Birds of Illinois

IT WAS THE day before the annual bird count by the Audubon Society on New Year's Day when I would accompany one of handful of groups that set out to count as many birds as they can find.

I had one of those remarkable nature spotting days starting with the 20 minute ride to work down Milwaukee Avenue from Libertyville. In 20 minutes I spotted a healthy coyote (clean, good looking coat) that was hunting the tufts of grass poking through the snow near the stand of little Blue Bird houses along Route 21 near the Merit Club on Lake County Forest Preserve property.

Then within minutes there was some type of smaller hawk sitting on top of a wooden power pole. As I pulled into work on Delany Road, I spotted what I thought was a Coopers Hawk because of its narrow wedge shaped tail. After lunch there was a red-tailed hawk hunting a field off the parking lot and at night as I exited the parking lot to go home at night there was a rough-legged hawk soaring over our building with its distinct dark colored shapes on the undersides of its wings.

This would be a good sign that we would see lots of wildlife during the annual bird count, except that the area of our 5 hour count, along the Des Plaines River between Route 176 and 137, would get 8 inches of snow and a temperature drop down to single digits with wind chill.
Joel Greenberg, who supervises the counters and collects the bird feeder surveys as well, had the same fears I did. He also had seen a lot of birds the last few days, but you can only count the birds for the record on Jan. 1. We were afraid they would all lay low for fairer weather.

But I was excited about walking off trail along the river. It would be like hunting, only I wouldn't take any game out of the field. I figured I'd try and shoot some pictures instead, but as it turned out that's a lot harder than you might think.

There used to be a spot in Richmond where I hunted in my youth that had a bramble covered drainage ditch that ran down a hill and when it was covered with fresh wet snow it could suck the air out of your lungs it was so stunning. It was picture perfect awesome, but I never did snap any pictures of the spectacle and now its a subdivision.

Only mother nature in her craftiness could come up with something so neat and tidy as fresh fallen snow that follows all the curvaceous branches and vines with the same exact thickness of snow. You just want to kiss it, embrace it, but you also don't want to disturb one little branch.

That's what Joel, I and University of Illinois at Chicago professor Jennifer Schmidt found as we headed out into the woods behind Liberty Auto on Route 176. "It's so beautiful to be out in the woods on a day like today. You can tell we're the first people," said Greenberg.

Of course we were, it was 7 a.m. and finally light out. Greenberg had seen two Screech Owls at the maintenance parking lot at Independence Grove before meeting up with me, so maybe it would be a good day.

If we had taken all we had seen, our stringer or game bag would of included 3 Yellow Rumped Warblers (known as butter butts), 3 Gold Finches, 7 Downy Woodpeckers, 6 Chickadees, 2 Nuthatch, 3 robins, 8 Canadian geese and 66 Mallard ducks. We came across a Flicker, Winter wren, Hermit Thrush, Sharp_shinned Hawk, Morning dove, Cardinal and Red Tail hawk.

I spotted the Sharp-shinned Hawk (a sharpy) way up in the top of the tree and got kudos from Greenberg for being sharp eyed. I took a picture, but it is one of those where you point to a blob in the branches and explain to people that really is a bird and not the photographer's thumb.

We also had a fleeting glance of some deer, watched a muskrat swim around oblivious of the weather and checked out areas where deer had pawed the ground in an attempt to graze.

Greenberg wound stop in an area he thought would be good for birds and loudly call out "Splish, splish, splish." He explained its called Pishing or Shushing. The technique throws out an array of frequencies taken to be alarm calls that all kinds of birds respond to. It worked to an extent.

Next Greenberg pulled out his old tape recorder where he had recordings of screech owl. Greenberg explained that birds will congregate to the sound to try and harass the predator into leaving the area. This one time it worked amazingly well with birds popping out of nowhere to scold us, especially one bold Robin that was really looking for a fight.

As you can see in the picture, the woods were picture perfect. The snow absorbed sound so you could hear the branches trailing in the river make a light gurgling sound. The trees creaked and groaned and then there was quiet, loud enough that you could hear it until a snowblower started up somewhere in the distance.

In the next couple of weeks Greenberg will be adding up the count and hopefully we had a lot of feeder counters. Last year there were 73 species spotted. We'll report on his numbers as soon as he is ready.

After my birding expedition I had to pick up my daughter from the Vogg family's house on Winchester Road and as we were driving home a hawk with grey-blue wings swooped right in front of us. Turned out it was an American Kestrel according to my search online.

Bird on.

Link to original article published January 3, 2008 in the Lake County News-Sun.