaiso birder John Kendall set a new Big Year record in 2008 with 312 birds.

Two more data sets mentioned by Brock: of 25 species chosen randomly from the 100 most often tallied during the annual Christmas Bird Count, 20 or 80 percent showed positive trend lines; of 40 species randomly chosen from Breeding Bird Data, 26 or 65 percent similarly showed positive trends, he said.

Brock did make allowances for the growth of birding as a hobby—more birders mean more pairs of eyes in the field mean more birds seen—as well as a certain competitiveness among birders prompting more hours in the field and more effort during those hours.

And he also conceded the decrease in numbers of various specialty birds—grassland breeders, for instance, like Henslow’s Sparrow—and the virtual disappearance from the state of formerly common birds, like Evening Grosbeak. “But I don’t know how you can conclude that there are fewer birds than there used to be,” Brock said. “Surprisingly, it looks like things in Indiana are going better than they used to be.”