Chicago’s Park 566 was no exception. When I first met Park 566 in 2017 it was a perfect example of a perfectly nondescript grassland: flat, barren, and overrun with phragmites, buckthorn, thistle. Boring, and not a pleasure to walk through. Something to be skipped over on the way to somewhere else.

Over the past nine years I watched these seventy acres be transformed to a robust variety of native grassland vegetation, host to a rich diversity of insects, birds, mammals and reptiles. It was heaven on earth to the creatures who called the park home, but to my untrained eye it was still boring. The hidden beauties of Park 566 might have been lost on me had I not trained my eyes on one particular bird. To that bird, I want to give long overdue credit:

Pardon, Madame et Monsieur Dickcissel. You are colorful proof that the plains are anything but ennuyeux!

I don’t speak French, and probably the Dickcissels don’t either. But I apologize in French because overused English expressions like “sorry” or “my bad” sound too trite. They’re throw-away flicks of the tongue that we use without thinking of their true meaning. “Pardon”—with the accent on the second syllable, bien sur!—gives my apology a sense of gravity. And while “boring” sounds just plain boring, ennuyeux has cachet.

Anyway, after that wandering linguistic aside, let’s get back to meandering through a tall-grass prairie where Dickcissels have set up home, as I explain why this bird had such an impact on my understanding the grassland. There is no missing the Dickcissels, especially the males. They will perch atop a stalk of mullein, or cling to a bit of last year’s dried primrose stems, and belt out their six-beat song that some people claim sounds like “Dick, dick, ciss, ciss. ciss, ciss!” (Some people have overactive imaginations.) In the early morning, while the dew is still on the spider webs, and the low sun strikes the Dickcissel on its throne above the swaying grasses, this beautiful bird is like a mini sunrise. It’s difficult to find the words to describe them…in any language.

Especially in the first four or five years of birding Park 566 I latched on to the Dickcissels like old friends, and I gained an appreciation for the grassland that probably would not have happened without them. The Dickcissels of Park 566 were perfect companions for this novice birder/grassland under-appreciator.

They are everywhere: During summer in the entire north half of the park, where the grasses are taller and the sunflowers more numerous, you can’t scribe a 50-yard circle that doesn’t contain at least one Dickcissel.

They are not hard to find: Shy and diminutive would not be words to describe Dickcissels. From the moment you set foot in the park in summer you can hear the males’ insect-like chirps coming from every direction. It’s not a song as much as a statement: “I am here! You can hear me! You CAN hear me!” For me, this Dickcissel music has become the sound of summer in Park 566. I can’t imagine the park without it.

They are predictable and consistent: They stake out their territory—a particular patch of grassland whose boundaries only they can see—and from start of summer to end, I can count on being greeted by the Monsieur of each venue as I pass their invisible borders. Thanks to the Dickcissels’ territoriality, the landmark deprived grassland took on a topographical depth that helped me experience it in a way I never had before. This summer of 2026, for example, one male liked to hang out on and around a particularly tall pale Indian plantain that stood out among the wild bergamot (begamote sauvage in French, by the way). I could count on three or four singing males among the tall sunflowers to the left of the center road. One favored a particular grand mullein in the central sand piles. Last month when I saw a note by my birding buddy Kelly of a male Dickcissel posing on some random stems, with the Chicago skyline in the background (Little Bird in a Big City), I knew exactly which particular “random” stems those were; I had seen that bird there with his likely mate several times. I used to wonder how birds of the grasslands could manage to relocate their nests among all the shapeless grasses after flying around foraging for food. I think I’m beginning to get it. The Dickcissels taught me to parse the grassland into its smaller parts, to see the botanical neighborhoods in the plains.

They were new to me: At this point, I can almost hear the other birds of Park 566 grousing: What am I, chopped liver? (or foie gras, as the case may be….) To a degree, everything I wrote above about the Dickcissels could also be said of other species that are common in the park, like the Song Sparrows, the Common Yellowthroats, the Indigo Buntings or the Eastern Meadowlarks. They are all territorial, numerous and vocal. But what was special about the Dickcissels was that they were new to me. I met Dickcissels for the first time at Park 566. Their newness gave them a certain je ne sais quoi. I can’t describe why, but those birds hooked me. I got to know them at Park 566, and I got to know Park 566 with them.

September approaches, the summer nesting season ends and the Dickcissels have grown quiet. The adult males who are still present have no need to defend their territories, so the park no longer resonates with their “You CAN hear me!” For me, this is one of the clearest signals of the approach of fall: what I do not hear.

In preparation for their long trek south for the winter, the Dickcissels are getting more gregarious, calling to each other across territorial borders in short chirps and flocking up in preparation for the trip south. To all of them I say merci for another wonderful summer. See you in April. Bon voyage!

Yes, boys and girls, birds talk with their mouths full. Or at least Warbling Vireos warble with their beaks full. I don’t have video to prove it, but many times I have watched a Warbling Vireo who continued to sing mellifluously as he whacked a large caterpillar against a branch until it cooperated and agreed to be swallowed. The bird stopped singing long enough to ingest the bug and wipe his mouth, before moving on to stanza two. Then he proceeded to catch another caterpillar just in time for the refrain. Impeccable timing; exquisite chops.

The Eastern Warbling Vireo is a nondescript bird--both male and female overall light gray and dark gray--but what it lacks in eye-catching plumage it makes up for in pipes. In my experience it’s one of the singingest songbirds in our midwestern trees. Maybe tied for first with its cousin, the Red-eyed Vireo. And I can forgive the Warbling Vireo for its poor table manners, because its song is so beautiful--a long and rambling warble, the way a Robin’s song meanders, but more gentle, and usually ending on a downbeat and an up note.

The Eastern Warbling Vireo can be hard to spot, because it often hangs out high in the canopy. But when I do manage to get a photo, the effect is usually soft and beautiful, because the light is filtered by the leaves. I really like this plain bird with its less than perfect etiquette.

And while it may sing with its mouth full, I have never seen a Warbling Vireo in a bad mood.

P.S.: For the record, the caterpillar’s twig mimicry in the photo below did not fool this Warbling Vireo.

Precocials are usually nidifugous

A label that sounds most ridiculous

“I’m precocial, too,”

said the gull to the goose.

“But I prefer that you call me nidicolous.”

Translation: Some birds hatch from the egg hardy and covered in dense down, able to stay warm and get about on their own almost immediately. Such precocial chicks usually leave the nest as soon as they stop wobbling enough to pass a breathalyzer test. Birds that can and do leave the nest right after birth are called nidifugous.

But some that could leave the nest, don’t. Most gulls, for example, hatch well clothed and quite hardy. But unlike goslings and ducklings that jump in the water and paddle along with their parents almost immediately, gulls remain in the nest and in the care of their parents for five to six weeks. Precocial birds that choose to stay in the nest are called nidicolous.

Of course, there are many bird species that hatch naked as a J-bird, weak and barely able even to hold their large heads aloft enough to be fed. Biologists call these species altricial, roughly translated as “needing to be nursed.” These chicks couldn’t leave the nest right after hatching even if they wanted to. They are completely dependent on the parent birds for warmth and sustenance until they sprout enough feathers to maintain a steady body temperature and eventually leave the nest.

Precocial, altricial, nidifugous, nidicolous. Fancy words like these can make scientists sound downright pedantic. But you have to admit, the right four-syllable word can save many syllables elsewhere. For example, it was impossible to shoehorn “chicks that leave the nest right away after hatching” into the first line of my limerick, but “nidifugous” was a shoo-in.

Sometimes, though, biologists just can’t leave well enough alone. Let a big word sit long enough on a biologist’s desk, and it will be coddled and fed until it sprouts feathers and flies off on its own. It’s not enough to call a bird just precocial or nidifugous. Biologists have identified different levels of precociality and nidifugosity, depending on the condition of the chicks when they hatch. It’s all neatly summarized in the following terms:

Precocial 1 (Megapodes): Down present, eyes open, mobile, parents absent.

Precocial 2 (Ducks, Plovers): Same as Precocial 1, but parents present.

Precocial 3 (Quail, Turkey): Slightly less precocial than Precocial 2.

Precocial 4 (Grebes, Rails): Same as Precocial 2 & 3, but sometimes can’t feed themselves.

Semi-precocial (Gulls, Terns): Same as Precocial 4, but can’t feed themselves.

Semi-altricial 1 (Herons, Hawks): Same as Semi-precocial, but are not mobile.

Semi-altricial 2 (Owls): Same as Semi-altricial 1, but eyes are not open at birth.

Altricial (Passerines): Same as Semi-altricial 2, but no down present at birth.

Yes, dear reader, long hours are spent on the beach arguing over whether gulls and terns are semi-precocial or semi-altricial 1.

Which is where the Herring Gull comes in. As researchers sit down on the beach over lunch to argue semantics, a gull swoops in, nabs a sandwich from the picnic table and flies off, shrieking, “You guys carry on. I’ve got three precocious chicks that are eating me out of house and home!”

The gull is not exaggerating. Since his mate laid three eggs in their rooftop nest two months ago, the two parent birds have been foraging practically non-stop to keep the family fed. During the month-long incubation period, they took turns tending the nest—one bird sitting on the eggs while the other procured food for the two of them. When the chicks emerged from their shells, they were covered in a speckled coat of dense down (they’re precocial, remember) and able to amble around in the nest within hours of hatching. But they stayed put in the nest (they’re nidicolous) doing what all babies do—eat, poop, grow, repeat. The parents, instead, lost weight as they focused on keeping the chicks well fed. That researcher’s tuna sandwich is not as good for the chicks as protein rich crustaceans or small fish, but for a desperate papa gull, it will do in a pinch.

A month after hatching, the chicks are large and very active, but their wings are not developed enough to fly. They remain in or near the nest, and it may be as much as another month before they finally spread their wings and leave. And even then, they’ll follow their parents for as much as another month, begging for food and taking nidicolous to a ridiculous extreme. All told, by the time their chicks are fully on their own, the Herring Gull pair will have spent about a third of their year on the important task of procreation.

With the nest finally empty, and only themselves to feed now, the parent gulls have more time to do what we most often see gulls doing—nothing. Except for intermittent foraging visits to the local dump, or a recently plowed field, or the wake of a fishing boat, Herring Gulls spend a vast majority of their day not doing much of anything, lined up on rocks and wharfs and breakwaters in Zen-like contemplation.

Of course, biologists have a name for this behavior. They call it “loafing.” I’m serious.

And on that note, I think it’s time to wrap up this essay, jump out of my empty nest and join the gulls loafing at a local lakefront park, content in the knowledge that there is a scientific name for what we are not doing.

But much can be said for the enjoyment of taking a walk naked.... You know what I mean: Leave the binoculars at home, or just let them hang on your neck, while you take in with your naked eyes--and ears--the whole scene unfolding around you.

I was on my way home from the local market, cutting through Nichols Park, when I noticed some movement in the small dogwood tree near the native plantings area of the park. I was naked-eyed, with both arms weighted down by heavy shopping bags, and my first thought was, “Dang, I wish I had my binoculars!” What a self-limiting thought that was. It’s like attending a classical music concert and not being able to enjoy the performance because I don’t have opera glasses and can’t see the lead violin clearly. Does it matter that I can’t make out the calluses on her fingertips, or see the fraying of her bowstrings as she saws away?

I stopped, and watched, and listened. Even above the noise of the city and the kids playing on the swings, I could hear a constant soft chittering, like the mouse I fed under my cot at summer camp many years ago. It did not take long to spot the bird, and I knew immediately what it was, even without any visual aids. Not because it was big and brightly colored--it was tiny, and soft blue--but because it never stopped moving. Picture a hyperactive quarter-note bounding around uncontrollably on an unlined sheet of music. It bounced from the center of the tree, out to a far-reaching branch, then flew back to the center, then sashayed along a low branch, before working its way to the top of the 10-ft tree. If I had bounced a laser pointer’s beam around in those branches, I have no doubt that bird could have kept up with it. All the while, it twitched its tail left and right, up and down, like a symphony conductor, while continuing to twitter and buzz non-stop.

It was fun to watch. If I had had binoculars--or even worse, my camera--all the while I would have been cursing the bird under my breath for not sitting still long enough for me to see it clearly and get a good photo. And I would have completely missed the miracle of the tiny blue bird in the tiny tree in the tiny city park in the big city of Chicago on this beautiful spring day. But because I was “naked,” I saw the bird more clearly than I had ever seen it before.

Blue-gray Gnatcatchers are still moving through the Chicago area, on their way north from South America. The trees and bushes have leafed out by now, so these tiny birds can be hard to find, but with a bit of patience and luck, you may see them bouncing around on their unlined sheets of music. I think you’ll agree you can enjoy the show just fine without opera glasses.

P.S.: In closing, a tidbit of family lore. My wife’s native language is not English, and I mumble. When she first started getting into birding, for better or worse I was her go-to guide. Thanks to my poor diction, for the longest time she thought this bird was called the Blueberry Ass-scratcher. Gems like this are what a long life together yields. Ah, till death do us part!

P.P.S.: I acknowledge the irony that I wouldn’t have photos of these beautiful creatures to share with you if not for the camera. More often than not, though, the camera gets in my way. The long lens that brings the bird in closer also creates a distance between the bird and me.

Park 566 is a wonderful grassland park, but in spring I can’t resist the lure of a hardwood forest. Join me on a brief excursion away from the Midwest grassland to the Midwest forest.

To this native Midwesterner, nothing beats a maple/beech forest in spring. Walking the edge of a freshly harrowed field in May, I see a deer trail leading into the dense woods, and I am pulled in. I duck under a few low-hanging limbs, and when I straighten up again I find myself in a different world. Like shutting the door on a luxury sedan, the noises of the outside world are muted, and I am swimming in a silent sea of soft greens and yellows. The leaves don’t rustle as I walk, like they do in the fall. I enter this quiet world quietly.

Around me are massive trunks, of beech and maple trees who bided their time in climate-induced quarantine for five long months—still and patient on the outside, but beneath the surface flowing with the lifeblood of spring. As March turned to April, and April to May, their buds swelled and groaned, longing to burst out of confinement, but fearing to do so until the proper time. That time has come. The stay-at-home order has been lifted, and every tree and bush has burst forth with fresh leaves—soft, green and tender. The trees were forced to hold their breath for so long. Now I think I hear them breathing.

This forest slows me down. I listen. I touch. I notice. A tiny inchworm stretches upward from a leaf, imitating a stem, I suppose. A droplet from last night’s rain falls from the upper canopy and startles a leaf in front of me. It startles me, too. It’s surprising how loud a drop of water sounds when the heart is still.

As my eyes and ears adjust, I realize I share this space with at least two birds. One a Wood Thrush. I don’t see it, but its eerie song rings clean and clear in the perfect acoustics of the dense leaves.

The other a Red-eyed Vireo. It was this vireo that had shaken loose that noisy drop of water earlier. The bird descends from the upper canopy, flitting downward like an unmoored leaf that can’t remember which tree it belongs to.

It pauses, cocks its head, and then snatches an insect from the underside of a leaf. Up-down-left-right it flits. It’s the only non-green thing in sight, but I am amazed at how difficult it is to keep my eye on it.

To someone who delights in creating portraits of birds in action, nothing is closer to perfection than the soft light of this beech/maple forest. No burned whites. No over-sharp contrast. No annoying shadows. And vireos tend to spend most of their time in the upper canopy, so I am happy at the chance for some eye-level shots. But the darn bird won’t sit still long enough to get a bead on it. Then I remember the inchworm, and I train my lens on it. The worm is right out in the open. No self-respecting Red-eyed Vireo would miss such an easy breakfast. Could I be lucky enough to capture the bird just as it snatches the inchworm?

No. I blink, the worm is gone, and the Red-eyed Vireo is perched two branches away with a contented grin. At least it gives me a chance to get a few shots before it bounds off after other bugs. I never find the bird again, but I hear it overhead, singing incessantly as it forages in the verdant green.

As the unseen sun rises higher, so does the temperature. As if to remind me not to get overly sentimental about Mother Nature, a swarm of freshly hatched mosquitoes and other tiny carnivores find me and disturb my peaceful reverie. They drive me toward the forest edge and back into the sunny field, where a mild breeze liberates me from the marauding horde.

The Red-eyed Vireo still sings as I slide back into the ordinary, where I walk with heart lifted.

March 29, 2026

Dan Lory

Poster Child for “Get a Life”

Hyde Park, IL

Dear Dan:

The purpose of this letter is to recommend to you the Song Sparrow as a subject for your next essay on birds.

They say “If you want something done, ask a busy person.” Well, that’s obviously not my motive for addressing this letter of recommendation to you. Seeing you here at Park 566 almost every day, I am impressed at your obvious abundance of free time, apparently unencumbered by the commitments that seem to weigh down the typical human. So I write to you not with any real hope that you will convert word to action, but simply because you are likely to actually find and read this note.

I recognize, of course, that only a man of leisure can find time to write essays of the sort that flow from your pen. Yet as much time as you seem to have on your hands, I also find it amazing that until now you have not deigned the lowly Song Sparrow worthy of even an iota of consideration.

It’s not a flashy bird, the Song Sparrow. To a man of apparent appreciation for fashion like yourself—with your patched brown pants (the same ones every day!), threadbare moss green jacket, and beanie hat that looks like it was lifted from the dumpster behind Goodwill—I can understand how you might overlook the simple accoutrements of the Song Sparrow. Spotted brown and gray and soft white, with not a single splash of bright color, it is the epitome of plain. But if you take the time to look closely, you will see there is a great variety to the shades and patterns in the plumage of the several dozen Song Sparrows that you’ll encounter in this park during the peak season. The pair who nest near my family both have very pronounced dark areas in the center of their chests, where the brown spots are splashed more closely together. Others at various points around the park—I hear through the grapevine—have much more uniform spot patterns. Surely you could find something to write about the Song Sparrow’s ability to make use of the simplest of materials for maximum variety.

I know for a fact that you do pay attention to detail, at least as well as a human can, with only your senses of sight and sound to rely on. When you make your strange “pishhh, pishhh” sound, any Song Sparrow within a hundred feet will pop up curiously from its place of rest, posing patiently as your machine-gun-shutter camera rattles off a volley of shots. I estimate you must have upwards of 5000 photos of Song Sparrows stored in that little computer of yours. Did maybe one or two of them turn out well enough to use in an essay about this cooperative bird?

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the Song Sparrow’s song. If you would stop humming old rock & roll tunes from the ‘60s as you walk, you would surely hear them yourself, and appreciate this vivacious bird’s pipes. Morning, noon, evening. Spring, summer, fall, winter, you can count on a Song Sparrow serenade. Each individual has a slightly different take on it, but they all stay true enough to the basic score that you can tell a Song Sparrow when you hear one. They almost always start out with one note, crisply repeated three times, followed by a drawn out sparkle of trills and arpeggios. Imagine: “Ho…ly…Cow! Have you ever seen such a beautiful sunrise!” or “Ho…ly…Cow! I wish this guy would stop taking photos and just get on with his walk!” The Song Sparrow brings to this city park the same exuberance that Harry Caray brought to Wrigley Field.

Dan, as I write, I fully expect that this letter will move from your hand to your pocket to the bottom of your inbox, while you focus instead on the eye-catching warblers, or the fearsome raptors (damn their talons). But let me make one last appeal to your sense of decency and remind you that in dead of winter, when the warblers are still in the Bahamas in shades and flip-flops, and local raptors are more intent than ever on inviting scarce meadow inhabitants to lunch, so to speak, the humble Song Sparrow stalwartly maintains a regular presence. You know what I’m talking about. Picture those days when a strong northeast wind blows in off the lake, driving eight-foot swells against the rocks and creating a bizarre landscape of sideways-hanging icicles on the trees along the shore. Not to worry; even then you will see a Song Sparrow, or two or three.

Have a heart. Get a life. Write about the Song Sparrow.

Yours empathetically,

Meadow Vole

Park 566

NE slag shoreline, fence pole #23

PS: This LOR was started five weeks ago by my great grandmother. She was unable to get beyond the intro diatribe before meeting her demise at the talons of the local kestrel. My grandfather and my mother both valiantly continued writing until each ended up in the digestive tracts of a coyote and a garter snake respectively. Though this missive has been a labor of four generations, I assure you that the sentiments expressed herein are shared by all who contributed to its penning. -MV

I know the Meadow Vole has a reputation for empathy and consolation among its own, but now I see that this good will carries across to its neighbors as well. For the record, I do not have 5000 photos of Song Sparrows in my computer. There are 219, to be exact. But if you count the many that I have deleted over the years, well….

Despite the shrewd wit (pun intended), I am so grateful to the Meadow Vole(s) for writing such a compelling LOR that I am posting it here in its entirety. It’s always wonderful when a bird essay just writes itself. -DL

To break the monotony I had several routes I would take. One of them took me past a small mahjong parlor. From the frosted windows a yellowish light trickled. There was no music; instead, the low and steady murmur of male voices oozed from the windows and doorway, punctuated occasionally by a loud cry and a cascade of clicking sounds. It was a sound that I can’t find the words to describe. The many voices somehow became one, as if the building itself were humming. Sometimes I paused beside the sign that read 麻雀, trying to make out snippets of conversation. Many nights I wanted to step inside, if for no other reason than to share in the apparent camaraderie, but I was always repulsed by the tsunami of smoke that billowed from the doorway. I think if you stand in front of a mahjong parlor long enough you could pickle both lung and liver just by osmosis.

Many years after returning from Tokyo, imagine my surprise when, while birding in a marsh in the Calumet region south of Chicago, I came across a mahjong parlor. Early one November morning I was standing at the edge of a large patch of cattails and phragmites that surrounded a shallow lake. I could not see the lake; the reeds were too high and too dense. But there was no mistaking the sound of a mahjong parlor with a lively game in full swing. And that unusual sound triggered my psyche in surprising ways. The moist ground beneath my feet hardened to asphalt, and for a brief instant I could see the façade of the Tokyo mahjong parlor. I smelled—even tasted—cigarette smoke, with a hint of shochu. It’s not that I was nostalgic for those smells, but the sound of mahjong released a flood of emotions and sensations from those years I spent in Japan—the sounds, the smells, the friends, the work.

And then I thought, this is weird. I’ve seen some unusual things in the marshes in the Calumet area, but whatever it was those men were doing on the other side of those cattails, I wanted nothing to do with it. I quietly backed away and moved on.

Several weeks later I was scanning a waterfowl covered lake, trying to prise a positive ID from every bundle of feathers floating there. A fellow birder gave me hints on how to pick the Gadwalls out of the crowd. “Don’t worry about plumage color. Look for a plain, gray-brown, large floating loaf of bread, with one end burnt black and the other sporting a teapot-spout head. That’s a Gadwall. And if you ever come across a bunch of them together, no need to even look. Just listen. They sound like a bunch of men sitting around talking and playing poker.”

“No kidding,” was the only response I could muster. Now I knew the source of that mysterious murmuring several weeks back. Since my birding friend is American, it’s understandable that his Gadwall play poker. But I have no doubt that the Gadwall I had heard were playing mahjong.

Beyond their card-playing, at first blush there isn’t a lot to say about the plain Gadwall. I’ve heard it described as the “Coors Light of ducks.” That’s actually a good description for a pretty nondescript duck. The female is a mottled brown, like most female ducks. The male is gray on the side, light gray below, light gray above, with a hint of brown. Even the bill is gray. Only the black rear-end saves the bird from total monotony.

But take the time to look closely at the Gadwall’s plumage and you’ll see delicate and intricate patterns, like the countless tiny daubs of an impressionist painting. I think it is best described as distinctively subdued. Far from Coors Light, the Gadwall might be likened to a crisp Czech pilsner—simple in color, complex in taste. (A note to any Coors Light drinking bird lovers: It’s never too late to discover true beer….)

The next time I visit Tokyo, and walk past a mahjong parlor, I will not be at a loss for words to describe the sound. The low murmuring will remind me of a flock of Gadwall. And as I stand beside the sign that reads 麻雀, the asphalt beneath my feet will soften, the sweet/sour smell of the wetland will replace the cigarette smoke, and my heart will carry me away and set me down among the head-high cattails of a Calumet marsh, where I will listen to the Gadwall as they set up another game of mahjong.

The other type of difficulty is more subtle. Rather than hit you up the side of the head, it just sits there quietly in your heart. It demands no attention, but it is having a big impact on you all the same. It’s a longing for the homeland, for the familiar. The things that tug at the heartstrings. You can overcome all those smack-you-in-the-face difficulties, but this deeper yearning never goes away, even if you’ve long stopped noticing it.

I woke up one March morning, back in Chicago after a five-year stint overseas. Actually, I’d been home almost six months already. Overnight a late winter snow had fallen. The storm had moved out and a bright sun was piercing the slats of our bedroom blinds. I could hear the water dripping from the maple tree outside our window as the heavy snow melted. A Cardinal started singing, and I started crying. They were not tears of joy, nor of sorrow. They just welled up from somewhere forgotten and unexpected, like the sap rising in that maple tree.

I had not heard that sound for five years. That singing Cardinal plucked a string in my heart that had sat there taut and waiting for a long time. It was alive now, and it sang: You are home.

There is much to say about the Northern Cardinal. About the fact that they do not migrate, so they are here with us all year round. Or that the male keeps its bright red cloak through all seasons, unlike most birds, who trade their bright spring wardrobe for drab colors in the winter. The Cardinal’s massive beak looks powerful enough to unscrew the lug nuts on your car’s wheels, and I have seen beaks on some Cardinals that look as if they tried just that--scratched and worn like my favorite old pair of pliers. And did you know that both the male and the female Cardinals sing, and that they mate for life?

I wonder if there’s a lesson for us among all those Cardinalities.

If you want to learn more, go ahead and Google it. But as for me, there’s only one thing that need be said about the Northern Cardinal. It’s the bird that brought me home.

Today I can kill two birds with one stone.

Wait. That’s not the best choice of analogies to launch an essay on birds. Maybe “Free two birds with one key?” Or, sticking with a stone/rock analogy, how about “Film two Rocky movies with one Stallone.”

I think I’ll change gears completely and go with an ice cream theme: Serve two scaups in one cone.

The poor birds still do not make out well in the end, but the analogy works because—I am convinced—no one really knows how to pronounce the name of these birds. Here in the Chicago area I often hear scaup rhyming with “cop,” pronounced as only a Chicagoan can say it. I’ve also heard some people pronounce it like “scope,” while others say it like the “aw” of “awful.” When I Googled “pronounce scaup,” I found a recording by a guy—he had to be a Scotsman—who pronounced it like what you would put in an ice cream cone.

Anyway, today’s twofer deals with closely related waterfowl who are stalwart regulars to the Chicago winter lakefront—the Greater Scaup and the Lesser Scaup. I’ve already written a piece on the Greater Scaup, and I do not want to repeat myself, but the Lesser Scaup deserves its day in the sun. And whether I like it or not, it is next to impossible to talk about the Lesser Scaup without comparing it to the Greater Scaup. So I will cover them both again in—to use another avian analogy—one fell swoop.

Let’s begin by getting the comparisons out of the way. Lifestyle: Both the Greater and the Lesser Scaup are diving ducks, foraging for crustaceans at the bottom of shallow lakes and bays. Dress: In plumage they are almost identical. I’ve heard both birds described as Oreo cookies: black on both ends, and whitish in the middle. Their blue-ish colored bill earns them both the nickname bluebills. Size: As its diminutive name indicates, the Lesser Scaup is ten to fifteen percent smaller—in length, weight and wingspan—than its slightly chunkier cousin. All of this adds up to two very similar looking species that create a serious ID challenge for most birders.

So, when you see a group of scaup floating on a body of water, how do you know which you are looking at? Their plumage is the same, and as they bounce up and down on the waves, a ten percent difference in size can be very difficult to gauge, even if it is a mixed flock. One surefire way to know that all the scaup you see are Lesser Scaup is to visit Costa Rica in winter. Those Oreo cookies floating on the lake that your hotel overlooks? You can be sure they’re all Lesser Scaup, because among all the related North American ducks in the genus Aythya—Greater Scaup, Redhead, Canvasback, Ring-necked Duck, Tufted Duck—only the Lesser Scaup winters so far south.

Another way to know you’re looking at Lesser Scaup is to vacation in the treeless tundra wetlands of northern Canada in late spring. As you lounge in your floating lawn chair, swatting away hordes of mosquitoes and black flies and sipping your cold Molson, keep a close eye on the hundreds of nesting Greater and Lesser Scaup that surround you. When a Greater Scaup chick hatches, it will sit still for several hours until its downy feathers are dry. Then it will rest quietly on the nest for the first 24 hours or so, before eventually making its way into the water.

But it’s Lesser Scaup you’re looking for, so never mind those dilly-dallying Greater Scaup chicks. Look instead for the nest where every chick acts like the second child. After the hatchlings emerge from the eggs, their down has barely dried before they’re jumping out of the crib into the water, where they immediately begin testing their diving skills. This would be the nest of a Lesser Scaup. The chicks can’t dive very deep, or stay under for more than a few seconds, because all that fluffy down makes them far too buoyant. But that doesn’t keep them from trying. I’ve never seen this with my own eyes, but just the thought of a frazzled looking mother Lesser Scaup trying to corral a dozen fuzzy ping-pong balls disappearing underwater and boing-boinging back up again all around her puts a smile on my face.

Of course, there are less expensive ways than traveling to Costa Rica or northern Canada to tell whether you’re looking at a Lesser or a Greater Scaup. The shape of the head and the amount of white on the flight feathers are the two key field marks; I’ll leave it to you to consult your favorite field guide for the details. In the meantime, under my breath so my birder friends can’t hear me, I’ll offer you another approach to scaup ID: Don’t worry about it.

As you watch a raft of a hundred scaup floating on Lake Michigan, shimmering marvelously in the morning sun when they resurface after each foraging dive, you face an existential dilemma: How important is it to you to be able to tell the Lesser from the Greater? Unless you are a serious birder looking to expand your year list and contribute complete and accurate data to Cornell’s eBird database, maybe it’s enough just to know they are scaup. Leave it at that, and enjoy the beauty of the moment.

Now, if a group of birders happens by while you are watching the scaup, listen carefully while they try to suss out an ID—and a pronunciation—for all the birds in the flock. “They seem to be mostly Greater Scopp,” says one birder. Another adds, “I count twenty-two Lesser Scope,” and the whole group eventually agrees it’s a 30/70 mix of “Lesser Scawp” and “Greater Scoop.” When you decide you’ve heard enough, put on your best Scottish accent and declare, “Haud yer wheesht , an get oan wae it, ye numptys! It’s justa wee treud de Scoop.” The birders will move on soon enough, and you can go back to humming “What a Day for a Daydream…” while you enjoy the moment.

You know you’ve been birding too long when you Google “Redhead” and expect that the top listed site in your search results will be about a waterfowl. Not even close. There was “The Truth About Redheads” (not the duck), “Redheads have been Feared and Vilified Throughout History,” and many others in similar or sometimes more risqué vein. But the bird called the Redhead did not come up in Google until page two, listing number 22. Bing was better; Redhead (the bird) was listing number seven.

What if birds used Google? Humor me as I imagine a Redhead duck conducting a Google search. The following are some likely search results.

“How to be a Redhead”

No red feathers? No worries. Did you know you don’t need red feathers to be a Redhead? Click HERE to learn more.

It’s been scientifically verified that female Redheads are a soft brown color—not red. The same is true of the young of both sexes. Only the mature male has a striking cinnamon red head, and even then it’s only at its reddest for about half the year. The rest of the year, it’s a more subdued rufous color. Visit our sister site for more fascinating facts about Redheads, to see where you fall.

Click HERE if you want to learn more about why in the world birds often are named after only the males of the species.

“13 Fascinating Facts About Redheads”

OK, we exaggerated. Come on, nobody is interested in learning that many fascinating facts about anything. But we’ve got sponsors to promote, so here at least are a few facts about Redheads:

1. Redheads are diving ducks, feeding mainly on crustaceans and insects during the breeding season, and submerged aquatic plants the rest of the time.

2. Redheads are very gregarious, readily joining other flocks of waterfowl on open water. They are very easily attracted by decoys, making them very popular with duck hunters.

3. Winter flocks in the Gulf of Mexico can number as many as 60,000 Redheads.

4. The nest is built by the female. She chooses a place among the rushes and reeds of wetland areas, where she plucks reeds and other vegetation to weave a platform as large as 9” x 24”. Submerged vegetation serves as anchor and support, while down plucked from her own chest provides padding and warmth. To add to the nest’s comfort and seclusion, she often bends surrounding rushes to form a makeshift canopy over the nest.

5. Redheads are known as a “brood parasitic” species. In a practice quite common among waterfowl, female Redheads often lay their eggs in the nests of other species—even in the nests of ground-nesting predators like the Northern Harrier. Now that’s pluck.

“Redheads from 20 Countries”

Redheads breed only in Canada, US and maybe some small sections of northern Mexico. There may be errant individuals as far as east Asia and western Europe during migration, but for the most part Redheads are a waterfowl of the Americas. They were not given the taxonomic name Aythya americana for nothing.

But if we ignore the semantics and count the countries where they are spotted in giro, we hit twenty right on the nose. Click NEXT to view the first 10:

Canada, USA, Mexico and the seven countries of Central America. Ten already. NEXT=>

Cuba and the Bahamas. NEXT=>

Japan, Iceland, Germany, Netherlands. Sixteen and counting. NEXT=>

England and Wales. (We might be making too fine a distinction here.) NEXT=>

Bermuda and the Caymen Islands. (OK, now we’re really stretching it.)

BINGO! 20 advertisers satisfied.

“What Growing Up a Redhead Meant for My Self-Confidence”

I was a shy hen growing up. My siblings and I were always dragged along on family visits to the Gadwalls and the Canvasbacks, but I kept to the background even more than the others. When I was old enough to start my own brood, my body kept making eggs, but I wasn’t confident that I could manage a nest with more than four or five. The Gadwalls and the Canvasbacks all seemed to have their stuff together, even with larger families. So during visits to their nests, I would sneak an egg or two into their brood. No one ever noticed.

It only took a couple of breeding seasons before I gained enough self-confidence to keep all my eggs in my own nest. And as my confidence grew, I just pretended to ignore it when a young Wood Duck or a Merganser would lay an egg in my nest, too.

“10 Famous Redheads”

I know this is a tried-and-true SEO gimmick, but why stop at 10? The Redhead population is estimated at about 1.2 million. As many as 500 hang out during the winter months in Lake Michigan at the park that I frequent. Those are 500 very famous Redheads in my books. I will miss them dearly when they head north come spring.

I wrote this essay six years ago, before the pandemic nudged many people into birding. Though birders’ numbers have increased since then, first-bird-of-the-year diehards are still a rare breed.

It’s New Year’s Day in Chicago. You look out your window just before dawn to see your neighbors walking hand in hand, hoods up, heads down, headphones over their ears. It’s cold, so their middle-aged-rap-star look does not surprise you. You assume they are on their way to the lake to watch the sun rise on the new year. But instead of getting in their car, they cross the street and walk together into the park. Under a group of basswoods across from the baseball diamond they stop, remove their headphones, throw back their hoods, raise heretofore hidden binoculars and look up into the trees.

You have just witnessed the time-honored New Year’s Day ritual of the first bird sighting of the new year. These two dyed-in-the-wool birders are bound and determined that bird number one shall not be a House Sparrow, so they secreted themselves to a place where they were more likely to see something else—maybe a Downy Woodpecker, or a Northern Cardinal. Nothing against the poor, maligned House Sparrow, but come on, “Anything but a House Sparrow!” is what most birders think at the start of each year.

For me, it’s the Canada Goose. In the South Shore park where I bird a lot, you can’t throw a stick without hitting one. This year I did not want my first bird at that park to be a Canada Goose. With ear buds in and blasting Tool’s “Pneuma,” so I would not hear the honking geese, I exited my car. Eyes to the ground, I walked toward the lake. For the past month or so—and as recently as the previous day—there had been a large flock of Greater Scaup in the bay between the shore and the distant breakwater, and I had decided that those stalwart regulars deserved to be this year’s species numero uno.

It was not easy to keep from glancing toward that area in the bay where the Canada Geese always congregate, but I was resolute as I approached the rocky shore. I looked up and could see a small flock of what I assumed were Greater Scaup on the water about 300 yards away. Thrilled that I had pulled off my New Year’s Day challenge, I raised the binoculars to verify that they were indeed Greater Scaup. My quick motion startled a bird that had been resting near shore barely fifty feet from me. It startled me in return, and without thinking, I looked at it as it took off low across the water with wings whistling. It was a Common Goldeneye.

Plan foiled. I wanted the Greater Scaup to be first, but I’d settle for the Common Goldeneye. Anything but a Canada Goose.

As if to make up for missing their number one billing spot, while I stood there flock after flock of Greater Scaup came flying in to join that first small group I had seen—but not confirmed—earlier. Within five minutes there were about 500 birds out on the water, most of them Greater Scaup, with Redheads mixed in.

The Greater Scaup is not a colorful bird, but the soft browns of the female, with her daub of white where the blue bill meets the face, and the sharply contrasting whites and blacks of the male make it a strikingly handsome bird. A flock of fifty to a hundred Greater Scaup flying across gray Lake Michigan on a cold, gray winter morning, when you can’t tell where the horizon ends and the sky begins, is an uplifting sight. For a brief second the birds disappear, as they bank toward you. Then when they bank away, their bright white bellies sparkle, a flash of jewels amid the somber surroundings.

Besides wanting to one-up the Canada Goose, I had another reason for wanting the Greater Scaup to be my first bird of the new year. The Greater Scaup is the only diving duck that is circumpolar, meaning their territory covers the entire northern third of the globe. As I sat watching yet another flock land on Lake Michigan, I imagined a similar scene being enjoyed in Tehran, in Toulouse, in Tokyo. And I imagined the birders in those places enjoying the spectacle just as I did.

It was a good first thought for the New Year.

I was probably about seven years old when my uncle Zelo spun another of his Paul Bunyan-like tall tales. We were walking a pine forest of northern Michigan in summer, looking for huckleberries and dodging mosquitoes. As we waded through the waist-high ferns we came upon a big depression about five feet deep and fifty feet across, where all the ground cover was completely gone, creating a huge bowl of yellow sand. “What do you think happened here?” I asked.

“I know exactly what happened,” my uncle said, “’cuz I was here to see it. There used to be a little pond right there, you know. Remember last December, when we had that really sudden cold snap? Just after dawn I was out hunting, and as I approached this tiny pond, I heard the loudest racket. I got closer to investigate, and saw the pond was filled with ducks, elbow to elbow. They were trying to fly away, but couldn’t. Turns out the pond had froze up solid overnight, and those poor ducks were stuck there with just their heads and wings free. It was a pitiful sight, as they flapped and flapped, trying to get away.

“Then you won’t believe what happened next. With all those ducks flapping to beat the band, as true as you and I are standing here, that whole frozen pond started to break free, and up it rose—like a big upside-down flying saucer. I stood there with my jaw to the ground, watching those ducks lug that huge chunk of ice over that hill there, heading south. I imagine the pond eventually melted somewhere over Louisiana, and those ducks made it to Mexico by happy hour.”

The story was hard to believe, even for a seven-year-old. I looked at the bare sandy area, “Really, Uncle Zelo? Tell me then, what kind of duck were they?” He answered without missing a beat, “Red-breasted Mergansers, every one of ‘em.” My uncle got me every time with long names like that. After all, you don’t just make up a name like Red-breasted Merganser.

In case you are sitting there wondering…. let me assure you: No, there is no way a flock of Red-breasted Mergansers could have made off with that frozen pond. To get up in the air, Red-breasted Mergansers—like their cousins the Hooded and Common Mergansers—have to get a good running start. When they take off from a lake, they will run across the surface for as far as fifty yards before getting airborne. No way could a flock of mergansers have lifted that pond straight up. Those must have been Mallards or Wood Ducks that my uncle saw, which take flight by shooting straight up from the water.

Uncle Zelo did not know his waterfowl as well as he liked to think he did.

The Red-breasted Mergansers are in breeding plumage this time of year. The male is a beautiful mix of deep blue/black, orange/red, white and black. Before long he’ll be strutting his courting display and fighting with other males over potential mates. They often look comical, with their bright orange eyes, long, thin serrated bill and disheveled perm. The female is more subdued in color, with dark feathers around the eyes, giving her a bit of a Goth look.

The Red-breasted Mergansers will be with us in the Midwest all winter. If you walk the shore of Park 566, you’ll find them dotting the surface of Lake Michigan for the entire mile long stretch. They tend not to form large 1000-bird rafts like the Greater Scaup and the Redheads. They’re scattered instead—3 here, 6 there, 25 further ahead. At least 200 all together on a typical day, and often quite close to shore and easy to observe.

Reason enough to get out and brave the cold!

With this essay I hope to make amends for the decades of ill will I’ve harbored toward the noble Wild Turkey. After all, the bird can’t be blamed for the misfortune of having its name attached to the rot-gut that did me in many years ago.

When speaking of the Wild Turkey, there is no need to spend time on ID fine points. It’s pretty hard to mis-identify a Wild Turkey. You probably will never hear anyone say: “I didn’t get a good look at its tail, so I’m not sure if it was a Wild Turkey or a Hermit Thrush.” You know it’s a turkey when you see one.

I prefer instead to spend a few lines to make the case that the Wild Turkey would have been a very appropriate choice as the national symbol of the U.S.A. Yes, I know that Benjamin Franklin purportedly argued as such more than two centuries ago, but he made his case based on the Wild Turkey’s apparent higher moral stature. My case is based on mistaken identity and mistakes rectified.

Here is a brief history of the Wild Turkey.

The year 20,000,000 BCE:

The natural process that led to the evolution of various species of what we now call game birds, such as the pheasant and the grouse, also gave rise to the ancestors of the turkey. Eventually two species of turkey would develop, both of them endemic to the American continent only.

About 20 million years later:

Sometime after 500 BCE, peoples indigenous to Mexico and Central America began to domesticate the turkey. By 500 CE, the domesticated turkey was a staple of the people of the Mayan Empire.

About a thousand years later:

In 1519, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba arrived in the Yucatán from Cuba, the first European visitor to the Aztec territory ruled by Moctezuma II. Among the many fascinating items that Córdoba shipped back to Spain were a few turkeys plucked from the barnyards of Mexico.

Very quickly these large, tasty fowl found their way to barnyards of the rich all over North Africa and Europe, replacing the peacock as the dinner of choice for royalty who wanted to put on the dog.

About 1525 the first domestic turkeys arrived in Britain. King Henry VIII was undoubtedly the first British monarch to fall asleep on the couch after feasting on roast turkey from the Americas.

But because of his dinner’s circuitous route from Mexico to the British Isles via Spain, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, King Henry probably slumbered in blissful ignorance of the bird’s true origins. The British were already familiar with exotic imports like the African guinea fowl, which made their way to Britain on trade routes that passed through Turkey, and they referred to these sorts of exotic birds as turkey-fowl. When the turkey—which wasn’t called turkey yet, of course—started to arrive via the same trade route as the Turkey-traversing turkey-fowl, the Brits just assumed this was a new variety of the already familiar exotic fowls from south or east Asia.

Thus, the turkey came to be called turkey.

Or something like that. I’d say there’s about a 50% chance that this story of how the turkey got its English name is true, but I have not found a better story, so I’m sticking with it.

Meanwhile, back in the good old future U.S. of A. turkeys were roving the forest fringes as they’d done for millions of years, scraping for hickory nuts and beech nuts, blissfully ignorant that they were turkeys. The Cherokee called the bird gvna; to the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region it was gichi-bine, which means large grouse. Taxonomically, the Ojibwe were closer to the truth than the Europeans were.

Early 1600s

The pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock. While that fabled origin story has a credibility potential of maybe 15%, we can be 99% certain that among the livestock the pilgrims unload from their ships were a few domestic turkeys, probably about the same number that Córdoba had sent to Spain from Mexico a century earlier. Imagine the pilgrims’ surprise when the gobbling of their turkeys attracted gvna from the surrounding forests. The endemic turkey may have served to strengthen their misconception that this new world was connected to the Far East, since that’s where turkeys came from, right? What exquisite irony to think that the Europeans’ erroneous understanding of the origin of the turkey possibly served as “evidence” of the fact that the earth is indeed round. Unfortunately, it took them many more years to figure out that there happens to be a huge continent between Europe and Asia, almost every square mile of it populated by turkey that have never set foot in Turkey.

1640 until today

The irony continues, tragically, as the “wheels of progress” grind slowly across North America. Over the next three hundred years, the turkey, which fed and enlightened indigenous peoples and immigrants alike, was slowly but surely extirpated—by rifle, by arrow, and by plow—from one territory after another. By the beginning of the 20^th century there was serious concern that the Wild Turkey would follow the Passenger Pigeon on the road to extinction.

Fortunately for the Wild Turkey and for us, in the 1940s we humans began to recognize the errors of our ways. Conservation groups, departments of natural resources, and hunting organizations began programs of re-location and re-introduction to help the Wild Turkey gain footholds in areas where it had been wiped out. The Wild Turkey proved to be a very resilient and adaptable bird, and by the beginning of the current century every one of the lower forty-eight states was home to a healthy and growing population of Wild Turkey. The current population in North America is estimated to be 7.8 million birds—ninety percent of them in the contiguous forty-eight, and the remainder in Mexico and Canada. There are probably more Wild Turkey in North America today—and in a broader range—than there were when the first waves of immigrants came from Europe. And the bird even has a whiskey named after it, for what that’s worth.

And so the Wild Turkey’s colorful history comes full circle. I will resist the temptation to draw pithy moral and historical conclusions or get preachy about why I think the Wild Turkey should be our national bird. Let me just list a few descriptors that come to mind when I look at this wonderful bird’s twenty-million-year journey: misunderstood, underappreciated, underestimated, resilient, and ultimately vindicated. I am hard-pressed to find a bird with such an impressive array of traits, so intricately wrapped in the history of our nation, and so reflective of the collective experience of the diverse groups of people that comprise our multicultural society.

Mic drop.

Is nothing sacred?

It’s true that October through early November is the best period to see this rare visitor as it passes through on its way south. So comparing the LeConte’s Sparrow to the Halloween gourd is timely, if nothing else. But “pumpkin-faced?” Besides caving to the tired pumpkin cliché de jour, this description makes the poor bird sound like a clown. If you’re looking for adjectives to describe the distinctive plumage of the LeConte’s Sparrow, and you’ve got your heart set on an edible color, a quick visit to the Benjamin Moore display at your local home center will give you plenty of creative ideas: Glowing Apricot, Tangelo, Sharp Cheddar, Peach Crisp….

OK, I’ll end my rant here. After all, I guess it could have been worse: sweet-potato-faced?

To describe the LeConte’s Sparrow’s color I like Benjamin Moore’s Glowing Apricot. It’s not quite orange, but not yellow, either. And the apricot hue is accented beautifully by crisp black streaks on the bird’s crown and flanks, with a thin black eye-line that looks like it was carefully drawn by a Japanese calligrapher. The contrasts created by the black lines really do make this bird appear to glow. The black/apricot motif is especially striking on the LeConte’s Sparrow’s back, where each individual feather has a charcoal black center surrounded by glowing apricot and a chiffon white outer fringe. As these feathers overlap each other on the bird’s mantle, they create a bold pattern of stripes that make the LeConte’s Sparrow as beautiful from behind as from the front or side. Everything about this sparrow is crisp, clean and elegant.

Unfortunately for us birders, the beautiful LeConte’s Sparrow is as introverted as it is elegant. It is extremely elusive and very adept at remaining out of the glare of the spotlight. Even trained and experienced ornithologists and naturalists struggle to find this bird. During a recent study of its breeding habits in northern Wisconsin in spring—when males of all species are most vocal and ostentatious—scientists were able to locate (aurally) eighty-six distinct males singing to mark their territories. But of those eighty-six singing male LeConte’s Sparrows, only eight birds came out into clear view long enough for the researchers to see and visually verify them. Little is known of the bird’s nesting habits because practically nobody can ever find a nest! In fact, though the species was first described and categorized in 1790, it took almost a century before the first LeConte’s Sparrow’s nest was found. It took scientists less time to find tracks of the sub-atomic proton after it was first discovered than to find this secretive sparrow’s nest.

LeConte’s Sparrows breed in the marshy areas of the great grasslands of central-west Canada and northern Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. They spend the winter months in the southern U.S. On their way back and forth between Canada and the gulf coast during spring and fall migration, they pass through the nation’s middle, offering us Midwestern birders ample opportunity to seek and not find them.

Here is a typical day in the life of a Midwestern birder on the prowl for a LeConte’s sparrow. Arrive at your favorite grassland park at dawn. Ignore the message scribbled in the dirt at the park entrance by yesterday’s birders—”Abandon hope all ye who enter here”—and plunge into the waist-high grass. Within ten steps you are soaked from the knees down by the dew on the bluestem and bergamot and asters. Sparrows flush left and right, like popcorn on a hot griddle—Swamp, White-crowned, Song, White-throated, Savannah, Field, Lincoln’s. They perch briefly, long enough for you to ID them, but your interest is elsewhere today. You’ve done your homework, so you know to be on the lookout for a tiny bird with a hint of yellow-orange that won’t flush until you almost step on it, flies weakly for a very short distance barely above the grasses, and then disappears back into the grasses.

A bird that seems to match that description flushes from ten feet away and drops again low in the grasses. Heart thumping, you manage to get the binoculars on it. You meet its gaze and realize it’s a Sedge Wren.

For two hours you wade on. This park is seventy acres of grassland. That’s plenty of space for a five-inch bird to hide. Your heart rate skyrockets only one more time. This time it’s clearly an orange/yellow-colored sparrow, but you only get a split-second look at it with the binoculars before it disappears in the grass. You can’t be sure it was a LeConte’s Sparrow, because the LeConte’s Sparrow has a close cousin, the Nelson’s Sparrow, whose color is very similar. I’d call the Nelson’s Sparrow a Sharp Cheddar instead of Glowing Apricot. If you see the birds clearly, the IDs are relatively easy. But when you’re up to your elbows in wet grasses trying to get a look at a tiny orangish sparrow hiding low, you can be forgiven for not being able to distinguish Glowing Apricot from Sharp Cheddar.

You return to your car, wet and tired and LeConte’s-less. You vow never to do that again.

You’re back the next day, of course. Today, though, you forego the bushwhacking and stick to the beaten path. Five minutes into your walk, as you scan the grasses searching for an orangish sparrow, suddenly a LeConte’s Sparrow pops up from a clump of bent-over grasses not twenty feet away, lands on a rope fence, and just sits there as if waiting for a bus. It’s not bothered in the least as you raise your camera and snap dozens of photos. Eventually it tires of its perch and disappears in the grasses on the other side of the path, leaving you with a smile on your face that lasts all week.

You bird the park five more times before the end of October and don’t see another LeConte’s Sparrow for the rest of that season.

I’m not making this up, or exaggerating. I’m convinced you only see a LeConte’s Sparrow when it wants you to see it. When and why are you chosen? Well, as Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” You have to be there to be chosen.

Even when the bird wants you to see it, it’s easy to let the opportunity slip through your fingers. It happened to me once (at least). Fortunately, on this occasion I was saved by my camera. It was at the end of a day of birding, and I was photographing a small flock of Pine Siskin, Common Redpoll and American Goldfinch plucking seeds from the dried flower heads. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and dozens of birds were flying back and forth all around me. I had a great time snapping hundreds of shots and soaking up the energy of that flock of birds. Later that day, as I sorted through the photos, I came across one with a bird flying into the frame from the upper right corner. It was not in crisp focus, so I was about to crop it out of the photo…until I took a closer look. I was amazed to see it was none other than a LeConte’s Sparrow. I had spent the entire morning in a fruitless search for that elusive bird, only to have one photo-bomb me just before I headed for home.

It can happen to you. There is still time this fall for a LeConte’s Sparrow to find you. Grab your pumpkin latte, throw a pumpkin bagel in your pocket and head to a grassland near you. Expect the unexpected. And don’t discard any photos before looking carefully for surprises in the upper corners.

I know, I know. A mature male Indigo Bunting in breeding plumage is nothing short of stunning. On its perch atop a tall honey locust, singing its heart out, glistening in the late morning sun like a sapphire fallen from heaven, it lives up to its description as a piece of sky with wings. But…

Yes, I also know that that dazzling indigo color is just a pigment of our imagination. In fact, the feathers of the Indigo Bunting contain not an iota of indigo pigment. Instead, there are tiny structures in the breeding male’s feathers that refract blue light, just as particles in the air refract blue light and make the sky appear blue. If that shiny blue Indigo Bunting you are watching takes wing and perches on a branch deep inside the shade of the tree, it transforms from a piece of brilliant blue sky to a dark blue-gray corner of cloud. You wouldn’t think it’s the same bird at all. I know this, but…

I know that feathers wear out. So all birds undergo a regular cycle of plumage renewal. Newborn birds start with soft, fuzzy feathers that are soon replaced by sturdy body and flight feathers. Then, at regular intervals they drop their worn feathers as new ones come in to replace them. In the case of the Indigo Bunting, this can lead to some pretty splotchy results, as males transition into or out of their blue breeding plumage. I have many unflattering photos of young male Indigo Buntings that I have stashed away, like that uncle who plans to embarrass you on your wedding day with snapshots from your high school years. But…

I know that at the start of my walk every morning of summer I can count on the resident male Indigo Bunting greeting me with its bouncing song of tangled couplets—continuing to sing until I am out of earshot. When I end my walk several hours later, he is usually still trilling away. There’s a reason he is known as one of the singingest songbirds of the Midwest. I watch him change from dull brown to shiny blue as the sun comes out from behind a cloud. Brown, then blue, then brown again. I close my eyes and don’t worry about the color. It’s the song that counts—a song that is always as bright and uplifting as the rising sun itself. That blue bird never fails to sing away any blues that might be flitting around my heart. I know this, but…

I know—though my ears are not sensitive enough to detect it—that this particular Indigo Bunting is singing with a Chicago accent. Each “neighborhood” of Indigo Buntings has its own unique variation of the core Indigo Bunting song, and young Indigo Buntings learn this variation from other males in the neighborhood, not from their fathers. So, for example, if a male Indigo Bunting from New York’s Central Park were to show up in the spring at this southside Chicago park and start a family, no matter how hard he might try to prevent it, his kids will end up singing wid a sout’ side aaxent.

I know all these things about the male Indigo Bunting because I am attracted to shiny objects. They catch my eye, so I learn about them. But… but can you let me get a word in edgewise about the female Indigo Bunting?

Because, you know what? The male in spring and summer may be good with the song and dance, but you do not really know the Indigo Bunting until you’ve met the female. No glitz, but plenty of glamour, to my eye. Various shades of brown, and tan, and rust. Wings and tail slightly darker than the rest of the body, and the underbelly a soft cream. Two light wing bars that add just a touch of contrast. It’s hard to wear brown well, you know. There is no dazzle to distract from the crisp profile of this impressive bird. While the blazing blue male Indigo Bunting elicits a “Wow!!”, the female makes me think “Nice.” It’s an understatedly beautiful bird.

The next time you are captivated by the color and cadence of a male Indigo Bunting overhead, enjoy it to the fullest. But remember also to lower your gaze and check the low bushes around you for a lurking female. Listen for her cardinal-like staccato chips; watch for a bouncing branch that signals her location. If you are able to catch even a brief glimpse, I know you will not be disappointed. No buts about it.

Keeping Northern Mockingbirds was the thing in the eastern United States two centuries ago. As its name implies, this plain-colored master of mimicry has an impressive playlist of other birds' songs. The most versatile Northern Mockingbird might cover as many as 200 different bird songs. It will sit in the high branches of a small tree or shrub and skip from one song to another, on and on, like a DJ trying to suss out the taste of his audience.

If you wanted to buy such a bird in Philadelphia in 1828, it would have set you back as much as $1400 in today's dollars. With strong demand for this bird among nature-starved city folk driving such a high price, there was never a shortage of nest robbers happy to make a quick fin. The result was that the Northern Mockingbird was almost extirpated from some areas of the East Coast--another example of how the human desire to possess or profit often leads to the destruction of the very thing we seek. Our desire for beautiful feathers in the late 1800s, for example, almost wiped out the Great Egrets and Snowy Egrets. Our insatiable appetite for oil and other natural resources still puts in danger the existence of countless species. It took us until 1973 to finally pass the Endangered Species Act, which recognizes that every species' right to exist takes precedence over our desire to possess and to profit.

Fortunately, the Northern Mockingbird's is a story with a happy ending. The human desire to possess died out before the birds did. Today the Northern Mockingbird remains a very common bird across the entire southern half of the continental United States. It is a stunning bird to watch. What it lacks in color it makes up for in panache. Its proud posture, slightly curved bill, and deep yellow eyes give it an almost stern look as it prances across grassy areas, pouncing on crickets, caterpillars and other insects. When it flies up to a perch atop a small tree, it glides with an effortless lilt, flashing the bright white wing patches that are its trademark.

The Chicago area is on the northernmost edge of the Northern Mockingbird's summer territory, so it is considered a treat when one is nice enough to hang its hat here for the summer. In the summer of 2024, we had the rare opportunity at Park 566 to watch a pair of nesting Northern Mockingbirds raise not one but two broods. By observing this pair for two full months, we learned quite a bit about their nest-building skills (ho-hum) and their ability to multi-task (impressive). The first nest was built in a small, scraggly elm, in the crook where the trunk branched in two, barely five feet off the ground. The nest itself appeared as scraggly as the host tree—a tangle of twigs and branches that was impressive not for its architectural finesse but for its apparent disregard for the laws of physics. How the eggs remained in the nest long enough to hatch is beyond me. Granted, we viewed the nest only from a discreet distance, so maybe there was a plush nursery tucked away somewhere deep in that tangled mess. Maybe.

If so, apparently it was not cozy enough to keep a young chick in there for long. In fact, we wondered if that might have been the adult birds’ strategy—don’t let the young chicks get too comfortable, so they will exit the nest as quickly as possible. In fact, we were surprised to discover that while the empty-nester adult birds were still bringing food to a young clingy fledgling that hung around in a tree near the family shack, they were already busy incubating another brood in another ramshackle nest in a tree some fifty feet away. That was a quick turn-around.

Watching that busy pair of Northern Mockingbirds for a couple months ranks high on my list of favorite moments in the field. And it makes me relieved I was not born in 1800. If I had found the nest two hundred years ago, my temptation to raid the nest for my own benefit would probably have been too hard to resist.

I have never taken a young mockingbird from its nest to keep as my own, because I have been raised differently than my fellow Americans of two centuries ago. I have no $1400 bird in a fancy cage on my porch to impress the neighbors. What I possess instead are many happy memories—and a few photos—of these marvelous birds. I’ve listened to their beautiful song in the field. I’ve watched them hunt for insects and carry the food to the waiting chicks in the nest. That is treasure enough for me. I consider myself a rich man.

If D-76, stop bath, fixer, Dektol, enlarger, dodging card, and developing tray mean anything to you, you’ll appreciate my fascination with the Northern Rough-winged Swallow.

As the oldest child of three, I felt it my duty to please my father by showing interest in things I thought he thought I should like. Dad had a tiny darkroom in our basement, and when I was old enough to hold a developing tank, he was teaching me how to pop open a roll of black-and-white 35mm film and load it into a developing tank in the pitch dark. Once the film was developed and dry, we’d spend long hours under the dim red safe light turning negatives into positives—cropping, agonizing over exposure, watching the image magically appear on the photo paper, and hanging the wet prints up to dry.

Unencumbered by the self-imposed filial duties of the firstborn, my younger brother and sister wanted nothing to do with photography and the alchemist’s den known as the darkroom. Their loss. I was captivated by the whole photographic process—tweaking the camera settings with the help of a light meter to capture the image, developing the negative, and then enlarging and printing. From setting the aperture and shutter speed to hanging prints to dry, it was a slow, painstaking process. The “D” in front of SLR would usher in the instant gratification and almost infinite adjustability of modern DSLRs, but that was still decades away. A roll of 35mm film had only twenty-four or thirty-six exposures, with fixed film speed. If you wanted to switch from landscape photography to action shots, you either sacrificed the remaining film and inserted a roll with a higher ISO, or you carried a second camera. I couldn’t afford either, so I stuck to landscapes, occasionally thrilling to the discovery of a swooping swallow that I somehow captured in one of my shots. Actually, those photo-bombing birds might have been Chimney Swifts or Caspian Terns, for all I knew about birds at that time.

I never delved into color. I enjoyed the challenging simplicity of black-and-white.

My thoughts on black and white vs color changed when I started birding. To photograph these beautiful creatures in monochrome seemed like viewing a Monet exhibit on a black-and-white television. Sure, I would manage to see and even feel the energy in each painting, but I would certainly miss the subtle interplay of colors and shades, the unexpected color contrasts and even the occasional intentional discord that can’t be captured in monochrome. Likewise with birds. There is beauty in the movement and the sound of birds, but their colors! They can take your breath away. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird supping at a trumpet vine. A Northern Shoveler winging low across a golden autumn sunset. An Eastern Bluebird perched in a blooming redbud in spring. I swoon just thinking of the beauty. Especially for a beginner birder, color is often the first thing we note about any bird we see, and the colors of a bird’s plumage play an important role in identifying it.

Digital photography dispensed with the long hours in the red glow of the darkroom safe light, only to replace it with countless hours in the soft glimmer of the computer screen. I no longer get my hands wet processing the shots, but reviewing hundreds of images after each outing, and then using software to crop, adjust the balance and saturation, and perform other fine-tuning is no less painstaking and no less time-consuming. Still, I enjoyed developing a whole new skill set, and I got pretty good at it.

And then I met the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I became a big fan of this bird for several reasons. First, it was a good bird for practicing my burgeoning skills with the long, heavy telephoto lens. Even with the amazing autofocus and six-frames-per-second shutter of my first DSLR camera, just finding a swooping swallow in my viewfinder was challenge enough, let alone capturing a shot in focus and properly exposed. I coined the term vertiwhip to describe the dizzying whiplash induced by panning non-stop—left!/right!/down!/up!/left!/!up! After ten minutes of that torture, when I said, “I’m sick of this!” I meant it literally. To avoid eating my breakfast in reverse I’d sometimes have to lie down on the grass for a while.

Which, by the way, is a nice position from which to view the swallows. Afraid to use camera or binoculars until the queasiness subsided, I’d just lie there watching the swallows and swifts flit about. They all had the same target and the same MO, spastically chasing their insect dinner through an invisible maze of pathways, turning this way and that like winged bumper cars on steroids. Taking in the big picture like this, I found that I was able to begin to distinguish the various types of insect-chasing acrobats caroming above. The Chimney Swifts were easy, with their flying-cigar silhouette and stiff, rapid wingbeats. The orangish belly of the Barn Swallows sometimes stood out clearly, and if that was not enough, their forked tail clinched it. What made the Northern Rough-winged Swallows stand out was their chunkier shape, their broader wings, and their slower flight style. It’s all relative, of course; the Northern Rough-winged Swallows fly with more than enough gusto to induce vertiwhip when I try to photograph them, but their wing beats seem more deliberate than other swallows, and they often glide with wings spread for extended periods.

If you join me supine on the grass, another thing you will notice about the swallows and swifts flying overhead is that they could be as colorful as peacocks, and you’d hardly be able to tell. They are often backlit and flying so fast that it can be very difficult to pick out plumage colors. To enjoy them, it’s best to learn how they fly and the shape of their wings.

In other words, the show is just as good in monochrome as it is in color. And the Northern Rough-winged Swallow carries this to the logical extreme. Its plumage is a minimalist palette of soft gray, gray-brown, and white, with no sharp contrasts. “Color, schmolor,” it seems to say. “Whatever I want to express can be done in monotone.” In fact, the Northern Rough-winged Swallow even sounds black-and-white. They call to each other with a toneless bzzzzt that mimics an electric bug-zapper.

Northern Rough-winged Swallows prefer open areas near water, making them a perfect fit for Park 566, my favorite lakeside grassland park. Often present there in large numbers, they have given me plenty of photo-ops. And the more I got to know them and study their photos, the more I came to feel that color was getting in the way of appreciating them fully. Whatever the background—deep blue sky, vibrant green leaves—it seemed the surrounding setting always stole the bird’s thunder.

So as I worked on my photos of the Northern Rough-winged Swallow, I decided to return to my black-and-white roots…and I loved what I found. It’s as if the bird was meant to be seen in monochrome. Turn that blue sky into crisp white-gray. Transform the steel-blue fence into Northern-Rough-winged-Swallow-taupe. Convert the moss-covered chunk of slag into a twenty-shades-of-gray Ansel Adams mountain-scape. Suppress the color clutter and the Northern Rough-winged Swallow comes alive in a fresh, simple way. That drab bird positively sparkles.

Of course, the Northern Rough-winged Swallow doesn’t need my help for it to shine. It’s I who needed help learning how to see it well. The minimalist swallow opened my eyes to how much I was being blinded by color. I find myself often seeking out the “dull” birds because of the elegance they project when seen in their stunning simplicity. Flycatchers, catbirds, crows, kingbirds, chickadees, female Indigo Buntings, cowbirds, gulls (dare I go there?). There is a surprising number of species whose plumage is fifty shades of gray.

There is not much time left this year to enjoy the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. Usually by the end of August they have vacated Park 566, probably already on their way to their wintering grounds in Mexico and South America. That’s OK. There are plenty of other “dull” birds to keep me in practice until the swallows return in spring. And when the swallows do return, there is something new I hope to capture on film. I learned that the Northern Rough-winged Swallow has an amazing way of drinking. It sips on the fly by skimming its wing in the water and then drinking the droplets from its wing.

That gave me an idea for my dream monochrome photo. Picture this: I am at water level when a lone Northern Rough-winged Swallow sweeps low over a placid Lake Michigan, barely six inches above the water. Less than fifty feet away the bird dips its wing into the dark water, slicing the steel gray surface like a filet knife and raising a glistening silver spray a foot into the air. Before the shimmering plume cascades back into the lake, the swallow turns its head in my direction, the morning sun glinting in its flint-black eye. I manage to snap a shot just as it drinks the white droplets that cling to its gray wing.

Wouldn’t that be thrilling? And if National Geographic should somehow discover my photo and tell me they would like to publish it if I submit it in color, I’ll say (with a wink to the Northern Rough-winged Swallow), “Nah, I’m good.” There are times, I think, when it is best to set aside our multi-colored glasses, strip things down, and see the world in black and white.

Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in this year’s census, but I did assist as a volunteer with the 2021 census. It was a privilege to work side-by-side with the professionals of the Michigan DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and other collaborators on the Warbler Conservation Team as we covered our specified transects and added our sightings to the group total. In that 2021 census, the global population—Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario—was estimated at 2,245 breeding pairs. I was elated to have seen or heard 14 of them.

The 34% drop in four years from 2,245 to 1,489 pairs is discouraging, but not unexpected. Already in 2021, leaders of the census were pointing out factors that they felt would have a negative impact on the population over the four years until the next census. Their biggest worry was that new habitat creation would not keep pace with habitat reduction as jack pines outgrew their suitability for nesting Kirtland’s Warblers. The slice of the jack pine pie that was appropriate nesting habitat was becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie.

The Kirtland’s Warbler is a relatively large warbler with a booming voice and a boisterous personality. If you visit their prime breeding territory in late June, you will readily find the males singing their lungs out from the tops of the ten-foot jack pines that they call home.

Unfortunately, the Kirtland’s Warbler’s breeding territory is not as expansive as its personality. They are almost completely dependent on jack pine scrubland habitat in the north-central area of Michigan’s lower peninsula. In fact, they are so closely associated with jack pines that their common name is the jack pine bird, or jack pine warbler. And for the jack pine warbler not just any jack pine will do. More specifically, they need young jack pines between five and ten years old, whose dense lower branches provide perfect hiding places for their nests. Once the pines are over fifteen years old, the bottom branches thin out, and they no longer provide good cover for the Kirtland’s Warbler to nest.

Until the 1800s, periodic natural fires would clear out large tracts of mature jack pines, leaving room for young pines to grow. This natural burn/rebirth rhythm created a constant churn of stands of young-growth jack pine perfect for the fussy Kirtland’s Warbler.

Then a series of unfortunate events occurred, like dominoes falling one after the other, and we almost lost this beautiful warbler forever. Here is Dan's Domino Theory of species imperilment and revival. (Spoiler alert: It's not all bad news.)

Domino 1, second half of the 19th century, the vast white pine and jack pine forests of the upper Midwest were leveled. The wood was used for railroad ties, fences and construction lumber to fuel economic growth in the great plains states—including the 2"x10" rough-sawn timbers that form the floor joists in our 135-year-old Hyde Park brownstone.

Domino 2, in the first half of the 20th century, to save the few remaining stands of white and jack pines in Michigan's lower peninsula, the Michigan DNR and US Forestry Service pursued an aggressive campaign to educate the public about forest fire prevention. For eighty-one years Smokey has been the spokes-bear of this campaign, with the famous slogan, “Only you can prevent forest fires!” (The slogan today is a broader “Only you can prevent wildfires!”)

Domino 3, with much of Michigan’s once-vast conifer forests denuded and converted to prairie and farmland, parasitic Brown-headed Cowbirds, who thrive in a mixed forest-prairie environment, moved eastward. They eventually found their way to Michigan, where the red carpet had been rolled out for their expansion.

Domino 4, all the while, the remaining jack pine forests of Michigan's northern lower peninsula continued to mature, with no new generation to follow. Jack pine seed cones require the heat of forest fires to burst them open and release the seeds. Without the wildfires that periodically struck the jack pine forests, there were no stands of new-growth young jack pines.

Domino 5, Kirtland's Warblers continued to return in spring to Michigan's jack pine forests, but they found fewer and fewer of the young-growth jack pines that they needed for nesting. Those that did succeed in nesting found their nests parasitized by the newly arrived Cowbirds.

Domino 6, by the late ‘60s, the population dropped well below 1,000 pairs, the number that is considered the minimum necessary for a self-sustaining population. In 1967 the Kirtland’s Warbler was officially listed as endangered. The 1974 nesting bird survey indicated that less than 200 pairs of Kirtland's Warblers remained.

Domino 7, Michigan DNR and other conservation stalwarts began to act. Controlled burns of mature jack pine stands created new stands of young jack pine and thus increased breeding territory for the Kirtland’s Warbler. At the same time, in the newly burned areas the DNR began trapping Brown-headed Cowbirds to help level the playing field for nesting Kirtland's Warblers.

Domino 8, by 2011 there were 1,828 pairs of Kirtland's Warblers, and the species had even managed to establish a few nesting areas beyond the claustrophobic confines of northern lower Michigan. In 2019 the Kirtland’s Warbler was removed from the endangered list.

Domino 9, now instead of potentially dangerous controlled burns, Michigan DNR and the forestry industry work hand in hand on a clear-and-plant strategy that provides a continuous churn of mature stands of jack pine that can be cleared by the wood industry. Then, in the bare areas after culling for lumber, jack pine seedlings are planted to provide young-growth jack pine stands for nesting warblers. When those jack pines again get too large to host Kirtland’s Warblers, they are culled again, and new seedlings are planted again, and the cycle continues.

The fallen dominoes spell "Success!"

With nature’s dominoes, though, there is always a new domino waiting to fall, as the 2025 census shows.

Domino 10, though total acreage of jack pines has remained steady, suitable nesting jack pine habitat has shrunk drastically. Fortunately, the Kirtland’s Warbler Conservation Team knows why. In their clear-and-plant strategy (Domino 9) they had underestimated the length of time between when the jack pines become too large for Kirtland’s Warblers to nest and when they become large enough to be harvested profitably. In other words, new plantings outgrow their usefulness to the warblers much faster than they grow into their usefulness to their human stewards.

In his email update today, William Rapai, Executive Director of the Kirtland’s Warbler Alliance, points out the consequences:

We knew the census numbers were going to be down because the amount of available habitat was down about 8,000 acres. The Michigan DNR and the US Forest Service have pledged to have about 30,000 acres of nesting habitat available for the birds; currently there's only about 22,000 acres available.

The census counted 1,489 singing males in Michigan and Wisconsin, which means the total number has fallen below the goal of 1,500 pairs, which was the level at which the species was considered recovered in the 1976 Conservation Plan. UGH!

That's the bad news. The good news is that this decline was anticipated. The Conservation Team began to get concerned about habitat numbers back in 2021 and the agencies quickly came to terms with the issue and ramped up the effort to increase acres being planted. Unfortunately, since more acres are maturing out of the conditions that Kirtland's Warblers want, we won't see bottom until 2027. From there, according to the plan, we'll see more acres being planted every year and we should be back to the 30,000 acre goal sometime in the 2030s.

The next census in Michigan will probably be in 2029. To steal a favorite line from my favorite uncle, God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be helping on that census, hoping to contribute in some small way to our understanding of how the next domino will fall.

FURTHER READING:

In Michigan, the Kirtland’s Warbler enjoys some notoriety, and quite a few articles have appeared already about the results of the 2025 census. Below is a link to one in the Detroit Free Press. Also below is a detailed release from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources concerning the results of the census and plans for next steps.

From the Detroit Free Press https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/07/28/dnr-kirtlands-warblers-jack-pines-habitat-survey/85403123007/

From the Michigan DNR website https://www.michigan.gov/dnr/about/newsroom/releases/2025/07/28/kirtlands-warbler-conservation-team-addresses-decline-in-population

I guess you could say I am writing this essay on a lark.

It seems the old expression "on a lark" may date back to the 1800s, referring to a whim or a flight of fancy, like the light, soaring flight of the lark. I’m quite proud of myself for coming up with such a cute lead line for this spur-of-the-moment reflection on the Eastern Meadowlark.

There’s just one problem. The Eastern Meadowlark is not known for its high, graceful flight. On the contrary, with its stout body and relatively short wings, it's a pretty clumsy looking flyer. Imagine Charles Barkley hoisting a ballerina: effective, but not exactly elegant.

Oh, and one other tiny technicality: the Eastern Meadowlark is not a lark. It's in the same family as Red-winged Blackbirds, Grackles and a couple dozen other sharp-beaked birds with long tails.

Except the Meadowlark doesn't have a long tail.

Maybe I should just start all over....

Where I should have started is with the Eastern Meadowlark's song. There is nothing comparable. It’s a simple song—not musically complex like the Winter Wren’s extended warbles. It doesn’t force itself on you, like the full-chested whoops of the Northern Cardinal. It’s a soft, plaintive whistle that seems to rise from the grasses and then sink back again, like the morning mist put to music.

Picture yourself in a grassland, walking along a fencerow, the sun rising over your left shoulder, a tall poplar several hundred yards ahead. Coming from the top of the tree is a voice like a tin whistle—not a rousing jig, but a plaintive ballad, lifting and lilting and meandering, like a good Irish storyteller. The singer pauses. Did he forget the words? No, he just choked up for a moment, overwhelmed by the beauty of all that is around him. Eventually he takes up the melody again, with subtle variations. When you manage to spot the bird, with the early morning sun striking its bright yellow chest, you'll marvel at the pot of gold perched atop that tree.

Marvelous. Eastern Meadowlarks look and sing as if their entire being were a whimsical flight of fancy. To share space with this beautiful bird is to be enriched beyond measure.

Enough said. Enjoy the photos.

Plumage aside for the moment, there is plenty about this bird to raise the eyebrows. First, their migration route. Some Bobolinks fly from the far reaches of South America to the northern great plains of the US and Canada. That's about 12,500 frequent-flyer miles per year. By its sixth birthday, the Bobolink has flown the equivalent of about three times around the globe!

And how does it know where it's going? It follows its nose. Of course it uses its eyes and ears, too, but there are little bristles in the Bobolink's nasal cavity that contain iron oxide. Like an internal compass, these bristles help the bird orient itself along the earth's magnetic fields and reach the destination hard-wired into its internal GPS.

But when it comes to plumage, it seems the male Bobolinks checked their sense of direction at the door. During most of the year, the male and female look pretty similar—beautiful shades of gold, with soft black and brown streaks. But in spring, when the hormones are flowing, an adult male in his stepping-out attire looks like he saw a photo in an old Time magazine and just had at it with some white-out and a black marker. The result is a black-and-white zoot suit worn backward. "Hmmm, interesting," is all you hear from the other birds in the field.

Except for the female Bobolinks. The species has been propagating successfully for many millennia, so who's to fault the Bobolink male for his taste?

Actually, the Bobolink faces more serious non-sartorial threats to its future. Its favorite food and source of energy are rice and other seeds that are found in uncut meadows and in the remaining prairies of North and South America. As we replaced the prairies with farmland, we also destroyed Bobolink habitat. Many communities and organizations throughout the Midwest are working to preserve patches of original prairie wherever possible. (For a nice presentation of one such local gem, see Kelly Ballantyne’s account of her search for the Prairie Cicada at a tiny five-acre original prairie just north of Chicago. There's a Time Machine in My Hometown)

The area where Park 566 sits was marshland, not prairie, before it was filled in with steel mill slag and other types of refuse over the past 150 years. In an ironic twist, there is one small area in the park where the accumulation of detritus has created by accident a mini biome that approximates a dolomite prairie. This was pointed out to me several years ago when I did a walk-through with the manager of the park’s restoration work. In a space barely as big as a football field, he pointed out compass plant, rattlesnake master, prairie dock and other plants whose names I can’t remember. These iconic prairie stalwarts continue to flourish, though keeping invasive phragmites at bay is a constant challenge.

Bobolinks are frequent visitors to this post-industrial park, but only during spring and fall migration; there is no evidence yet of their nesting. Every time I see or hear one, I put on my marketing cap and shout (when I’m birding alone, of course): “Hey, tell your friends about this place. And next spring, plan to stay a while.”

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Enjoy more photos below. Whether it’s the male in breeding zoot suit or female/male in casual soft browns, this stunning bird thumbs its beak at convention.