Category: Field & Street

Somewhere east of Dune Acres, nestled among the high dunes that line the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, is a piece of flat, sandy ground that holds the finest prairie remnant in the state. This 80-acre parcel is now a part of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. It has been officially named the Lois Howes […]

A pair of flickers has dug a nest hole in a big sugar maple in the backyard of a house at the end of our alley. The tree was damaged in a storm two years ago. The storm snapped one of the main vertical limbs at a point about 20 feet from the ground. Apparently […]

There are two ways to attract a butterfly. One is to put out a bait consisting of elderly fruit–bananas are particularly good–mixed with molasses, beer, and yeast. The other is to piss on the ground. Either smell, urine or rotting fruit, is practically irresistible to your average lepidopteran. I learned of the inelegant tastes of […]

Almost nobody has anything bad to say about bluebirds. They are birds of happiness–gentle of demeanor, sweet of voice, confiding of disposition, beautiful of plumage, colored, it is said, like the sky above and the fresh turned earth below. They also have a very high tolerance for human beings. It seems likely that they nested […]

I spent the first Saturday in May sitting in classrooms at Joliet Junior College, attending, along with a few hundred fellow enthusiasts, the eighth Northern Illinois Prairie Workshop. The workshop organizers had provided us with 61 different classes to choose from, with topics ranging from “Prairie Management With Fire and Saw” to “Surveying Prairies for […]

This Saturday is Count Day, the 16th annual State-Wide Spring Bird Count. About 1,500 birdwatchers, 150 of them in Cook County, will be out all day counting the birds passing through Illinois as the northward migration nears its peak. For decades, birding was a sport with one major annual tournament: the Christmas count. The first […]

The storm last February that sent waves crashing into the condos on Sheridan Road and threatened to relocate the Oak Street beach to the lobby of One Magnificent Mile made lake levels a hot political issue. A lakefront commission appointed by the mayor last fall suddenly found itself famous. Its chairman, former alderman Martin Oberman, […]

The oldest known bird fossil was dug out of a limestone quarry in Bavaria in 1861. It was given the genus name Archaeopteryx, ancient winged, and since the quarry was the source of the fine-grained limestone used for lithographic printing, the species name became lithographica. We know from the age of the rocks where it […]