The call of the upland sandpiper is one of the eeriest sounds in nature. A long wailing whistle that rises and then falls, it has been called as sad as a November wind, and indeed it does sound more like the wind than the cry of an animal.
We have a few birds in far southern Cook County in some old fields that have been taken over by the Forest Preserve. The largest concentration in the state, over 100 adults on the average, lives at the Joliet Arsenal, the Army munitions plant just off I-55 in Will County.
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You need three things to do a survey of nesting birds: good eyes, good ears, and a willingness to get up at the most ungodly hours. Bill Glass, a heritage biologist for the DOC, had invited me to help with the count and had given me instructions to meet him near the arsenal at 5:30 AM. To get there on time, I had to leave my house on the north side at 4 AM, which meant getting up at 3:30. Science is a demanding profession.
The usual method used on counts like this is to lay out a route through the area you want to cover and then drive or walk the course, stopping at regular intervals to look and listen for a uniform period of time, in this case, four minutes. At each stop, one person serves as a sort of recording secretary, writing down names and numbers of birds seen or heard. While the sandpipers were our main objective, we recorded everything we encountered.
The original centers of abundance of upland sandpipers were the shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies of the Great Plains. The tall-grass prairies of Illinois were too lush to suit their tastes. Here they were almost certainly confined to the sparser prairies growing on infertile sands and gravels or to areas that were being heavily grazed by our native cow, the bison.
In a curious way, their fate became entwined with that of the passenger pigeon. When the pioneers cleared the woods to make pastures, they were destroying passenger pigeon habitat. That habitat loss, combined with the greed of commercial hunters, led directly to the extinction of the pigeon.
Bluegrass is a cool-season grass that does its growing in spring and early summer and turns brown in August. The native grasses–Indian grass and big and little bluestem–are warm-season grasses that start growing later in spring, and thrive on the hot, dry weather of July and August. Ideally, the combination will provide good grazing from April through October and good upland sandpiper habitat as well. If it works, farmers may have more reason to turn some of their land into pasture, and the sandpipers may reoccupy some of their former habitat.
