One thing the Bears will never ever do

Caution: non-birding post ahead 🟡

Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash

Here’s a non-birding item just to mix things up a bit. If you’re seeking a birding angle to this story, I suggest a wintertime visit to Middlefork Savanna Forest Preserve, which abuts the Bears’ practice facility in Lake Forest, Illinois.

The stakes feel higher than ever as the Chicago Bears circle the drain on a season again. The team had maneuvered its way to the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft, first by being especially terrible in 2022 and then by fleecing the hapless Carolina Panthers in a trade soon after. The result was the Bears taking an all-everything quarterback prospect from USC, Caleb Williams.

The season started out well enough, and Williams has shown some brilliance as a rookie, but the wheels came off after a loss to the Washington Commanders on a Hail Mary pass in October. The team hasn’t won a game since and cashiered its coach after blowing a game in Detroit on Thanksgiving.

Now the franchise finds itself at yet another crossroads, looking for a new coach to mentor a young quarterback who’s experienced a dysfunctional first season. Williams, to his credit, has handled himself extremely well through all of this.

Bears fans have seen this act again and again through the years. Sometimes there’s a decent young quarterback, but the coach is terrible. Then the quarterback worsens under a new coach, who eventually turns out to be terrible. Then the cycle repeats itself. They’re a franchise that hits rock bottom only to go even lower.

Short of selling the team, the Halas Family needs to make a bold move and bring in a coach with a big personality who will immediately have command of the locker room. So many of the recent coaches, if not all of them, have been nice people—they’d be nice Thanksgiving dinner guests—but their genial approach has quickly descended into chaos.

The coaching candidate I’m thinking of is Deion Sanders, a first-ballot Hall of Famer and current coach at the University of Colorado. Sanders isn’t being discussed as a Bears candidate, but that’s because it’s the Bears and the Halas Family. He’s being ruled out—or not even considered—because we’re so accustomed to business as usual as Chicago football fans. The truth is a more aggressive franchise will bring him in eventually, and that team will be rewarded with instant buzz, national attention, and excitement.

Let me further make the case for Sanders. He’s taken a sad-sack Colorado program and it made it relevant. His son, Shedeur, the Buffaloes’ quarterback, has emerged as a possible No. 1 overall pick. Another player, Travis Hunter, won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday. All of this has come together in just two years in Boulder. It’s a remarkable feat, and while Sanders has his critics football isn’t about being nice.

Again, though, the Bears won’t do this. The candidate mentioned most is Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, no relation to Ben Jonson. But I suspect that won’t work out. Johnson will be the hottest candidate on the market, and he’s been in close proximity to the Bears as an NFC North rival. That likely will make him cautious. He very well could come to Chicago and faceplant in the same division as the Lions. Then where will he be? Left among the many coordinators who cratered as headmen.

So where does that put the Bears, despite the team president saying this will be the most attractive job in the NFL? They will be vying with other bad teams for second-tier coordinators and head coaching retreads. It makes sense to get creative and go for a college coach, one who’s on the rise and can inspire the room.

Again, the stakes are high with Caleb Williams on his rookie contract. The Bears need to do something to get out of this cycle and go against the instincts that have proved wrong time and time again. They need to do it fast. And that means hiring a very un-Bears head coach.

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‘Making Chicago winters less miserable’

Red-breasted Merganser is one of the species noted as a winter specialty.

Block Club Chicago featured the joys of winter birding last month, in a piece “How Birdwatching Makes Chicago Winters Less Miserable — And More Magical.” The article makes some great points, and highlights everything from tips for beginning birders to some of the threats (read: building collisions) that urban birds face.

The legendary Ross’ Gull sighting of Winter 2022-2023 made it into the piece. The rare visitor was located by Dan Lory at Park No. 566 on the Far Southeast Side. The last time a Ross’ Gull lingered in Chicago was 1978.

“Birders were in heaven,” Lory wrote later in a Chicago Ornithology Society blog post. “Shutters clicked. Fists bumped. Texts and photos flew like snow buntings on a winter field.”

Winter birding offers a number of benefits, but one I often come back to is the solitude and quiet. There’s usually no one else around, no car stereos are blaring, and the woods are often utterly silent. And it’s an opportunity to appreciate the more common, year-round species like Northern Cardinal and Red-bellied Woodpecker. Birding in winter is a good thing.