Request 010 — 1/10/2026

BEAR DOWN! (And Bears in Illinois!)

Hi all! It’s Saturday! Welcome to foiaday!

Like most people in Chicago right now, I’m riding the high of a Bears win, which is greatly countering the ickiness of whatever stomach bug I was slapped with yesterday. The Bears have a sort of healing energy, when they’re not making you have a heart attack every five seconds for three straight quarters.

It’s day 10, and we’ve requested for a bunch of documents. Tonight, I’m going to request for two different types of documents from the same place: the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

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Bears aren’t typically located in Illinois — maybe that’s why they want to move to Indiana? — but they’ve been spotted on rare occasions here and there wandering into the Land of Lincoln. When they are, there’s the standard fanfare in local media about a bear sighting, but I’m kind of curious about what other kinds of programs or documentation exists about bears in Illinois. 

I am doing that mainly for the bit, though. So let’s request something else that’s interesting from any sort of agency: conflict of interest and financial disclosure forms. (Oooooooo!) 

Without being flippant, I don’t know what a conflict of interest would exactly look like for IDNR, even if I have a few ideas, so I’m interested to see what relationships people are disclosing here!

So let’s start with da bears:

Copies of the following documents:

- Documents and data sufficient to show details about all bear sightings in Illinois in the past ten years, and records about mitigation or observation efforts taken by IDNR. Please release documents in a .pdf format if possible.

Then the conflict of interest forms:

Copies of the following documents:

- Conflict of interest forms filled out by employees of IDNR in the past three years, (from 2023 to 2026). These forms should outline any potential conflicts of interest that IDNR employees may possess in their role, as well as any financial stake or involvement they may have with vendors or other interested parties. Please provide the forms in .pdf format if possible, and please feel free to redact any personally identifiable information (like home addresses, cell phone numbers, Social Security Numbers, or other information outlined by state statute).

Okay, actually, I lied. We’re going to request one more record from IDNR.

In a press release this past May about a black bear sighting downstate, IDNR refers people to report bear sightings to this form, which is a user-generated form for large carnivore sightings. Hearkening back to the FOIA Advent Calendar, day 12 was to request for form responses — that is, the data on the other end that’s generated by the users who spot the bear/wolf/moose?/bobcat/etc. 

So:

Copies of the following documents:

- All data generated by the Large Carnivore Sightings form (https://wildlifeillinois.org/report-sightings/report-large-carnivore-sightings/) available on the wildlifeillinois.org website. Please include all fields and any additional information needed to understand the data (like a data dictionary or schema), and please release the data file in a machine-readable format, like a .csv, .tsv, .xlsx or database file.

Okay, folks. I’m going to grab a ginger ale and head to bed. Remember, because these records are being submitted on a weekend, they won’t be processed until this coming Monday — hopefully we’ll have some fun returns then from other agencies, too.

Take care, and bear down!!

Cam