And maybe the most famous one of all is Robin Redbreast.3 That one went on to become the official name of the bird, though it was honoring the European or English Robin and not our familiar thrush. Another personal favorite—for obvious reasons—is the Bob Robin.

The Bobolink didn’t really have a charming nickname until William Cullen Bryant’s 1864 poem, “Robert of Lincoln.” The Bobolink was almost always just called Rice Bird prior to the early 19th century.

In today’s video, Bryant’s text is paired with Bobolink footage from 2026 so you can learn their song. Bob-o-link is an apt paraphrasing but so is the second verse: spink, spank, spink.4

I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of Bobolinks while working on a new film project about the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, which is located about an hour northwest of Chicago. It’s the closest national wildlife refuge to the city and encompasses a beautiful mosaic of woods, wetlands, and prairie. I’d also say some sections are about the quietest places in all of the seven-county area.

You can read the whole text of the poem, “Robert of Lincoln” here.

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One thing you can count on in Chicago summertime is the lake breeze. Lake Michigan and its 300-mile expanse act as a sort of natural air conditioner when the wind is blowing just right. It doesn’t happen every day, but when it does the lake-chilled air is delightful.

On the afternoon of July 16, though, that lovely lake breeze turned against the city. The smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota, places like the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness, had drifted into place. The saturated air coming in off the lake condensed with the particulates to yield the worst air quality in the world.

It wasn’t silent altogether, but the mood was subdued. There was a stillness to the Blade Runner skies. What we really needed was a windy front to send the smoke somewhere else—an unsatisfactory solution as other people, animals, and plants will also then be the downwind victims.

The streets were empty as everyone stayed inside. Many businesses, parks, and attractions were closed. The birds that were still foraging, feeding young, looking for water, were moving around haltingly. There were a few check notes and wheezes, but no full-throated bird song.

“Blame Canada,” someone said. No, I thought. Blame the USA, too. Some of the fires were indeed originating within American borders, and the nation’s a world leader in climate and science denialism.

The beautiful boreal forest has been turned into kindling. According to The Atlantic, two of the three worst wildfire seasons in Canada’s history have taken place in recent years.1

The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up.

Days like these make us appreciate the blue-sky days even more. Until then we grapple with the future we were warned about.

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Many of the descriptions of these wildfires will portray them as far away. They aren’t far away. The Boundary Waters are about 500 miles from Chicago and a frequent destination for local vacationers. The region of Ontario affected by this disaster is about a one-hour drive from Grand Portage, Minnesota. (Though the First Nations community destroyed by the fire is a little farther north.)

When I was in the Grand Tetons in 2021 and wildfire smoke blocked all the views, the refrain was “that’s from fires in Oregon.” As if there were always fires in Oregon that kept it dim and overcast all day. Again—somewhere far away.

These boreal forests could just as well be the Wisconsin North Woods, your local prairie preserve, or the woodlot next door.

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“There is a bird that has built her nest every spring, in the tall tree over the grave. It is a little pe-weet. They are not so fine singers as some others, but I have always loved them, because they belong to our earliest associations. When I used to lead you to school, up the hill-road by the Friends’ Meeting-house, those birds would greet us from the fences and trees, every dewy morning; and I remember so well the delight you used to express, when I could succeed in making you see that it was indeed, no other than a little brown bird that had spoken the name of our elder sister so plainly, that they have ever since been associated with my pleasantest reminiscences of our childhood.”

The above passage is told from Life in Prairie Land, a memoir by novelist and abolitionist Eliza Farnham, who moved from New York’s Hudson River Valley to the champagne country of Illinois in 1835.1 She shares this anecdote from her sister about the “pe-weet,” a bird they knew from the East Coast. Central Illinois is a long way from the Albany, N.Y., area, but this one little bird connects both places. For me, it’s been hearing the same plaintive call of the pewee in recent years at home and in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. There’s something about this bird’s song that taps into so many memories and connections.

Writing in the early 20th century from Wisconsin, Angelia Kumlien Main described the Eastern Wood-Pewee this way:

“The song of the wood pewee, ‘pee-a-wee, pee-wee, peer,’ which is sung in so pensive and dreary a manner, is well suited to the character of this gentle bird. Coming, as it most often does, from the deep, thick woods, the sweet, plaintive notes are in perfect harmony with their forest environment, and are a characteristic sound of late summer, when all but a very few of the birds are silent.

This sylvan bird is, as his name implies, a lover of the cool forest and woodland retreats; and it is here among the tall trees, where the shadows and sunbeams seem to play at hide-and-go-seek with one another, that the wood pewee is at home.”

The great 19th century naturalist and writer John Burroughs wrote about pewees in his seminal Wake-Robin, published in 1871, and noted their superior flycatching abilities:

“The remainder of the summer is the carnival of the swallows and flycatchers. Flies and insects, to any amount, are to be had for the catching; and the opportunity is well improved. See that sombre, ashen-colored pewee on yonder branch. A true sportsman he, who never takes his game at rest, but always on the wing. You vagrant fly, you purblind moth, beware how you come within his range! Observe his attitude, the curious movement of his head, his ‘eye in a fine frenzy rolling, glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.’”

Main also cites the pewee’s skill as a hunter and goes on to chronicle their many prey items:

“Lucky indeed is the winged foe that escapes these vigilant watchers. On their bill of fare are found flying beetles, ants, butterflies, flies, gnats, mosquitoes, cankerworms, gipsy, and tussock moths, caterpillars, and plant lice. Edward Forbush in his ‘Useful Birds and Their Protection,’ writes that they are often seen fluttering about the foliage of trees, where they pick off caterpillars and plant lice. The most of their food is caught in the woods, although the pewees will sometimes venture into orchards and shade trees growing along country roadsides.”

We’re coming up too quickly on the time of year when the breeding season is over and the woods get quieter. The “latest” pewee I’ve had in recent years is September 25. With any luck, we’ll have a few more woodland experiences before then.

Twas here I found my forest bird,

This sad-voiced singer I oft had heard,

Whose song seemed to float from the top of the wood.

And, as a child, I ne’er understood

How the bird could be so very near

And the song could sound so faint, yet clear ;

Nor how it could float so far away

Mid the shadowy foliage where it seemed to stray

Until it became a part of the shade

That the far off oaks and maples made.

Dear little bird of the top of the trees,

Caressed and fanned by the passing breeze,

You sound so sad and lonely there,

As your pensive song floats through the air.

Were you merry and gay, you would not belong

To the shadowy places that need your song.

Your lay is a solace to the sad, weary heart,

Whose sweet, minor chord doth sympathy start;

So sing, little poet, from yon perch above,

Your song of tenderness , comfort and love.

—Angelia Kumlien Main

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Some of you may know that when I’m not birding, working, filming, or stuck in traffic on the Kennedy, that I am running.1 Or I was running, until the middle of last summer. That was when my foot seized up like a knotted pretzel and left me hobbling for about a week. It happened halfway out on a 5-mile run and I had to limp home with a mix of pain and shame and embarrassment. It was nine good years of running before this episode.

People who know me really well—certainly my teammates on the 10th-grade basketball team—know that I’m not a natural runner or even a jogger for that matter. Far from it in fact. To even now say that I’ve run a couple of 10Ks and a half-marathon feels like an anomaly. However, I felt like I made progress through the years and made up for a plodding gait with persistence.

Birders aren’t natural runners either. Birding, after all, is a pursuit that requires no athletic skill at all.2 In fact, oftentimes, the goal is to avoid walking or moving around too much, say a few feet from an overlook or a car stakeout. A rare bird that isn’t directly adjacent to a parking lot or roadway may as well be in the Aleutian Islands.

So all of this leads to that incident 11 months ago. I saw the doctor soon after and got a prescription. A few weeks later I lumbered into a location of a local kinesiology shop. I didn’t know what to expect, other than an assessment of my condition. I viewed all the therabands, machines, and weights with suspicion. What would the remedy for my aching foot be? The rack, the stocks, the chair? I thought about Mr. Miyagi rubbing Daniel’s ankle at the All Valley Karate Championship, hoping against hope that my foot may be so easily cured.

I lay back on one of the treatment tables and braced for being evaluated. I knew I wasn’t in great shape—hence the visit to the clinic—but I didn’t expect the first of a few surprising discoveries and pronouncements. First, my left leg is apparently longer than my right leg. This came as a surprise. I also felt a bit helpless. If this had something to do with getting better, it seemed well out of my control. My left leg will probably always be longer than my right leg.

Then I was asked to lay on my side and stretch my leg into the air. The therapist leaned on the leg, which collapsed in a heap. “Your hips are weak,” was the verdict, stated in a Palpatine hiss. Again, I hadn’t ever thought about the relative strength of my hips or even how to strengthen them. Visions of Elvis, Shakira, and Travolta came to mind. I’m aware of most of my shortcomings, and my adductors and flexors weren’t among them.

Next I was asked to walk down a small flight of stairs that were set up for testing out new patients. I walked down the three stairs confidently. This was a test I knew I could pass. “Your feet are at an angle,” the clinician said flatly. I thought back to all the times I went down a set of stairs in recent weeks. Maybe I had been taking them more gingerly. The peculiarities of my lifestyle were adding up.

The bigger question to me was what all these things had to do with the knotted tendon in my foot. I still left thinking that this would be a few sessions of therapy and that I’d be back on the running trail in no time. That didn’t turn out to be the case. I went through myriad PT sessions and exercises at home that finally got the whole of my right leg—hips, knee, ankle, and foot—in shape.

Four months later, on my last day of therapy, I was ready to sail out the door and treat myself to two scoops of ice cream. My speed on the treadmill was increasing and so was my stamina. I could now land on my foot over and over without needing a sedative. I was thinking the therapist would be impressed with my progress over these many months. “What other stretches can I do?” was my question after a lengthy run. “Hip stretches. They’re still weak.”

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” 1849

Most of us are delighted seeing even a single Ruby-throated Hummingbird in typical plumage. So it’s hard to articulate how special an all-white one is. There have been perhaps only three or four seen in the Midwest in the past two decades.

That’s the thing about nature—you think something is impossible, and then it happens right in front of you.

That was the case in a quarter-acre garden in the leafy Chicago suburb of Des Plaines last year. Most of us will bird our entire lives and never experience what Jenna Temple and her mom did, when a tiny white bird zipped into their yard, attracted to its mature trees, potted annuals, and native perennials. Jenna observed the unusual hummingbird from her bedroom window and quickly took some photos and video. She and her family had experienced the loss of two family members in the preceding months. They concluded that the ivory birdlet looked like a little angel.

What’s particularly remarkable is that a hummingbird feeder wasn’t part of the attraction to this backyard garden setting, one with minimal lawn, laden with leaf mulch, logs, rock/branch piles—and no pesticides or herbicides. Leucy was specifically feeding on black and blue salvia, the red-flowered pineapple sage, and shrimp plant at that time; all full in bloom during the first week of October.

Leucy, so-dubbed because of her leucistic plumage, stayed around for several days, enough time to share the sighting with friends and family. Sometimes she fed and other times she rested on a nearby elm or tulip tree branch or wire.

As in the above Emerson quote, “No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.” So goes any explanation as to why an all-white hummingbird is so special. It’s just that the most chance and fleeting encounters are the ones that linger the longest.

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The news arrived recently of the first Bald Eagle eaglets hatched in the city limits of Chicago in more than 100 years.1 The success is a testament to the recovery of the heavily industrialized Calumet region on the city’s Far South Side. Bald Eagles are returning to waterways all across the state, perhaps in numbers not seen since the late 1800s or early 1900s The years from 1943 to 1973 went without any nests in Illinois2; but by 1991 there were six nests, scattered from the northwest corner of the state on the Mississippi River to the southeast corner on the Wabash.3

In reflecting on this recent milestone, my thoughts go from the Land of Lincoln to The Heart of It All.4 It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that the return of nesting eagles in Chicago traces all the way back to recovery efforts led by the State of Ohio starting in the 1980s. Back then, a Bald Eagle sighting in Ohio was still a real anomaly and worthy of a rare bird alert—much like Illinois, there were only four nests in the state.5 That would start changing by the mid-1990s, when the eagles became a frequent sight in the western Lake Erie basin, including a large nest visible from the Ohio Turnpike. There were 38 nesting pairs by 1997.

The Bald Eagle returned to Ohio—eventually nesting in 87 of the state’s 88 counties— because of a program of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (the banning of the pesticide DDT helped, though illegal shooting and human disturbance also were factors). The program bears quite a bit of resemblance to the Piping Plover recovery effort in the Great Lakes, what with nest monitors, egg rescues, and captive-rearing.

Kenn Kaufman wrote about the program in 2019’s A Season on the Wind:

In the most hands-on approach, [ODNR] became adept at moving young eagles into and out of nests. If adult eagles were killed or abandoned a nest after eggs hatched, the biologists would take the young in to raise them by hand, or move them into the nest of a pair of eagles that had lost their young. If eggs failed to hatch, the biologists might be able to provide the adults at that nest with young that had hatched elsewhere.

One of the big problems was there just weren’t many trees remaining that once populated the Great Black Swamp in the northwest part of the state. There were towering cottonwoods, though. It was once thought the tall-yet-brittle trees couldn’t hold the weight of an eagle nest, though eventually the birds found a way to make the Populus trees work. An eagle perched in a cottonwood or sycamore by a river is a sort of prototypical image of the species, however the Ohio raptors often also began nesting well away from the water, too, taking advantage of tall trees as far as 5 miles away from riparian areas.

As the population grew around Lake Erie, eagles started to reclaim the northern tributaries of the Ohio River, the Wabash River, the Scioto River, and the Licking River. They made their way farther and farther west and became established as nesters on the lower Wabash, the Illinois River, and the Mississippi River, too. Then they moved up the Fox River corridor and into the Chicago Area Waterway System, a fancy name for the network of waters that includes the Chicago and Calumet rivers. Wintering eagles had long been present in numbers, but now they were staying through summer, too.6

There have been a constellation of groups working together to make the Calumet more hospitable to birds. The eagles’ nest is on a small parcel owned by the Chicago Park District, near industrial businesses with names like Cargill, Atlas Tube, Watco, Ozinga, and Ford. That we’re even discussing eaglets in this area—and there’s a naming contest under way—is something of a miracle (I wonder how Calumet River fish taste?). Stories like this one show just how wild our metropolis can still be.

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Last call: I’ll be teaching a class at Chicago Botanic Garden* for four weeks starting Monday, June 8—seats are still available! Curious about the intersection of birds, art, and history? Birds in art do not begin and end with John James Audubon. Delve in and learn about the stories of various birds through historic materials, including the works of Francis Willughby, Mark Catesby, Thomas Bewick, Sarah Stone, and lesser-known figures in bird conservation such as Wisconsin’s Kumlien family. We’ll also get a chance to visit the Lenhardt Library at the Garden and explore rare materials in-person. Learn more here.

*Garden membership is not required to take the class. Parking and admission are included in the cost of the class.

Hints to Observers
From Florence Merriam Bailey’s Birds through an Opera Glass, 1889.

When you begin to study the birds in the fields and woods, to guard against scaring the wary, you should make yourself as much as possible a part of the landscape. Most birds are not afraid of man as a figure, but as an aggressive object.

The observance of a few simple rules will help you to be unobtrusive.

First. Avoid light or bright-colored clothing.

Second. Walk slowly and noiselessly.

Third. Avoid all quick, jerky motions.

Fourth. Avoid all talking, or speak only in an undertone.

Fifth. If bird is singing and stops on your approach - stand still a moment and encourage him by answering his call.

Sixth. Make a practice of stopping often and standing perfectly still.

Seventh. Conceal yourself by leaning against a tree, or pulling a branch down in front of you. The best way of all is to select a good place and sit there quietly for several hours, to see what will come.

With these hints in mind, go to look for your friends. Carry a pocket note-book, and above all, take an opera or field glass with you. Its rapid adjustment may be troublesome at first, but it should be the “inseparable article” of a careful observer. If you begin work in spring, don’t start out before seven o’clock, because the confusion of the matins is discouraging — there is too much to see and hear. But go as soon as possible after breakfast, for the birds grow quiet and fly to the woods for their nooning earlier and earlier as the weather gets warmer.

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Reminder: I’ll be teaching a class at Chicago Botanic Garden* for four weeks starting June 8—seats are still available! Curious about the intersection of birds, art, and history? Birds in art do not begin and end with John James Audubon. Delve in and learn about the stories of various birds through historic materials, including the works of Francis Willughby, Mark Catesby, Thomas Bewick, Sarah Stone, and lesser-known figures in bird conservation such as Wisconsin’s Kumlien family. We’ll also get a chance to visit the Lenhardt Library at the Garden and explore rare texts in-person. Learn more here.

*Garden membership is not required to take the class.

Put yourself in the shoes of a late 19th or early 20th century ornithologist. You don’t have Merlin, or eBird, or any recording device. Not even a Walkman or a micro-cassette player. No reel-to-reel recorders either, those wouldn’t be invented for decades, and even then they would have been unwieldy in the field. All you have are your eyes, ears, experience, and the knowledge imparted by a few others. Even then, you might only have a partial view of nature study, without easily accessible, universally available resources, and only the insights of a few experts in your region.

In order to document bird songs, Mathews hiked through the thickets of the heavily forested White Mountains with a tuning fork and a notebook. Some contemporaries toted a stopwatch, too. He would have had to listen for birds calling repeatedly and long enough to decipher them. He might have tapped the tuning fork with a mallet to determine the key of the bird’s song. Then it was penciling each note onto the staff. Ironically, he called his notations “recordings”—not recordings in the analog or digital form, but a handwritten record of each song.

“Every bird sings his own song; no two sing exactly alike. A sharp and retentive ear for musical form can not fail to recognize those subtile (sic) differences of tone and expression which make the song of every singer unique. There are, of course, similarities in the songs of birds of the same species, but the differences, nevertheless, are as distinct as those by means of which the ornithologist has separated Bicknell’s Thrush from the Gray-cheeked Thrush.”

Over the years, he made some exciting discoveries, noting the differences between White-throated Sparrows singing in New Hampshire versus the ones on Prince Edward Island. However, even as he spent decades some of his project was met with resistance or even confusion. Just try to play a bird song on the piano—it’s very difficult to match its pitch and tempo.

Take nature’s clown, the Yellow-breasted Chat. Here’s what Mathews wrote:

“An eccentric character in the largest sense of the word. The song scarcely deserves the name. Putting on musical staff would be a hopeless task. Voice tones without either key or pitch. No kind of parallel in our bird acquaintance. A mere chatterer whose flippant conversation carries on with grotesque syllables.”

Or think about what happened when Mathews tried to translate the Bobolink’s burbling notes. Mathews gave up when it came to the Bobolink and merely suggested the character of the song. ​It wasn’t just Mathews who struggled to impress with his notations.1

Nowadays, most any of us could record high-quality audio with our phone or a digital recorder with myriad types of microphones. Within minutes, we could review these files and transfer them to eBird or Xeno Canto for others to explore. We are adding to the body of knowledge within a day or so; for Mathews it might have been many seasons, and even then only available to the people who encountered a copy of his book.

Science around this time seems to have often consisted of tallying massive amounts of data. It might be the number of nest burrows in a Bank Swallow colony or the contents of a Prairie-Chicken’s stomach. While we do some of this now (think Christmas Bird Count), we also have ornithologists and organizations synthesizing this into something with meaningful insights. Back in those days, it seemed the data itself was the end goal.2 And while that matters, it leaves a gaping void when it comes to why it’s worth going into the woods to record all of this stuff in the first place.

What strikes me about Matthews, and as I said last week about Florence Merriam Bailey, is how much these folks were in the moment. No cell phone, no distractions, no camera or recording device. Just one’s senses and an exceptional attunement to nature. This wasn’t Mathews’ full-time job either—he was primarily a designer for the Prang lithographic art publishers of Boston.3

Mathews lamented the perception that only occasionally a bird was a “supreme soloist.” It seems that the Gilded Age view was that humans made better music—with their voices and with instruments like the piano. While comparing the two seems absurd, Mathews was undaunted. His enthusiasm for birds comes across clearly, and that’s perhaps what we should take from his works (as well as his artistry).4

“Never does Nature repeat herself; it is not one vast mediocre chorus, it is an endless variety of soloists whose voices, filled with tone-color, redundant in melody, replete with expression, and strong in individuality, make up the orchestra which performs every year the glad spring symphony. The Hermit [Thrush] is the great tone artist, the Red-eyed Vireo is the obligato accompanist, the Song Sparrow is the melodist, and the Partridge controls the drums. But every individual sings his own song!”

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Pippin did what now?

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Just a reminder, I’ll be teaching a class at Chicago Botanic Garden this June, on Mondays starting June 8. Curious about the intersection of birds, art, and history? Birds in art do not begin and end with John James Audubon. Delve in and learn about the stories of various birds through historic materials, including the works of Francis Willughby, Mark Catesby, Thomas Bewick, Sarah Stone, and lesser-known figures in bird conservation such as Wisconsin’s Kumlien family. We’ll also get a chance to visit the Lenhardt Library at the garden and explore rare texts in-person.

Florence Merriam Bailey’s Birds through an Opera Glass stands out among 19th-century books about birds. Many of her contemporaries—think Robert Ridgway1 and Charles Cory—were focused on creating compilations of bird species, much like those of Sibley, Peterson, and Kaufman. While those works were driven by dry description, Bailey’s work is overflowing with vivid detail and delight in being outdoors. Bailey writes with a joyousness that’s palpable and jumps off the page even 137 years later.

Bailey didn’t travel far for her sightings—most are from her childhood home in Locust Grove, New York, or from Northampton, Massachusetts.2 She came from some wealth—her father was a congressman—and so she had the means to spend so much leisure time in the field. Her books became about appreciating nature as much as anything, and she wrote for a general audience in mind rather than the sometimes stuffy scientific community.

So let’s take a moment to enjoy some of Bailey’s writing about springtime, as we are in the midst of the same season that captured her imagination.

Great Crested Flycatcher

“In spring, when a loud piercing whistle comes shrilling from the woods—one note given in rising inflection—I know that the great-crested flycatcher has arrived. There is always an excitement about the event that prompts you to seize your hat and rush out to find him. And a sight of him up in a tree top is worth more than one walk!

What an aristocratic bearing his great crest gives him! And look at his olive coat, his ash-gray vest, and his bright sulphur-yellow knickerbockers! You almost expect him to produce wig and shoe-buckles!”

I have to say I think Great Crested Flycatchers are pretty cool, too.

Yellow-throated Vireo

“The name of this beautiful bird calls up college days, for my first memory of him is a picture of one of the fairest May mornings upon which a Connecticut Valley sun ever rose. Dandelions were just beginning to dot the tender grass, and the air was full of busy travellers stopping on their northward journey to see the beautiful old New England town that the bird-voiced Jenny Lind christened the ‘paradise of America.’”

What’s nice about this is it’s not just the bird—it’s the tranquility of a western Massachusetts hamlet in springtime.

The Bluebird

“As you stroll through the meadows on a May morning, drinking in the spring air and sunshine, and delighting in the color of the dandelions and the big bunches of blue violets that dot the grass, a bird call comes quavering overhead that seems the voice of all country loveliness. Simple, sweet, and fresh as the spirit of the meadows, with a tinge of forest richness in the plaintive tru-al-ly that marks the rhythm of our bluebird’s undulating flight, wherever the song is heard, from city street or bird-box, it must bring pictures of flowering fields, blue skies, and the freedom of the wandering summer winds.”

Spring comes and goes fast around here, and a bluebird appearance is always a thrill.

Song Sparrow

“In the spring the song sparrow comes North a few days after the robin, and although the chill from the snow banks gives him a sore throat that makes his voice husky, you may hear him singing as brightly as if he had come back on purpose to bring spring to the poor snow-bound farmers. Even his chirp—of rich contralto quality compared with the thin chip of his cousin—has a genuine happy ring that raises one’s spirits; and when he throws up his head and sings the sweet song that gives him his name, you feel sure the world is worth living in.”

On an eye-wateringly cold day, the Song Sparrow is indeed a fresh sound of spring.

What strikes me most from these descriptions is how much Bailey was in the moment. No cell phone, no distractions, no camera. Her opera glasses would have afforded something like 2X magnification and yet the observations are no less exciting than those seen through modern-day optics.

Like Angelia Kumlien Main, Bailey chronicles her personal observations in a way that is less beholden to the dreary wording of hard science. Further, she makes the idea of hearing a Song Sparrow truly appealing, “you feel sure the world is worth living in.” The enthusiasm of Florence Merriam Bailey remains contagious to this day.

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Birds, Art, and People

New class alert! I’ll be teaching a class at Chicago Botanic Garden this June, on Mondays starting June 8. Curious about the intersection of birds, art, and history? Birds in art do not begin and end with John James Audubon. Delve in and learn about the stories of various birds through historic materials, including the works of Francis Willughby, Mark Catesby, Thomas Bewick, Sarah Stone, and lesser-known figures in bird conservation such as Wisconsin’s Kumlien family. Examine the evolution of game laws and conservation in the late 19th century while discovering more about various species including the greater prairie-chicken, American golden plover, piping plover, and eastern pewee.

This class is something of a re-run of the class I led at the Newberry in August of last year. There’s some new material, though, and we’ll also have the chance to visit the garden’s Lenhardt Library to view some rare natural history works.

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Sea Rocket is back…

…and all is right with the world. Imani and Sea Rocket have reunited at Chicago’s Montrose Beach.

I was at an event recently that shall go nameless. It was an interesting mix of birders and non-birders. Toward the end of the event, a guy started chatting on his way out the door. “That was weird,” he said to a stranger, an innocent birder. “What do you mean?” said the birder. “Just the way you all of you were talking about birds. It was all you talked about.” He had a sheepish grin, so maybe he realized what he was saying was a little too honest. To him, the fascination if not obsession of birding was off-putting. The birder replied cheerfully with a long list of reasons why birding is great.

The exchange didn’t come as a surprise to me. After more than one of my Piping Plover talks, someone has come up to me to avow “I still don’t like birds.”

The thing is, the same guy who judged birds is probably obsessed with, say, college football. Perhaps he is a fan of some school and goes to every tailgate and puts on face paint and spiked shoulder pads. Perhaps he and the wife are clad head-to-toe in team gear. Maybe he went to the school. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he brings a seating pad for the bleachers. He still does this when the team is crushing East-Central Michigan by 73 points.

We all live in various bubbles. To many, the football obsession is weird. So is quilting, golf, stamp collecting, Pokemon, and gardening.

It’s a reminder that birders are still in a bubble, even though we’ve nearly gone mainstream with celebrity birders and mentions in television series.1 There are a lot of people out there who don’t give birds a passing thought.

Birding is one of the least-weird obsessions there is. What’s wrong with being outdoors in a meditative setting, minding one’s own business? The world would be better off with more birders. A whole universe opens up when one recognizes birds and gets a glimpse of their extraordinary lives.

This man’s view is a reminder to myself to be more open-minded. After all, all of us are trying to find joy in an increasingly uncertain world. What we do to pass the time is often the most fulfilling aspect of life. Even if it is kinda “weird.”

So laugh all you want, bucko. The birder lives life closer to nature and in tune with a world you’ll never have the benefit of experiencing. We live life on our own terms, without a concern to what’s considered “weird.”

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Eventually three of the eggs hatched by July 8. The fourth, though, was left unhatched in the nest scrape while Monty and Rose took to brooding the new chicks (one of which was our current resident Imani). Wildlife officials retrieved the precious egg, and it was transported to Lincoln Park Zoo where it hatched. Within days, the “zoo baby” was returned to the beach. Chicago Piping Plovers wrote this in a season recap at the time:

Without a doubt, this was the most moving moment of the entire season: Rose rushing to Zoo Baby and immediately brooding them, and Monty later flattening in the sand and piping softly to attract the baby to him.

Only two of the four chicks that year—Siewka and Imani—made it to fledging. All four members of the plover family went south by the end of that summer, but Imani and Siewka weren’t seen during the winter of 2021-2022.

You might not be familiar with these plovers or with the the story of Monty and Rose. In 2019, the pair became the first to nest in the Chicago city limits in about 70 years, even as they dealt with high lake levels and a potential music festival on the beach. The Great Lakes Piping Plover population has long been highly endangered, dwindling all the way to about a dozen pairs in the early 1990s (they’ve since rebounded). The dapper plover pair inspired an entire metropolis with their resilience and their parenting skills.

Monty was the first of the plovers to return in 2022 and passed away suddenly that May. It appeared Chicago would be embarking on a summer without plovers, as Rose hadn’t appeared and Imani and Siewka’s whereabouts were unknown. Then something truly unexpected happened, just one week after we lost Monty:

Here’s what I wrote then:

It was an unbelievable turn of events. Not only was Imani still with us, but he was enjoying a Lake Superior beach about 500 miles north of Chicago. Piping Plovers face much mortality in their first year, including many risks during winter and migration. And Friday was National Endangered Species Day no less.

Then there was another astonishing chapter days later in 2022, when Imani returned home:

Last week Imani abruptly showed up back at Montrose Beach, where he hatched last year and fledged along with Siewka. Imani’s still there as of yesterday, too, though there’s no sign of a female around as a potential mate.

Imani hung around long enough to be present during the commemoration of Monty and Rose and their offspring that took place at the beach Wednesday. Despite the threat of severe weather, more than 100 volunteers and plover fans attended the ceremony at the Montrose Beach House.

Imani remains the only bird hatched at Montrose Beach who’s returned to Montrose Beach (Siewka never made it back). He’s gone on to nesting success in 2024 and 2025 with Sea Rocket, a bird transplanted to Illinois from a rescue in upstate New York. Imani and Sea Rocket fledged Nagamo in 2024 and Bean and El in 2025.

Imani is back at Montrose Beach right now, having returned last week along with wingman Pippin, an unpaired male from Green Bay, Wisconsin. We hope Sea Rocket is not far behind, and maybe we’ll get a surprise appearance by one of their offspring.

As Imani approaches 5 years old—and the median life span for Piping Plovers—it’s a moment to look back at that challenging summer of 2021 and think about the impact it made. Imani continues to write the next chapter in the story of Chicago’s Piping Plovers, even though Monty, Rose, and Siewka aren’t around to see it.

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Preparations for 2026 season

I was recently asked whether there is an organized effort to protect the plovers. It was a reminder that not everyone is aware of all that goes into the Piping Plover project here in Chicago. It’s a mighty effort that spans local, state, and federal agencies, as well as several nonprofits and the regional Great Lakes Piping Plover Conservation Team. It’s likely the plovers could not have been successful all these years without many humans helping out.

This year there’s already been a clean-up (above) and a shorebird outreach day at the beach. There is a full complement of volunteer monitors ready to observe the plovers and educate the public. Donations have made it possible to have a volunteer outreach coordinator this summer and an education and outreach intern. Among their duties are informing dog owners about the regulations on the beach—dogs are prohibited whether on- or off-leash. Then there’s keeping tabs on the plovers and ensuring people stay away from any nest site.

Click here if you would like to donate to the project and help out Chicago Piping Plovers this season.

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Read my series on the history of Montrose Point, starting with this post:

Last week’s post discussed helpful birds. In contrast, Brown-headed Cowbirds and other brood parasites might be the least helpful birds. Let’s dig in.

Brown-headed Cowbirds are well-known rascals in the bird world. Nearly every other species in North America, of every avian family, lays its own eggs, incubates them, and then takes care of the young until fledging. But not the cowbird. The cowbird drops eggs into other birds’ nests—sometimes dozens of others—for the host birds to raise with their young. This causes many problems for little birds like the Grasshopper Sparrow, Kirtland’s Warbler, or Red-eyed Vireo, as the bigger cowbird babies out-compete the other nestlings.1 Like other brood parasites, baby cowbirds will push unhatched eggs right out of the nest.

It gets worse, though. If a cowbird finds a nest full of the host’s chicks, it’ll toss out the nestlings so the whole process has to start over. That means more opportunities to dump some of their own eggs. And cowbirds will retaliate against the host if one of their eggs doesn’t hatch.

In response, a few birds like American Robins and Yellow Warblers have adapted to deter cowbirds. PhD student Sarah Winnicki shared in a 2020 presentation that Yellow Warblers recognize cowbird eggs and will bury them under nesting material. Robins will chuck cowbird eggs out of the nest.

But maybe cowbirds deserve some respect for their cleverness.2 They’re able to proliferate their species without all of the effort of nesting and feeding. Consider that they have had to evolve to time the laying of their eggs alongside host species. Their scheming could be discovered if they’re too early. If too late, their eggs may be ignored as the others hatch and as the nestlings grow. Female cowbirds may lay up to 50 eggs in a single season—that takes inordinate energy and is a volume that increases the odds of success.

Winnicki states that cowbirds may poke holes in eggs to get a peek and determine how far along they are. Again, another interesting adaptation, one that requires stealth and savvy. And cowbirds have to be unusually observant to even find nests and recognize when egg-laying occurs. These are indeed clever birds.

And unlike some “destructive” species, cowbirds are native birds, that first followed the bison of the Great Plains, benefiting from all the seeds and grasshoppers stirred up by the herds. They then adapted to the cattle introduced in recent centuries and their range expanded east and north.

Cowbirds are back in these climes at this time of year, and I may look at them differently this spring. Even these scamps could use our support.

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It wasn’t always known that unmated birds might help a breeding pair. But in a 1935 article for The Auk, the great ornithologist Alexander Skutch1 published his findings that Brown Jays on the border between Guatemala and Honduras had exhibited cooperative breeding. Skutch identified three types of bird assistants: 1) Juvenile helpers; 2) Unmated helpers; and 3) Mutual helpers. Helper birds aided Brown Jays by bringing food to a mother during incubation and by fending off intruders. They also used their wings to shade nestlings from the sun on hot days.

Skutch and others2 went on to show that many species relied on bird helpers to ensure breeding success. King Penguins famously may feed multiple chicks aside from their own. The Long-tailed Tit, one of the smallest and cutest birds in Europe, often turns to one or two unmated birds to help parents feed nestlings. Skutch notes that the helpers didn’t necessarily join in the nest at night for roosting, but instead likely stayed outside on their own, “cuddled together in balls in dense thickets or sometimes in old nests of their own species or of Winter Wrens.” Some of these birds may be from previous broods. Some could be first-year birds that are not yet sexually mature.

Speaking of wrens, the Southern House Wren of Central America shows some interesting behavior that verges on helper status. Skutch observed that a young wren would stay with—and sleep with—its parents several months after fledging. On the other hand, Northern House Wrens, the species we’re more familiar with here in the Midwest, face a shorter breeding season and typically have two broods. The adults may permit young to linger in a nest box a few days, but once it’s time for another brood they’ll keep the juveniles away.

As we’ve seen here with our Piping Plovers, males and females share incubation duties and both sexes brood the chicks. Bank Swallows, another species at Montrose Beach, do the same. Skutch relates a story about observing a pair of Blue-throated Motmots in their burrows. In an experiment, he removed one motmot from the burrow as it was incubating. The other motmot took over without a sound.

In winter, we see multiple species coming together for greater protection while feeding in the cold woods. Golden-crowned Kinglets flock with each other and with other small songbirds including Tufted Titmice, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Downy Woodpeckers, Black-capped Chickadees, and White-breasted Nuthatches. There is strength in numbers, more birds on alert, together making it known where the food is.

All of this suggests that there is an evolutionary advantage to helping and that altruism is far from superfluous or frivolous. We humans could take a lesson from that, too. Everyone can lend a hand once in a while.

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Previous posts on this topic are here (The Army settles in at Montrose Point), here (When the lakefront was for warbirds), here (When Montrose was for bathing), and here (The Magic Hedge takes shape).

Back in 1995, the Magic Hedge was the place to be if you wanted to see warblers in Chicago. While the site had come a long way since the Army left in 1971, it was just one cluster of shrubs that provided the food and shelter that birds require. It was the kind of place that would eventually be called a migrant trap, for its honeysuckle was so attractive that the birds just couldn’t pass it up.

It was a different story out on barren Montrose Beach, which became a stronghold for Piping Plovers and other shorebirds decades later.

“On rare occasions, you would get a Piping Plover. But Waukegan Beach was the place to get them in those days,” says longtime birder Al Stokie. “I don’t think people were looking for them as much, and maybe the reason was the beach wasn’t as fancy as it became.”

The beach was changing, though. For decades, the Park District plowed sand toward the eastern end of the beach. It made for a smooth beach for the sun bathers and swimmers. Eventually a few cottonwoods and willows had appeared in the heap of sand at the east end. Finally, it was a daily birder named Kanae Hirabayashi who stopped the bulldozers from plowing under the trees.

“It was really miraculous once they stopped grooming the beach,” says Judy Pollock, then President of the Bird Conservation Network. “It’s funny, I thought they would just groom the beach forever. You don’t really think these things can change.”

Leslie Borns and her husband, John Purcell, would go birding regularly at Montrose Point.

“We started looking at plants when there weren’t many birds,” Borns says. “I couldn’t identify these green fingers in the sand. I knew a lot of plant people and asked them about Lake Shore Rush.”

The discovery of two endangered plants—Lake Shore Rush (Juncus balticus), along with Sea Rocket (Cakile edentula) by a woman named Margo Milde—meant the park district had to take action. Lake Shore Rush hadn’t been seen on Chicago’s lakefront since 1946, and Sea Rocket was on the state threatened list.

The Chicago Tribune ran a feature story, “Singing sands of time,” on the cover of the Metro section on December 3, 2000, that described two “baby dunes” that had appeared at Montrose due to “benign neglect” by the Park District. Early on the hope was that shorebirds—plovers and sandpipers—might eventually use the newly created habitat. “They use these plants on the beach for cover,” said Borns at the time, 19 years before Piping Plovers would eventually nest. “I’d like to see the area protected and preserved. These dune systems that are emerging are very fragile ecosystems.”

“I became aware of Leslie, because we were doing a lot of work to revive the Magic Hedge, and the Park District was spending a lot of funds toward restoration,” said Mary Van Haaften, who was then Natural Areas Manager with the Chicago Park District. “In the City of Chicago to find state listed or state threatened species, it really is something in an environment like that, a Cold War site. Any time something special came up it was just so rare and wonderful.”

Discussions began among birding clubs and the park district. The initial goal was to get a fence in place to keep people and dogs from trampling the foliage. It was the first of many examples of advocates and volunteers taking steps to revert the beach back to a coastal dune habitat.

“I started to develop a vision because [the land] was starting to evolve, and I wanted to recognize and enhance an ecological process,” said Borns, who soon became volunteer site steward. “I thought let’s fence the whole end of the beach and let things go.”

Susanne Masi, coordinator of Plants of Concern, a Chicago Botanic Garden program, noticed more rare plant species emerging and documented them. Lake currents and wind were pushing native seeds south from places like Wisconsin.

“It was pretty surprising. [Dune systems] vary because of lake levels and winds. They are quite fluid environments,” Masi says. “With low lake levels, a record from 1999 through about 2014, that just allowed for all of this habitat to develop in a very short period of time.”

“The sedge diversity there is absurd, the number of rare sedges there,” notes Greg Spyreas of the Illinois Natural History Survey. “It’s extraordinary how they got there, where did they come from? It doesn’t exist even 40 miles near there.”

“It wasn’t just that it got protected from grooming and things like that,” adds Eric Ulaszek, now retired from the Illinois Natural History Survey. “It was volunteers who really got involved and got things done. [Without volunteers] it would probably be a thicket with tough natives and invasives crowding out what’s unique there.”

This small but active group of citizens came together just as Mayor Richard M. Daley had made environmental issues a priority for the city.

“We really started opening up the areas and that is when these conservative species started appearing, sedges, forbs, plants, listed species and others,” Borns says.

“Montrose kind of kicked the whole thing off,” Pollock says. “Without [Mayor Daley], none of this really would have happened.”

“When I was there, we had 50 designated Nature Areas, ranging from the Magic Hedge to the [Montrose] dune habitat, to native plant gardens, and the Jackson Park lagoon area,” Van Haaften says. “That was Mayor Daley, he took a great interest in wildlife to his credit.”

Spyreas’ job is to map endangered species and create environmental impact statements. His first visit came when he was assigned to visit the dunes and meet with Borns.

“I had never seen anywhere like that in my entire life,” he says. “Literally in the middle of one of the densest cities and one of most well used parks and it had just kind of sprung up.”

“In Illinois, we have so little natural lakefront,” Masi says. “For that reason, and the fact that it is so developed, it makes Montrose and other sites so very special.”

The dunes were named a state natural area in 2005 because of the quality of the habitat. The fenced-off area not only was good for plants but good for birds also—particularly shorebirds that travel vast distances and need a place to rest and forage undisturbed. Those have been the conditions for the most part ever since.

“You’re usually losing species, losing habitats,” says Spyreas. “It’s a war of attrition, losses instead of wins. [Montrose Dunes] are one of a handful of wins.”

Piping Plovers are a sort of grail bird around the Great Lakes in that only a few dozen pairs remained in the early 21st century. By the 2010s, though, numbers were rebounding and the dunes were seeing more and more. Each year from 2010 through 2018 recorded at least one Piping Plover at the beach.

“For me, this was a very big deal, that you could transform habitat and create habitat and such a dramatic change in the landscape, which led directly to the Piping Plovers,” Pollock says.

Piping Plovers nested at Montrose Beach in 2019, the first in Chicago in 70-plus years, and continue to be a fixture. That first pair, as many readers know, was Monty and Rose.

“Much credit is owed to Leslie [Borns],” Van Haaften says. “She noticed that first tiny plant, took action, and made something possible that even I didn’t believe was possible—that someday Piping Plovers would return.”

Read related posts here:

When last we wrote, the Army had departed its barracks at Montrose Point in 1971 but left the Magic Hedge behind. The park district, with federal funds, hired wrecking firms to raze the old structures and restore the point to a modicum of nature. Within 20 years or so, the hedge was considered the best place in Illinois to see warblers in spring migration.

Reverting the point to something truly natural, though, didn’t happen right away. The park district failed to spend all the money the Army gave them for restoration.1

“All they did with those sites was razed the buildings, grow some grass and plant a few trees,” said Dale Pontius, a longtime user of Jackson and Burnham parks, said at the time.

The Army had left not with a proverbial bang but with a whimper. Recall that many environmentalists and pacifists were upset by the missile bases in the parks in the first place.

“The only ‘shots’ fired in anger in connection with the whole Nike program have been verbal potshots the public has taken at us for taking all that land in the first place,” said an Army Corps of Engineers spokesman in 1975.

A previous post took a look at the shrubs that became the Magic Hedge in detail. The ragged line of honeysuckle was planted to cover up the unsightly military command center. The site was spacious, grassy and devoid of almost any natural habitat. It drew in birds, though, because of its location on a promontory. It takes less energy for birds to fly directly from places like Indiana Dunes over Lake Michigan to Montrose Point than to hug the coastline or head inland.

“The area right next to the Magic Hedge, it was not a prairie or a field, it was a lawn,” says longtime birder Al Stokie.2 “You’d go over to the hedge and in those days that was about all you could go to, they were the only trees there. It had a big lawn and short grass, like walking in the lawn in front of your house.”

The first published reference to the Magic Hedge came in the Chicago Tribune in 1988.3 “The Magic Hedge, a row of bushes at the tip of Montrose peninsula that has a reputation for attracting bizarre wanderers, lived up to its name again this year. The most unusual was a magnificent frigate, a large tropical bird likely blown thousands of miles from the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricane Gilbert.”

Another early reference came in a brief Chicago Tribune article in 1989, noting a rather mundane Black-and-white Warbler.4 It was the warblers that were the draw—and continue to be to this day

“The whole purpose of going to Montrose was doing the hedge area and the harbor looking for the ducks,” Stokie says. “You really didn’t do the fields, there was no prairie, you didn’t do the beach. It wasn’t a big destination, you went to Montrose to look for warblers in the hedge.”

A 1990 sighting of a Brown Pelican drew more attention to the area around the hedge.5 “This is big news,” James Landing, a trustee of the Chicago Audubon Society, said at the time. It was the first Brown Pelican in Illinois north of Quincy. The same piece went on to describe the hedge as a “clump of shrubs and bushes that birders refer to as the ‘magic hedge’ because so many birds are attracted there to feed and rest.”

In October 1998, the Chicago Tribune wrote a large Sunday magazine feature, “Avian Nation,” with the irreverent deckhead “Birding isn’t just for little old ladies anymore.”6 The story profiled several birders including Dave Johnson, Judy Pollock, Carol Nelson, Dennis DeCourcey, and Kanae Hirabayashi, a retired insurance company analyst who visited the Magic Hedge every day. “I ride my bike over there to see these beautiful creatures,” she said, “these very small bodies that have traveled thousands of miles to get here and have farther to go. It’s such a serene feeling.”

By this time a couple of sand dunes had formed over on the east end of Montrose Beach, near where the beach groomers turned around on their daily rounds. A few willows and cottonwoods had sprouted and attracted birds. It was Kanae Hirabayashi who stopped the big bulldozers from taking out the trees.

“[She] put herself in front of the trucks and said ‘stop,’” recalls birder and volunteer steward Leslie Borns. “She said ‘Don’t mow those trees’ and got them to stop mowing.”

Next time we’ll get into the story of those dunes, which more than 25 years later, are one of the more unique natural areas in all of Illinois.

Read previous posts here:

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“Did you hear about this guy who swallowed a yo-yo? ... Yeahhh, on a bet! Some clodhopper down in Griffith, Indiana.”

For a few hours in late December, that was me: a clodhopper down in Griffith, Indiana. I hadn’t swallowed a Duncan product or won a bowling alley (that was in Terre Haute). But I did participate in the Dunes West Christmas Bird Count on a waterlogged day in the final week of 2025.

The rain was a sight to behold. It came down in sheets from about sunrise through the late afternoon. Water was ponding everywhere, and The Region’s many drainage ditches and impoundments were near-overflowing. It was the second straight year the count took place in a deluge. We’re on the edge of the Lake Michigan snow belt, making downpours in the middle of winter—apparently now de rigueur—even more anachronistic.

I found myself on the fringes of the Griffith-Merrillville Airport, its runway just yards from where I located a few soggy passerines. The homes and yards here are quite spread out compared to Chicago. As I trekked toward a promising greenway, I heard chickens clucking from a backyard coop. I wouldn’t get anything but a couple sparrows at the greenway, which presaged an increasingly desperate search for most any bird to count that morning, the rest of which took place from the warm and dry confines of my late model Honda.

At one point I went two hours without seeing a single bird, such was the biblical rainfall. I circled through several cemeteries, studying every tree and shrub and even a few monuments for signs of any movement. Then I scanned a few retention ponds by Costco and Hilton Garden Inn and still came up empty.

I headed back north to Ross, an unincorporated community alongside Gary. Here’s where I encountered a swampy landform, the Cady Marsh Ditch. This humble but wild tract is a remnant of the Lake Michigan strand plain. This once was the ancient lake shore itself, where water sloshed back and forth as the glaciers retreated, leaving a series of remnant shorelines on the landward side. Some of the remnant shorelines resulted in the larger dunes like the Tolleston. There are signs of this all throughout The Region and into Illinois, too. As the glaciers retreated, the earth’s crust rebounded from the weight of the ice. Lake Michigan was much larger and stretched well into Illinois and Indiana. Each time there was a rebound more water went from the southern Great Lakes toward the St. Lawrence River watershed, and the lakes reduced in size. Ancient Lake Michigan receded, leaving little gullies like Cady Marsh Ditch behind. Most of the natural shorelines have long since been eradicated by industry.

I was running out of adjectives to describe the rain when I entered Ridgelawn Cemetery near Ross. There were wooded stands on the periphery of the large graveyard that looked enticing though proved empty. I looked every cemetery tree up and down for signs of life. At the top of one scrawny conifer, there was either a bird or a clump of leaves. It turned out to be a bird, riding out the storm on a lofty perch. It was a small raptor, and when I really focused it was clearly a Merlin.

As there was nothing else to do, I watched it for a while, and it stayed in place despite the conditions. Merlins aren’t around my usual haunts, so this was exciting (in fact, a first for my Indiana life list).

I concluded the day with a list so brief that it could have been written on a napkin. But that Merlin and visiting places like Cady Marsh Ditch made it memorable.

More antics from the Bears

When last we discussed the Chicago Bears’ desire for a new stadium, this space noted that the all-glass façade placed along Lake Michigan would be devastating for birds making their way north or south during migration. The Bears’ stadium situation has long been, well, weird. Helmed by the mercurial McCaskey family, the team renovated the old Soldier Field with a widely panned design back in the early 2000s. The bizarre current situation, though, has many longing for a time when we could just make fun of the old renovation. Soldier Field was rocking this year as the Bears had their best season in recent memory. Millions and millions of dollars are still owed to the state for that 2003 renovation.

Now the forces are aligning for the Bears to play their home games in Hammond, Indiana, just across the Illinois border. Birders’ ears perked up all over Chicagoland when the news came that the site would be at Wolf Lake, a noted avian hotspot. On the Illinois side of the lake, there have been 248 species observed. Adjacent Eggers Grove has seen 254. On the Indiana side—perhaps birded less often—there have been 234 species observed, fifth most of any site in Lake County, Indiana.

The stadium placement would affect both resident and migratory birds. Wolf Lake just isn’t any inland lake, it sits at the southern tip of Lake Michigan meaning it’s along a vital migratory corridor for much of the year. Birds coming from the south use the area as a stopover point when they encounter the vast expanse of the lake—a major obstacle and one that requires inordinate expenditures of energy. A stadium placed there be yet another obstacle in getting to the northern breeding grounds. In fall migration, the problem would be reversed. Then there are all the breeding birds like Mute Swans and Caspian Terns that would be pushed to the western side of Wolf Lake as the stadium is constructed.

Commissioner Roger Goodell is said to have visited Wolf Lake as part of a Bears-led tour of potential sites. I wonder if he brought a spotting scope to view the swans.

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It’s been a good winter for American Robins locally. There’s probably a scientific reason for this, but all I know is that I’ve found concentrations of robins throughout the city and suburbs. Discussing robins in winter has long been a hobby horse for me. In one of the first posts for Ye Olde Substacke, I spoke with Bob Fisher about robins. No one has seen more robins in Chicagoland winter than Bob. In winter, robins subsist on berries; the ones we see here are likely birds that breed much farther north—note that robins breed north of the Arctic Circle!

Further, you might recall the time robins invaded the Back 40 thanks to a grub outbreak a couple years ago:

As if on cue, Northern Cardinals began singing on February 1. Cardinals are already staking out territory, and you may see several males fighting amongst themselves for breeding space, even in February. A subtle sign that spring is on the way. A cardinal belting out a song before dawn gives one hope in this gloomiest month. Five years ago I wrote:

Starlings come in murmurations, crows in murders, and magpies in a parliament. It doesn’t appear there’s an official term for a flock of cardinals. But If there was such a term for cardinals, for me it would be an appreciation.

In the handful of years I’ve been birding the Lake Border Upland, I can count only a couple of observations of a Pine Siskin. These small finches are a sort of nomadic species, especially in the East. They chase after seed crops, and truly delight in the catkins high in mature trees. This winter has been a good one for siskins in this corner of the Upper Midwest. I had to do a double-take when I heard their buzzy, rising zrrreeee call at a favorite winter spot for passerines. Then, on the same day, a careful study of my feeder yielded a siskin in among the goldfinches. They have been regular here for several weeks now.

It’s easy to want to wish this month of the birding season away. Instead, why not embrace it? The woods are quiet as are the prairie paths and lakefront breakwalls.

My kind of music

Congress of Starlings enthralled the crowd on February 6 at the legendary Old Town School of Folk Music. The local indie favorites, led by birder Aerin Tedesco, sang and strummed their way through songs about shrikes, ravens, ovenbirds, and, of course, Piping Plovers (full disclosure: their original song “The Gift” appeared in my “Monty and Rose” films). A vocal contingent of Piping Plover monitors in the audience made it known that this was music for birders by birders. Their new album, “Orphans,” is available via Bandcamp. It includes “The Gift” and songs like “O Peregrine” and “Ravensong.” The song “Outside Chance” appeared in the feature-length “The World of Monty and Rose.” Kudos also to opening act Modern Drugs, from Champaign-Urbana, which rocked the house with power pop and hook-laden rock.

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When last we wrote, the Army had just installed a Nike missile base spanning Chicago’s Montrose Point and Belmont Harbor. The Integrated Fire Control, command center, and barracks were positioned at Montrose Point, and the missiles themselves were 24 feet underground in magazines just south of Belmont Harbor. The military had taken over the parkland during World War II and soon after the completion of the Montrose-to-Foster extension, essentially a landfill that pushed the shoreline east by nearly 1 mile.

Army Spc. Richard Liepold of Mishawaka, Indiana, was just 20 years old when he was stationed at a Nike base in Arlington Heights, Illinois.1 Liepold, small in stature and often with a mischievous grin, was the primary subject of a 1959 article that appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune. He was perhaps typical of the young men at missile defense sites across the country, including at Montrose Point. The experience of being a missile man was generally an exercise in monotony, though Liepold noted that “there is usually too much to do around here. And there is plenty to keep us occupied off duty.” A photo accompanying the article shows Liepold playing pool in the recreation hall, and it’s also said that he and others go into the town of Arlington Heights for fun off-duty. There was a television set in the day room, a library, and a space for ceramics and wood crafts.

Liepold’s work day began at 5:30 a.m., and he was in the chow line for breakfast from 6 to 7 a.m. By 7:45 a.m., he was awaiting orders as he was headed to the missile pits. The article notes: “The men check every missile, testing every fin or vane, every screw, every large or small part, making sure that they are completely clean.” Sometimes, though, the men were just sweeping up or mowing the grass. Practice alerts and crew drills were done weekly, and every four days one of the batteries would get a “15-minute standby” order. The battalions had to be ready for sneak planes all day, every day.

Landscaping would seem to be the furthest thing from military planners’ minds, but outcry about blighted views may have brought shrubbery to the fore. It’s that vegetation that would become the Magic Hedge and a haven for birds (and birders) by the 1980s. Soon after the bases opened, residents spoke out against unsightly radar towers and other structures, all surrounded by barbed wire fencing. A lack of lake views and a decrease in property values were a real concern. There was a lot to be riled up about, what with the ceding of city land to the military rent free.

Hyde Park resident Leon Despres (pronounced de-pray), who would go on to become a longtime alderman, was among those objecting to the missile bases.2 Despres spoke at a park district hearing on the matter in 1956, concerned about the lakefront and places like nearby Promontory Point, the command center for the Nikes placed in Jackson Park to the south. Despres was a fixture of Chicago independent politics for decades and became something of an icon. A young Bernie Sanders once worked on his aldermanic election, and Despres served as a political mentor to a young organizer named Barack Obama. Upon Despres’ death in 2009, the then-President issued a statement: “Through two decades on the Chicago City Council and a long lifetime of activism, Leon Despres was an indomitable champion for justice and reform. With an incisive mind, rapier wit and unstinting courage, he waged legendary battles against the corruption and discrimination that blighted our city, and he lived every one of his 101 years with purpose and meaning. I have been blessed by his wise counsel and inspired by his example.”

Despres was among the pacifists and environmentalists speaking out in opposition along with the Illinois Audubon Society and community organizations based in Hyde Park. Advocates suggested that a battery be moved to a landfill island off-shore from Hollywood Avenue on the Far North Side. Perhaps the fight against the Nike installations was what helped Despres get elected 5th Ward alderman in the first place. Without Leon Despres, perhaps Obama doesn’t get elected State Senator.

Around the same time the Army was facing another opponent: the Air Force. The Army’s second-generation Nike missiles, or Hercules, had a range of about 75 miles; the Air Force’s Bomarc missiles had a range of 200 miles.3 The Air Force had been criticizing the effectiveness of the Nikes—and specifically the effectiveness of the Chicago air command. One wonders if the critiques were a factor in the demise of the Nikes, even as the Army rolled out Ajax, Hercules, and eventually Zeus missiles. The first bases to close in the Chicago area were as early as 1962, at least in the case of the Burnham Park site.4

But likely the bigger factor was the development of the intercontinental Minuteman missile. The launch of Sputnik had shaken the U.S. military. It was now possible that an ICBM could be fired from the Soviet Union toward the mainland United States, and that a U.S.-based missile could intercept it from most anywhere. The Army increasingly was turning to the Minuteman, stationed in places like Grand Forks, North Dakota, and Malmstrom, Montana.

The number of Nike sites were gradually decreasing in the Vietnam years. Some closed in the Chicago-Gary defense area in the early ’60s, others closed as late as 1974. After 15 years or so in operation, the Nike missile site spanning Belmont Harbor and Montrose Point was announced to be closed in June of 1971. With priorities shifting and the missile bases nearly obsolete, the Department of the Army’s historical summary from that year captured the moment well:

“During fiscal year 1971, with combat operations in Vietnam drastically reduced…the dimensions of a new Army challenge began to emerge. How could the Army, on the heels of an unpopular war, in the face of antimilitary sentiment and social ferment, with reduced strength and appropriations, and without resort to the draft, maintain a strong, viable, and professional ground force to meet its current and future roles and missions?5”

Wrecking firms were hired for $200,175 by the Park District Board with Defense Department funds. The demolitions, including blasting of underground bunkers, were completed on July 19, 1971, the date the Army terminated its lease. Aerial photos show that within two years the site at Montrose was virtually erased. The hedge was still standing, though, and it’s visible in the middle of this photo.

The Army had dramatically altered the character of Montrose Point. But the changes wouldn’t be permanent, as anyone can tell you who’s been there recently. Next time we’ll look at the arrival of birds (and birders) at the Magic Hedge, and the making of a hotspot that draws birdwatchers from across the country.

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Read the other stories in this series:

When we left off, none other than the great landscape architect Alfred Caldwell was making plans to turn Montrose Point into a masterpiece of park design. The Montrose-to-Foster extension, which developed the location for recreational purposes, had been completed in early 1934. But the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. involvement in World War II put much on hold. Including the plans for Montrose Point.

The heart of the heart of what is now the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary is the Magic Hedge. It’s become harder to discern the hedge through the years, as the vegetation has grown up all around it, but at one time it was the avian centerpiece of this unusual landform jutting into Lake Michigan. The hedge was known to attract dozens of warbler species making their way north during spring migration. It was such a magnet that it was considered magical for the way it drew in birds. It was specifically the Magic Hedge that was the draw for birds—and birders—in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, even more than the entirety of the point.

How the hedge got there has been a little unclear (at least to me), and I’ve heard different things through the years.1 It’s often been stated that the hedge existed to cover up a missile base that was located on the point during the Cold War. That’s only partly true, though, as we’ll get into in this piece.

It may not be that important what this place was, though, except for particularly curious birders like me, but it does provide a glimpse into American society from the Korean War through Vietnam. As I read through army reports, there was an emphasis on the imminent threat posed by the Soviet Union and China. “The communist threat of aggression is global in scope,” stated the 1953 Semi-Annual Report from the Secretary of Defense. “It is a threat against the Free World as a whole, and against our own Nation in particular, because the existence of a strong, free, and determined United States is the most formidable barrier to communist world domination.”2

The country was fighting the Korean War when the decision was made to build defensive missile installations at dozens of locations around major cities. It was a massive and expensive undertaking and not without controversy. In addition to protecting civilians, the defense rings were meant to protect commerce, hence the build-up around places like Gary, Indiana, what with its steel mills and nearby oil refineries. Enemies could strike a blow to supply chain as well as people, and the Great Lakes was pivotal to national security. Another place mentioned as crucial was the area around the Soo Locks that connect Lake Superior and Lake Huron.3 The locks handled the iron ore from the ranges in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that provided 83 percent of the supply for American steel. It was there that the army placed balloon barrages to protect the locks.4 These were unmanned zeppelin-shaped balloons with steel cables hanging down to protect against air attack.

Short-range, 90mm gun batteries already were set up on Chicago’s lakeshore by 1950, around the same time President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb.5 The area around Montrose was an early site for air defense, as Chicago Mayor Martin Kennelly and Park District President James Gately were said to have observed an artillery demonstration at Montrose Avenue and the Outer Drive in 1951.6 Another report states that artillery was positioned east of Montrose Harbor before the site became associated with the Nike program. The idea of using parkland for military purposes wasn’t completely unknown. At least 10 anti-aircraft gun sites were already set up on the lakefront—and continued to be—even as the missile sites were put in place.7 The brigades most likely were housed in Jamesway tents, which were long, wooden structures with curved roofs something like Quonset huts.8

When lightning struck an ammunition dump inland on Foster Avenue and caused a major explosion, questions were raised about the utility of the anti-aircraft batteries—and their safety.9 The explosions at Foster and Kedzie Avenue were heard as far south as the Loop and as far north as Evanston. Miraculously, all of the soldiers quartered at the site survived the disaster. A colonel in the Army defended the artillery in 1953, stating the guns were a last-ditch defense against sneak planes. “We are not wasting taxpayers’ money putting them there just for looks,” he said.10

After at least eight years of research and development, the Army was prepared to announce new batteries featuring surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles or the first generation of Nike guided missiles in 1953.11 The Army announced the Chicago area sites in late 1954—one of 12 sites that were expected to be constructed by the following May. Prior to then, missiles and rockets were simply aimed at targets and fired. They couldn’t be controlled remotely or with internal equipment. That changed with the Nike.

Nike missiles were touted as a game-changer by the Army. Named for the mythological Greek goddess of victory, they were 20 feet in length, could fly from 1,200-1,500 mph, and reach targets as high as 15 miles and 35 miles distant. The ordnance would be placed underground in magazines and hoisted into position by hydraulic lifts like those in an auto mechanic’s shop. The bunkers were accompanied by refuge and control rooms where the crew would remain while the missiles fired.12

The sites would include trained gunners, and radar and electronic specialists on full-time duty. The squadron would be made up of six officers and 88 enlisted men, majority career soldiers, at each site. Interestingly, many of the local sites are in prime birding locales today: Skokie Lagoons, Argonne National Laboratory, Indiana Dunes, Wolf Lake, the Cal-Sag Channel, Burnham Park, and Jackson Park. Lake Michigan prevented setting up missile batteries on the eastern flank of the city. Placing them on warships in the lake was too expensive, so the next best options were the lakefront parks. One site positioned at the end of a runway at Meigs Field eventually was moved because of the obvious hazard to planes.13

The layout of the batteries leads us to one of the misconceptions about the Magic Hedge. I thought I’d heard that the shrubs covered up missiles at Montrose Point. But that never was the case, despite the area’s use as an artillery site going back to the late 1940s. The important thing to remember is that the Nike missiles themselves were never placed at Montrose. The missiles were stored in magazines 24 feet underground at the southern edge of Belmont Harbor, approximately 1 mile south. Montrose served as the command center and radar site, located where the beach house is now, in smaller buildings that may or may not remain. The barracks for the 100 or so men stationed there were uphill from the command center, at the center of Montrose Point, roughly where the Magic Hedge is today.

Every site in the Nike missile program was designed in a similar way, with the command center, sometimes called Integrated Fire Control, about 1 mile away from the underground magazines like those at Belmont. The adjacent barracks at Montrose included mess, recreation hall, and a motor pool. At this time, and for many years afterward, vehicles could drive out to the far eastern edge of the point via a road on the southern edge. You can see two cars parked in the photo at the top of this post. It must have been convenient for the anglers going for perch and smelt off the point!

As for the appearance of the barracks themselves, I have yet to find a clear photo of the structure at Montrose Point. In the next post, we’re going to get a glimpse of some rarely seen aerial photos of the point in the ’60s and ’70s. But finding a ground-level shot of the barracks would take a level of digging that is impractical as of this writing.

Other installations in the Chicago-Gary defense ring offer some clues, though. They likely were simple one-story rectangular structures that served as residences and administrative buildings. Radar towers were large and spherical in shape; the launcher areas, like the one at Belmont Harbor, look like mini airport runways or tarmac. In Barrington, Illinois, part of the Palatine installation, a 1968 image shows what a barracks looked like a few years after closure. There are a few scattered trees and some overgrown shrubs and not much else. Nothing here suggests a hedge was a standard component of missile site landscaping.

Another site, near Wheeler, Indiana, may still be visible today. In a 1999 application for the national historic register, it was said that “Although deteriorated, the buildings of both parcels are basically intact…Buildings in the Control or Administration Area are in fair to good condition.” The area for that site now appears to be used for a paintball business called “Blastcamp,” appropriately enough.14

One question that’s arisen is whether the warheads in Chicago were nuclear. A newspaper announcement said Chicago was getting atomic weapons, around the time the Hercules generation of the Nike deployed in 1958.15 The army displayed an atom-tipped Hercules at Belmont Harbor, though it wasn’t immediately deployed there. The Portage-Wheeler installation certainly had nukes; the idea was that a short-range nuclear weapon could take out a whole squadron of bombers at once.

The placement of the missiles in Chicago faced public outcry from pacifists and environmentalists. Just a year or so after opening the missile base, a $20,000 initiative sought to beautify the entrances to the Nike sites at Montrose/Belmont Harbor, Burnham Park, and Promontory Point/Jackson Park.16 Most likely these dollars funded the shrubs that became the Magic Hedge. The plantings arrived because residents had spoken out against unsightly radar towers and other structures, all surrounded by barbed wire fencing.

In less than two decades, the plans for Montrose Point had gone from Burnham-inspired natural beauty and recreational space to something far different. Next time we’ll take a look at one of the people who opposed the Chicago bases and what happened when the army finally left. By the late ’60s, the Nike bases were becoming obsolete with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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The 1909 Plan of Chicago, co-authored by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, included a vision for lakefront parks extending all along the city’s shore. Burnham and Bennett1 viewed these lands as recreational, an escape from the drudgery of daily, manual labor.2 One difference from what came to be: the Burnham plan featured a chain of islands from downtown north all the way to Wilmette.3

The city began extending and expanding parkland northward as part of a plan adopted in 1919.4 First from Diversey to Montrose, beginning in 1925, then the Montrose-to-Foster extension that added 308 acres of land to Lincoln Park, including “the largest artificial bathing beach in the world,” what is now Montrose Beach. The Outer Drive would be expanded to ease congestion from cars that had clogged Sheridan Road and Clarendon Avenue.5 There was also the hope that visitors to the 1933 World’s Fair could motor along the lake for the entire length of the city.6

Planners accommodated the extremes of Chicago’s climate: protecting the Outer Drive and adjacent property from vicious winter storms and providing sandy areas for swimming when temperatures approached 100. Burnham’s plan envisioned a waterfront “playground” and grassy areas that ran up to beaches where the lake could meet the shore untrammeled.7 The interwar plans for recreation included a new yacht harbor—the deepest in Chicago—and an 18-hole golf course as well as picnic grounds and tennis courts.8

The beaches along the North Side lakefront were being overcrowded with bathers in the 1920s. The entirety of the North Side project would expand capacity to 185,000 bathers.9 More than 30,000 people had flocked to Clarendon Beach on a single day in the early 1920s and nearly 450,000 had visited annually. Included in the 1920s-era plan was a $500,000 pavilion “with every modern convenience” at Montrose Beach. Some portion of this may still stand today.10

All was well and good until a resident of Wilson Avenue named Clementine Eddy Fisk protested the loss of waterfront by filing a lawsuit. Pushing the lakefront out by almost a mile would be a loss of beachfront property and lake views. In the 1930 Census, she and her husband, William, both 65, listed their occupation as “dry goods.” Mrs. Fisk disputed the plan for two years. A judge eventually ruled in favor of the condemnation of the Fisk property, a 158 by 298 foot lot at Wilson Avenue and the lake.11 At the center of the dispute were riparian rights, but the decision allowed the condemnation of private property for public use. Mrs. Fisk’s primary residence was at 844 Wilson Avenue, a half-block inland from the lake, so presumably she could remain in her home. The park board then proceeded with contracts for the construction of a park fill from Montrose Avenue to Foster Avenue.

January 1931 renderings showed the expanded lakefront and Outer Drive, North Avenue Beach, Montrose Avenue Beach, and a never-built Edgewater Harbor.12 That included a beach on the north side of the harbor that would have been parallel with Devon Avenue. About where Loyola University’s lakeshore campus sits today.

Warren Wright was President of the Lincoln Park Board and President of the Calumet Baking Powder Company. In extolling the benefits of the extended Lincoln Park, in April 1931, Mr. Wright said, “The taxpayers of the Lincoln park district are like the stockholders in a going corporation, except that instead of receiving cash dividends, the returns on their money are computed in the use of the park system and participation in the recreation and pleasure that park activities afford.”13

Some accounts suggest work began on the extension in 1929. The harbor got under way in the Winter of 1930-1931. Beach construction between Montrose and Wilson started sometime the following year, as part of the Chicago Jubilee Celebration. The piers that protruded—Montrose and North Avenue stand out in particular—were meant for recreation and to corral sand for the beaches (the lake’s prevailing currents are from north to south).14 Lake-bottom dredging of sand filled in what nature couldn’t.

By August 1934, an article in the Daily Times described newly opened Montrose Beach, complete with lockers, showers, and comfort facilities as well as brick ovens for beach fires. Columnist Jane Logan, however, wrote that the bulk of North Side beaches lacked “the comfort facilities necessary to protect bathers from disease germs.”15 The Board of Health deemed several beaches unsafe, including Montrose (listed as Wilson), and called for expanded comfort stations and showers. Boaters were at fault, too, and Belmont Harbor was described as “an absolute menace to health.” (These newspaper stories suggesting a 1934 completion of the extension would seem to dispel the notion that the Montrose extension was driven by the New Deal or was a Works Progress Administration project—claims this author has seen elsewhere. The New Deal didn’t begin until 1933 when FDR took office; the WPA did not come into being until May 6, 1935. Funding for the extension was provided by the issuing of bonds in the late ’20s.)16

It was around this time that the esteemed landscape architect, Alfred Caldwell, proposed a design for the middle of the point, the roughly circular area that is the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary today. Caldwell adhered to the principles of the Prairie School and was an acolyte of Jens Jensen, who’s known for designs including Columbus Park, Garfield Park, and Humboldt Park. Caldwell is perhaps most known now for Chicago’s Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, which is a National Historic Landmark. A 2001 article in Landscape and Urban Planning described Caldwell’s Montrose design as “a large meadow enclosed by multi-layered masses of wildflowers, shrubs, and trees, with openings that created views to the lake and the park landscape beyond the point.”17 The idea was to develop a Prairie School concept known as “the broad view” that symbolizes the open prairie but is enclosed by shrubs and trees to create an experience something like a room with walls. But Caldwell’s design never was built. The attack on Pearl Harbor, and the United States’ entry into World War II, would alter the plans for Montrose Point. More in a future post.

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