The new nature documentary, “Beyond Our Senses: Bank Swallows,” is an extraordinary portrait of a single Midwestern species and ties the birds’ story to how we and other creatures perceive the world. Stunningly shot on one Lake Michigan bluff, the film features a “city of swallows” and some surprisingly dramatic moments during the birds’ life cycle. Recently we caught up with filmmaker David Andrew Busse, a four-time Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award-winning video producer and filmmaker based in Wisconsin.

TWiB: How did you get into the Bank Swallows’ story, or become aware of the colony?

DAB: I first discovered this colony when I went to a Milwaukee County park to take photos of Lake Michigan. I walked out to the edge of the bluffs and I saw thousands of birds swirling over Lake Michigan, diving to and from the bluffs in a scene that I found both incredible and chaotic. At the time I was not a birder so I had no idea what type of bird they were and I was fascinated seeing this huge group of birds thriving so close to Milwaukee. I left that day knowing that I wanted to film their colony, but it would be a few years before I began.

When I started filming I thought it would just be for a few days, but every time I filmed I discovered more things that drew me back.

TWiB: How much time did you spend at the beach and bluffs there?

DAB: It’s hard to say how much time I spent there, but for a while my life revolved around observing and filming them whenever I could. This was made difficult because as I worked on this project we were welcoming our first child into the world and I had a full time job, so I would most often observe them on my way to and from work and on visits to the park with my wife. I primarily filmed them at sunrise before work. Over the course of three summers, I filmed them for about 30 mornings total and made countless trips to observe. The first summer was spent gathering as much footage as I could and the following two summers I was filming the scenes I had previously missed.

TWiB: I don’t think I’ve ever seen shots of the Bank Swallow nest from a “burrow cam.” How did you get those?

DAB: One of the challenges of this project was working within my limitations and trying to find creative ways around them. In this case, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to place a nest cam on the bluffs, but couldn’t think of a way to do it without causing erosion and threatening their nests. Unfortunately for me, to do it the right way would require buying a pricey camera, pulling a permit from the park system, building an artificial burrow, and hoping a nesting swallow would actually use my artificial burrow. So I decided to see if anyone else might happen to have filmed nesting bank swallows. Luckily, I found a live stream of a bank swallow nest cam on Youtube that was being broadcast from Harper’s Island Wetlands in Cork, Ireland. They were able to capture this footage because they built a nesting wall with 24 burrows for bank swallows. I reached out to them and they graciously allowed me to use their footage. Little did I know that the most dramatic moments in the film would be happening inside of their nesting boxes.

TWiB: You could have picked any number of species to demonstrate “senses.” Did you think of the Bank Swallow first or the “senses” theme first?

DAB: When I sat down with the 40ish hours of footage I captured and began sorting it, I felt that it didn’t quite capture what I found so fascinating about the swallows. I realized that I was going to need a story element so that audiences would hopefully share in the wonder that I felt watching them. As I learned more about the swallows, I began to appreciate more how their inner world is vastly different from ours. Plus, I’ve always been interested in perceptions and am a fan of shows like Radio Lab and other science shows that seek to spread wonder about our world. I figured that visualizing their perceptions in a story-driven way could create a sense of wonder for viewers and better share how fascinating these overlooked birds are.

“Beyond Our Senses” will be shown in planetarium format at Cernan Earth & Space Center in River Grove, Illinois, in October and November. Check out the trailer here.

Leave a comment

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee through BuyMeACoffee.com. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

A sparrow song spreads east

They’re a little more quiet in fall, but White-throated Sparrows have one of the more familiar songs in North American birding—and one of the most paraphrased. Just check out these:

Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.

Pure Sweet Canada Canada Canada.

Oh Sweet Cana Cana Cana.

All Day Long Fiddlin Fiddlin Fiddlin.

So Wheat, Peverly, Peverly, Peverly.

Oh hear me, Theresa, Theresa, Theresa.

Which one did you learn first? For me, it was Pure Sweet Canada and later Old Tom Peabody.

White-throats’ songs have been well-studied. Schuyler Mathews, in his 1904 tome Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, noted how the birds in northern New Hampshire had a different song than those on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. The Canadian birds elided the second syllable and went right to the Canada Canada Canada.

A study from a few years ago, shared by the Cornell Lab, shows that the sparrows’ song continent-wide is changing. Listening to historic recordings, researchers found that the song in the west had a truncated Oh Sweet Cana Cana Cana before about 2000. Now that song has moved east, and the suspicion is that eastern birds picked up on shared wintering grounds.

I personally haven’t noted this much, and don’t see this showing up in recent recordings on Xeno Canto, but I’ll trust the researchers. It’s something to keep an ear out for when the sparrows are moving through and singing next spring.

Leave a comment

The area northwest of Chicago is a special place. Many waves of glaciation raked over the area for eons. As land and water receded and accreted and did so again, rough patterns began to form.1

Unlike much of the Chicagoland area, this is a rocky, hilly terrain, with freshwater springs left by the waning days of glaciation. The creeks run free and the water is clear, some of the highest-quality in the state. The fens are hanging. The tamarack bogs were some of the southernmost in the United States, so wild and unusual was this parcel straddling Illinois and Wisconsin. The Chain O Lakes and Fox River Valley rest in the low spots between the bigger moraines.

The area around Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge is covered in glacial drift—rock material transported by a glacier and deposited either directly by the ice, meltwater streams, or wind. Portions of the area are right on the border of the Illinoian and Wisconsinan glaciations. This might not seem like much, but areas to the east of Hackmatack were road-graded by glaciers once again in the Wisconsinan period. That didn’t happen in areas to the west.

The name “hackmatack” is derived from an Algonquian word meaning “wood used for snowshoes.” It was utilized by Indigenous makers for toboggans and canoe parts. The author Louise Erdrich calls tamarack bogs “the great Ojibwe pharmacy” for their teas for coughs, berries for snakebite, and willows for indigestion. The bogs outside Chicago wouldn’t be out of place in Minnesota, northern Maine, or the Cascades of the Northwest.

It’s a land of kettle ponds, marshes, shrub swamps, outwash deposits, woodland brooks, and peat-accumulating low spots. On the north-facing slopes, there are red oaks and trillium, the copses described as parklands by early visitors for their scattered trees. It’s typical moraine country, kettle-shaped hills and valleys, the latter often with ponds or lakes and no outlet. It’s in those isolated tarns that we find the Yellow-headed Blackbird, shown in this video, a scarce breeder east of the Mississippi.

Our new documentary, “Welcome to Hackmatack,” tells the story of the establishment of the refuge—the first within 100 miles of Chicago—and its nationally significant ecosystem along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Dedicated in 2012, it has quickly grown to encompass 1,273 acres in McHenry County, Illinois, and Walworth County, Wisconsin. A 985-acre acquisition for the refuge in 2024 was the largest in the Chicago region in this century and created the third-largest conservation landscape in the region. Several parcels are already open to the public for recreational pursuits including birding and hiking.

I’ll continue to post updates here, but if you want additional information and updates visit the Friends of Hackmatack website to sign up. The expected completion date for the film is Spring 2027. Showings will take place in community settings and possibly on public television. Funding for this project comes from The Community Foundation for McHenry County’s Hackmatack Educational Fund.

Watch the Video

‘Polling’ place

I was on the edge of the Hackmatack area months ago when a pair of songbirds landed in a lone tree in a meadow. My peripheral vision told me they were Black-capped Chickadees, but when I looked at them through my camera lens I realized they were Blackpoll Warblers—bigger, streaked, and with two white wingbars. It was a strange location for them, I thought, but in migration weird things happen. These are birds of the subarctic, breeding in the northern prairie provinces and Northwest Territories. But this particular spot in Illinois has more in common with the coulees and barrens of the Great Plains than the tundra-inflected bogs of the far north. I thought about why these two birds—both males—were together. Were they siblings from the same brood? Did they meet on the wintering grounds of South America, somewhere in the southern United States? The Blackpoll Warbler, especially the eastern birds, are known for a migration that has them zipping past the Gaspe Peninsula of the St. Lawrence and directly over the Atlantic Ocean toward Venezuela and Brazil. These two were on an interior course and might have come up through the Caribbean and Florida. It was one of those small moments in migration that could have easily gone by without a second thought.

Leave a comment

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee through BuyMeACoffee.com. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

Wisconsin Point has long been one of the more interesting birding areas in the Badger State. When combined with neighboring Minnesota Point and Park Point Rec Area, the site makes up one of the largest freshwater sandbars in the world1, separating the open water of Lake Superior from Allouez Bay.

Last year, we featured the story of plover monitor Mikayla Erickson and St. Louis River Alliance’s efforts to bring Piping Plovers back to the point. Mikayla and the alliance were hopeful even though plovers hadn’t nested at the site in nearly 50 years. It might seem far-fetched, but it is possible to attract plovers with just the right habitat—see the efforts here in Chicago at Montrose Beach Dunes—and at Wisconsin Point much work was done to create just the right ecosystem. “My goal is to keep this site beautiful,” Mikayla said last year.

So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a pair of Piping Plovers landed at Wisconsin Point and nested there this summer. The birds created several nest scrapes using the crushed shell and cobble that had been purchased locally and spread by hand.

In a web post, Kris Eilers of St. Louis River Alliance (SLRA) commented:

“This first nest is an emotional event after working 14 years to create a safe and attractive place for the birds to nest. We are so grateful for all the partnerships and especially our volunteers who have contributed to the return of this special bird.”

Added Mikayla:

“There is nothing that can describe the awe you feel when they finally choose to nest in a site that was so carefully and thoughtfully created just for them.”

SLRA notes that “Wisconsin Point now joins the Apostle Islands and two sites in lower Green Bay as one of only four locations in Wisconsin supporting nesting piping plovers—underscoring just how important this protected stretch of shoreline has become.”

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources called the nest “a significant milestone,” and noted that SLRA volunteers supplemented efforts by “removing unwanted vegetation, managing woody debris and monitoring for piping plover activity, which dictates when a predator exclosure is deployed over the nest.”

It was a record-breaking year as there were 99 pairs of Piping Plovers nesting across the Great Lakes—the most since the population was first listed as endangered in 1986—and 11 more pairs than last year. The recovery goal is an ambitious 150 pairs. If more places make concerted, years-long efforts like Wisconsin Point’s, that goal might be within reach.

Leave a comment

Watching the rankings

Longtime TWiB readers might recall that I like to keep tabs on species counts at some of the birding hotspots of eastern North America.2

Now we have an update to Wisconsin’s hotspot rankings. Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest freshwater marshes in the United States, recently tied the Manitowoc lakefront for the No. 1 birding spot in the Dairyland. A Lark Sparrow seen on May 22 appears to be the site’s 299th species. Rounding out the top five are Harrington Beach State Park (287), Wisconsin Point (286), and a tie between Lake Park (282)3 and Wind Point (282).

Maybe the weirdest recent addition for sites on this list was a WILLOW PTARMIGAN, Alaska’s state bird, at Pennsylvania’s Presque Isle State Park, earlier this year.

Banking on it

A new birding documentary takes a close look at an often-overlooked species and one that’s on the decline in the United States. “Beyond Our Senses: Bank Swallows,” by filmmaker David Busse, is a beautiful portrait of a massive nesting colony on a Lake Michigan bluff in Wisconsin. Check out the trailer here. “Beyond Our Senses” will be shown in planetarium format at Cernan Earth & Space Center in River Grove, Illinois, in October and November.

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee through BuyMeACoffee.com. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

Buy Me a Coffee

When I’m not watching baseball, running, or tent camping, I’m on a golf course.

Today’s round is at a corporate track in the suburbs. It’s not even noon and the smell of cigar smoke permeates a late summer day. The soundtrack is from that modern scourge, a Bluetooth speaker, blaring Hootie and the Blowfish, The Who, and Motley Crüe.

There are bits of dialog.

“Where’ve you played?”

“Kiawah. Spyglass”

“Guess where I’m going next month. Bandon Dunes.”

A weather-worn sign surrounded by invasive species says this is an Audubon Sanctuary Golf Course. The phragmites and teasel are almost blocking it out. The hedges lining the fairway are of shaped buckthorn.

Something seems amiss. A quick glance at the internet shows that this Audubon sanctioning body isn’t the Audubon you know. This isn’t National Audubon, a state Audubon, or your local chapter. This Audubon, known as Audubon International, is unaffiliated with those Audubons.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1849’s Nature, “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.” A few adult persons could discern among these Audubons. The golf course program gives the sheen of legitimacy for the golfers who notice nature at all.

A few goldenrod and boneset waved in the breeze as I teed off on the 18th hole, clinging on for dear life among the phrag. It was a good round, with fresh air, mild temps, and a few cold beverages. But the sanctuary was for the golfers. Not nature.

America’s best idea

I can recall my first camping trip to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. This was well before the dunes were a national park, but the same rules still applied: Leave no trace. You couldn’t so much as pick up a twig for kindling as everything in the park was (and is) protected. We were careful not to keep any rocks when we were on the beach. And we never collected any wildflowers when the spring ephemerals were in bloom.

It seems a quaint idea nowadays. First there was “border security” construction within the beautiful Big Bend National Park. Then there was a report that Major League Baseball was considering hosting a game inside the boundaries of Grand Teton National Park (is nothing sacre?). Later it was said MLB was no longer considering the idea. Commissioner Rob Manfred, already an unpopular figure, stated that MLB “had not reached the stage in our due diligence in which we evaluated the environmental impact.” Heck, it doesn’t take a study to figure out that.

Safer crossings

Wildlife crossings are becoming more and more common—and successful—in several Western states. The bridges and underpasses save animals and protect humans, too. It might be time for crossings, or at least tunnels or culverts, for species like the Blanding’s Turtle here in Illinois. Fencing can guide the turtles into the culverts, which, whether dry or inundated, can make for a safe passage.

Auguring poorly

A new ad for a web server company shows a former member of the Seattle Seahawks football team handling what’s pretty clearly an Augur Hawk, a sub-Saharan Africa species. A sharp-eyed TWiB reader brought this to my attention. As this space has noted before, the “Seahawk” is really just an Osprey. But an Augur Hawk might be easier to handle than an Osprey from a falconry perspective. It’s too bad because this could be a real educational opportunity to highlight a pretty unique local species in the Osprey.

Best bird shots

Every year that passes is the best year ever in bird photography. Cameras are better than ever, relatively affordable, and there are simply more people in the field. It’s making it such that good photos are almost commoditized. But a new list of 20 images from the Bird Photographer of the Year Award shows that composition, light, and timing still mean something.

New class! The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior

Sign up for my new class at the Chicago Botanic Garden! Starting October 19, in “The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior” where we’ll be reading and discussing bird observations from favorites like Florence Merriam Bailey, Schuyler Mathews, Aretas Saunders, and Alexander Skutch. The class runs four weeks on Monday evenings, 5-6:30pm. On the fifth week, we’ll have an optional morning bird walk at the Garden.

Explore a variety of birds as they sleep, eat, sing, and dance, with an emphasis on midwestern species. Using historical texts, examine the unique behaviors of various species and come away with a better understanding of these often overlooked, but fundamental, aspects of the avian life cycle.

Words to live by

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee through BuyMeACoffee.com. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

State-endangered Blanding’s Turtles are up against a lot, living in the Chicago suburbs, with their tangle of roads, housing developments, and industry. Unlike most turtles, female Blanding’s make long-distance nesting forays—up to 3 miles!—migrating to the ancient beach ridges where they hatched.

“A turtle walking three miles,” said Gary Glowacki, Manager of Conservation Ecology, Lake County Forest Preserves, “there are not a lot of places where a turtle could walk two or three miles and not get hit by a car.”

In thinking about Blanding’s1 conservation, one has to think in terms of decades rather than years. The turtles can live up to 80 years and take about 15 years to reach sexual maturity. There aren’t short-term solutions.

“I started working here 20 years ago,” Gary said. “One of the first things I worked on was a population viability model that looked at where the population was headed. The outlook was really bleak. It predicted a high likelihood that within 50 years, they’d all be gone.”

Enter the Forest Preserves’ captive-rearing program. Gary and the Forest Preserves figured it would take 100 “headstarts” per year for the next 30 years to save the local population from extirpation. The idea was to hatch and raise scores of turtles in captivity to increase the viability of the population.

“We raise them to try to get them to the size so they aren’t a tasty, bite-sized treat for predators,” Gary says.

The Forest Preserve site is close to the Wisconsin border on a former estate. The previous residents had a beach volleyball court that turns out to be the perfect location—with an artificial pool—for captive turtles.

“They live in nice sandy soils, so the volleyball court was kind of ideal,” Gary says.

I’ve had Blanding’s Turtles on my mind because I’m working on a video project about Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge. Blanding’s Turtles are one of the many endangered species at this unique mosaic of habitats on the Illinois-Wisconsin line. I’d always known of the turtles but didn’t really understand how they were any different from the sliders and snappers in the neighborhood. Blanding’s, it turns out, are only semi-aquatic, and remain only in isolated populations in the Midwest. Northeast Illinois is something of a stronghold for the species, if nothing else because of the strength of local conservation organizations.

Blanding’s Turtles are one of the species that benefit most from wildlife corridors, that is, contiguous tracts of natural land where they have plenty of room to thrive. The thing is, there aren’t a whole lot of places in northeast Illinois—or really the Midwest—where they can do that. Turtles, as you might imagine, are at particular risk while crossing roadways.2 Further, they are victims of poaching and the illegal pet trade.

Blanding’s Turtle was first listed as Threatened in Illinois in 1999 due and elevated to Endangered in 2009 due to threats and declining populations. Although populations in Nebraska and Minnesota are estimated to be very large with thousands of individuals, most populations are small and isolated.

“I can’t think of another animal that’s more symbolic of the habitat we find in Lake County, the Chicago region, these coastal landscapes and…marsh habitats, prairies and savannas,” Gary told the Chicago Tribune recently. “And you quickly learn that, by protecting and conserving Blanding’s turtles, you’re really protecting a whole suite of other species.”

Share

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

New class! The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior

Sign up for my new class at the Chicago Botanic Garden! Starting October 19, in “The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior” where we’ll be reading and discussing bird observations from favorites like Florence Merriam Bailey, Schuyler Mathews, Aretas Saunders, and Alexander Skutch. The class runs four weeks on Monday evenings, 5-6:30pm. On the fifth week, we’ll have an optional morning bird walk at the Garden.

Explore a variety of birds as they sleep, eat, sing, and dance, with an emphasis on midwestern species. Using historical texts, examine the unique behaviors of various species and come away with a better understanding of these often overlooked, but fundamental, aspects of the avian life cycle.

Learn More

His new book, To Life: Jews Exploring Nature, illuminates significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

BD: How did the To Life project come together?

JG: I compiled a list of subjects, about 70. One of my criteria was whether the person identified as being Jewish. Of these 70 people, I would end up with eight. There was a range of people, from Joan Ehrenfeld, who was very observant, to arachnologist Herbert Levy, who was raised Jewish in Germany with a big Bar Mitzvah [but then ceased any Jewish practices once he entered the United States, feeling more German than Jewish]. Then you have mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, who was so secular his children were shocked to learn they were half-Jewish.

I interviewed 150 people. That’s one reason this thing took 10 years. I had Zoom sessions with folks living in Ethiopia, Israel, China, Beijing, Panama, and other places. The goal was to learn as much about [my subjects] as possible.

BD: So much has been written about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—did you find anything new? [Read more about Leopold’s back story as a birder here.]

JG: Leopold was a mystery even for people who [were close associates]. I was able to interview two people who knew him, including Elizabeth Spiegel, who had gone on bird walks with him through Jackson Park for $1.50. [Leopold] was my one bad apple. But a couple people have said that his chapter was one of their favorites.

BD: Was it strange that someone later convicted of murder led bird walks with kids for $1.50?

JG: Maybe in hindsight, but Spiegel told me she was totally shocked when she heard the news. As part of [the] bird walks, Leopold would organize an annual picnic with the kids and their moms, and everyone enjoyed his company.

BD: Philip Hershkovitz of the Field Museum, a Curator/Mammalogist, is another person with a local tie. Tell us about him.

JG: Four of the people in the book have strong Chicago roots. Hershkovitz, grew up in Pittsburgh with what would prove to be two lifelong interests, music and most particularly neotropical mammals. He transferred to the University of Michigan in 1931 where he received his BS degree and then entered their graduate program. Two years later he decided to leave Ann Arbor and move to Ecuador, which he had concluded would be the cheapest country where he could live in South America and pursue his principal passion to study mammals. His advisor strongly discouraged him from doing this as he had no contacts [and] didn’t know Spanish at all. He was there for maybe four years, and as time went on, he adopted the ways of the locals, went shirtless and barefoot, and used a blow gun to collect specimens. He seemed to have modeled himself after von Humboldt and Darwin and go to remote areas for years at a time.

He was offered a position at the Field Museum in 1948. Just a month later he brought his wife and daughter to Colombia, where his family would reside in cities as he worked the hinterlands in search of specimens. His wife was lonely but never lost devotion to her husband. Her dream was to move to Chicago, shop at the A&P, wear a dress, and have a doctor. [Hershkovitz] came back to Chicago four years later.

But [Hershkovitz] didn’t get along with numerous museum employees, so to avoid any conflicts, the museum created just for him the position of Research Curator, which enabled him to do his mammal work, while not having to deal with tasks or people he wished to avoid. In Hershkovitz’s hundreds of publications only three had a co-author.

BD: I would like to ask you about the region generally since your “Natural History” is such an important book. In a recent post, TWiB featured Eliza Farnham, who was enthralled by this landscape. We also have some of that in The Best-Known Grouse. Why do you think early European visitors were using phrases like “rise of emotions” in this “sea of grass.” Was it just 19^th century romanticism?

JG: People were really taken by the prairie. All the way into 1840s, they came to the Midwest having come from Europe, where nothing is remotely like the tallgrass prairie. Going east to west, you go through woods, and it’s not until central Indiana that you suddenly see something that is totally foreign to your existence. That’s why so many made analogies to the oceans and the waves, as it was the thing they were familiar with. It was quite rich, there were bison. Some use the term antelope, though they could have been deer. The first settlers preferred the savannas, the transitional areas where there were trees to build things, while the ground was rich.

BD: You’ve spoken eloquently about the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Do you think they get overlooked somewhat?

JG: Dwight Perkins had a notion of a forest preserve—not a park district—to preserve nature and allow people to enjoy it. People like Perkins understood that humans do best when they have places to run around. Cook County now is the second-most populated in the country, only after Los Angeles, and the Forest Preserve District is 70,000 acres of land. Of the nine counties in the area, eight of them have forest preserves or a conservation district and only one does not [Grundy County]. If you add them up, they have 200,000 acres of protected land. Three of the four counties in the state with the highest-quality natural areas, species diversity, and endangered species, are Cook, Lake, and McHenry. The forest preserves are a huge thing.

To Life: Jews Exploring Nature is available via Rutgers University Press.

New class! The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior

Sign up for my new class at the Chicago Botanic Garden! Starting October 19, in “The Wonderful World of Bird Behavior” where we’ll be reading and discussing bird observations from favorites like Florence Merriam Bailey, Schuyler Mathews, Aretas Saunders, and Alexander Skutch. The class runs four weeks on Monday evenings, 5-6:30pm. On the fifth week, we’ll have an optional morning bird walk at the Garden.

Explore a variety of birds as they sleep, eat, sing, and dance, with an emphasis on midwestern species. Using historical texts, examine the unique behaviors of various species and come away with a better understanding of these often overlooked, but fundamental, aspects of the avian life cycle.

Learn More

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

Take action

In case you missed it, last week’s post featured the Flyway City exhibition and ways to take action to reduce building collisions. This Week in Birding is a supporter of the Chicago Collisions Coalition. We want Chicago residents to ask City Council to create a mandatory bird-friendly building design ordinance to reduce the number of building collisions. There are two important steps you can take right now—before the budget season in October.

1. Send a Letter. If you live or work in the city, click here to go to a form.

2. Speak with Your Alderperson. Call or visit with your Alder, information here.

This ordinance has long been discussed, protects birds, and makes a lot of sense in the architecture capital of the world.

Share

The mass collision event at McCormick Place in October 2023, drew national news for all the wrong reasons. The exposition center had long been a problem for birds flying along the south lakefront. It wasn’t until that cold front swept through that the public—and in turn elected officials—began to talk about the problem and taking action (bird-safe film was applied to windows).

Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem, the new exhibition by the architecture firm Studio Gang, takes a solutions-based approach and presents ways people can take action to create a healthier urban environment. (WTTW has a wonderful story on the exhibition and collaboration here.) The story of McCormick Place is featured—the number of bird deaths plummeted after bird-friendly measures—along with several other successes.

The Flyway City display melds effortlessly into the exhibition space on the second floor of the Chicago Architecture Center, facing East Wacker Drive. The center itself models bird-friendly design. The building’s window façades feature a pattern of UV dots that are detected by birds but mostly invisible to people. The blue curtain dividers are actually scaffolding netting that is a low-cost material used to screen exterior windows to protect birds from collisions. An acoustic monitor was placed on the architecture center building to detect the number of migratory birds, and a small computer display allows visitors to play the game Bird Song Hero.

Another display shows how Studio Gang designed a custom bird-safe glass pattern for a dormitory at Kresge College, University of California Santa Cruz. The glass is patterned with playful elements in the forms of frogs, rabbits, owls, and bats. Rather than being a burden, bird-safe measures can be elegant and rewarding in and of themselves.

Playing in one nook of the exhibition is the local film, Broken Flight, by filmmakers Erika Valenciana and Mitchell Wenkus. In the film, injured birds are taken to DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center. Appropriately enough, the conservation center is featured in the exhibition for its bird-friendly design, which includes minimal glass throughout, custom copper screen, and dot-patterned windows.

An interactive area allows visitors to sit down with markers and pencils to make a bird-friendly glass pattern of their own. When I was there, I saw one made of hearts and another of clouds.

A smaller companion exhibition, Chicago’s Living Habitat, co-curated by the conservation organization Openlands, conveys the story of our unique region through beautiful landscape photos. One paragraph summarizes our many attributes:

The Chicago region sits where some of North America’s great landscapes meet. Eastern deciduous forests, northern coniferous forests, and western grasslands join here, under the broad influence of Lake Michigan.

Among the places featured are Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, Indiana Dunes National Park, and Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary. An overhead photo of the natural landmark Volo Bog, a rare quaking bog, resembles Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. And, of course, there is an image of a Piping Plover (contributed by Chicago birder/photographer Susan Szeszol).

Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem is on view at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 East Wacker Drive, through January 3. Chicago’s Living Habitat is on view through January 27 at the same location.

Take action

This Week in Birding is a supporter of the Chicago Collisions Coalition. We want Chicago residents to ask City Council to create a mandatory bird-friendly building design ordinance to reduce the number of building collisions. There are two important steps you can take right now—before the budget season in October.

1. Send a Letter. If you live or work in the city, click here to go to a form.

2. Speak with Your Alderperson. Call or visit with your Alder, information here.

This ordinance has long been discussed, protects birds, and makes a lot of sense in the architecture capital of the world.

Share

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee. It’s a simple, low-cost, and one-time way to support my work.

If you enjoyed this post, you also might like…

It’s August in the wilds of the Upper Midwest. It’s humid, there’s just been another rain, and I’m sitting in a slightly sticky campground. A little bit of fog hangs on the hills. The music on the radio is classic rock—and not the good stuff. This is “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” and “Sweet City Woman.”

Even the birds at this time of summer are a little tired. The woods are quieter and the songs are mostly gone. The Great Crested Flycatcher, with its bright sulphur knickerbockers, calls less emphatically than it did a couple months ago. The ever reliable Eastern Wood-Pewee—the pe-weet—is still singing, but others are reduced to call notes, squeaks, and squawks. There’s no cell signal here so Merlin is out of the question.1 I’m trying to decide if an ill-defined whit is a thrush, or vireo, or even a woodpecker.

Upon arriving home, there’s an alert from the Chicago Bird Alliance that fall migration is already under way. The Cornell Lab’s Birdcast is now tracking the large movements of birds expected between now and November.2

The weather will break soon, and a fresh season of birding will be here.

AI lands in archives

Macaulay Library and eBird recently wrote about the threat of AI to media archives. It seems birding and nature are ripe for AI-generated images and AI-enhanced over-editing.

The Macaulay Library aims to document the natural world through digital media for scientific studies and future research and applications, and as such photos submitted to it through eBird are considered a record of where and when species occur, their behavior, what they look like, and the habitat they occur in. AI-introduced changes alter that natural truth, eroding the credibility of the ML archive among other birders and the scientific community.

You might remember the post in this space from nearly two years ago, “AI is for the birds.” I wrote then:

The *only* thing giving me hope when seeing this schlock is that society has been through this before. Tall tales, trick photos, and hoaxes have all been around for a long, long time, and we’ve mostly made it through unscathed.

The Macaulay story goes on to highlight some guidelines and notes that people can now flag images as “over-edited” and “artificial.”

There’s a lot to worry about with AI. Uploading original photos is one way to stay true to real life.

Some scrappy birds

There’s an effort in Pilsen to deny a permit to a scrap metal facility that’s near some interesting birding areas (and a neighborhood that has long suffered environmental degradation). It’s possible that the plant is emitting manganese, a potentially harmful metal.

This is a quote from a lead organizer of the campaign:

“We want the communities here to be able to engage with what little nature we do have,” [Ajay] Chatha said. “Despite all the shitty things that happen, this is a very vibrant space where lots of good things also happen.”

Nature and greenspace are often lacking in the corridor from Pilsen southwest through Little Village. But birds keep coming back to some of these spots along the South Branch of the Chicago River. (Here is some video of wintering bird species with the metal plant as the backdrop.)

A healthier environment would be good for bird populations and the residents of Pilsen.

The deer and the woodcock

Audubon Magazine posted a short item last week with some surprising video of an encounter between a White-tailed Deer and an American Woodcock. Those living in close proximity to deer may know that they eat most anything—coniferous trees, tulip bulbs, bird seed, and more. According to the piece, deer also may opportunistically eat bird eggs. So the woodcock sees the deer as a threat and fends it off from a likely nest.

Share

Enjoying these posts? Not ready for a Substack subscription? Buy me a coffee. It’s a simple, low-cost, and hassle-free way to support my work.

If you enjoyed today’s post, you also might like…

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Leave a comment

“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

Subscribe now

Share

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.”

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

If you liked this post, you also might like…

Enjoying these posts? Buy me a coffee to make a one-time contribution. Your support makes This Week in Birding possible.

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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!”

Share

Subscribe now

Pippin did what now?

If you liked this post, you also might like…

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Read More

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.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Enjoying these posts? Buy me a coffee to make a one-time contribution. Your support makes This Week in Birding possible.

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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share