Category: Field & Street

Confirmed sightings of bobcats have come from 90 of the 102 counties of Illinois in recent years. Double-crested cormorants were rare migrants through this region just a few years ago. Now they are regular nesters with growing breeding colonies. As a result, the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board is proposing to remove both of these […]

A few months ago it seemed that gypsy moths were going to be the big bug story of this summer. This long-established pest of eastern forests is moving into northeastern Illinois in significant numbers. Traps baited with gypsy moth pheromones and placed all over Cook and Lake counties are attracting large numbers of interested males. […]

This is a great year for raspberries. The little patch in our backyard is producing a dessert every night, and out in the woods the canes in the bramble thickets are heavy with fruit. I make plans for our backyard berries, plans for raspberry tarts and for berries dressed with sweetened yogurt drained of its […]

These are the longest days of the year, and it seems like we need every minute of them to squeeze in all the stuff that is happening. During the past two weeks I have watched a pair of blue-gray gnatcatchers building a lovely nest of lichens bound together with spider’s silk. I have watched Baltimore […]

When I started birding along the Chicago lakefront in the early 70s sightings of other birders were a lot rarer than sightings of birds. Of course the parks were generally less heavily used in those days. I once narrowly escaped a mugging near North Pond, between Fullerton and Diversey, on a perfectly pleasant spring afternoon. […]

Garlic mustard is nearing the end of its flowering time around Chicago. Always an early bloomer, it came even earlier this El Ni–o year. There may not be a flower left by May 15. The leaves will soon die, but the dead stems topped with slender seedpods will remain through the summer. Each of those […]

The ospreys are back in the forest preserves around Palos Park. A pair has been resident there the past two summers, but they didn’t seem to lay any eggs in the nest they built; ospreys typically spend a few years building a nest before they use it. One of the birds I saw last Sunday […]

A loggerhead shrike recently spent several days at Montrose Harbor. I had the good fortune to see the bird on Sunday, March 29. Montrose has long been famous as a rich source of sightings of rare–and, for that matter, common–species, especially during spring and fall migration. The loggerhead shrike was just the latest in a […]

Chorus frogs are singing. Even after cold nights that leave a skin of ice on the breeding ponds you can hear this lovely sound of spring as the sun begins to do its warming work. The songs of chorus frogs–to be precise, our local animals are western chorus frogs–are like the rasping noise made by […]

The sap is flowing in the sugar maples. The crows have returned to the nest at the top of the tall ash across the alley. Listen closely and you can hear the bugling cries of sandhill cranes and, in the woods, the whispered note of the brown creeper. Raucous flocks of red-winged blackbirds and grackles […]

The phrase “presettlement conditions” has been bouncing around in the Sun-Times in recent days as the paper weighs in on the issue of what our forest preserves are and what they should be. It makes the claim that re-creating presettlement conditions would mean the destruction of forests. This is not what people involved in the […]

Gulls and geese are dominating the bird news this winter. The gulls are getting noticed because of their rarity, the geese because of their abundance. Winter is the season for gull sightings around here. We can expect birds that nest along the shores of the North Atlantic or in the Canadian arctic to come south […]

In 1934 Roger Tory Peterson was turned down by nine publishers before Houghton Mifflin accepted his tiny field guide to the birds of eastern North America. A Field Guide to the Birds was oriented exclusively toward an audience interested in field identification, and nobody knew if that audience was large enough to support even one […]

More than 200 people spent last Saturday in meeting rooms at Northeastern Illinois University learning about birds and habitat management in the Chicago wilderness region. On hand were scientists and land managers from various institutions, birders with experience at monitoring changes in bird populations, and birders with no such experience. Meetings like this are becoming […]

You can hear sandhill cranes long before you see them. The migrating flocks fly high–a thousand feet or more. In fact, cranes have been seen flying as high as 13,000 feet. Standing at the south edge of the prairie at Miami Woods, I was watching a red-tailed hawk soaring over the open ground when I […]