Our suspicion is that black-crowned night herons have been nesting along the North Shore Channel. This bird is on the endangered list in Illinois. We have three known colonies around Chicago: Lake Calumet, Lake Renwick near Plainfield, and Baker’s Lake in Barrington. There are two other colonies along the Illinois River south of Peoria and another two near East Saint Louis. And that is it for the whole state.
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Alan suggested that we start at the lake and paddle all the way to Devon Avenue, since this would cover the area where most of the sightings took place. So we drove into the Sheridan Shore Yacht Club in Wilmette Harbor, unloaded the canoe, and put it in the water. We weren’t sure we would be allowed to do this, since the yacht club is a private place. But we followed the golden rule of gate-crashers–always act like you know what you are doing–and got under way without incident.
Unfortunately, things took a rather bad turn almost immediately. We paddled around the clubhouse and discovered that an enormous building sat athwart the channel dead ahead. The building houses the machinery that controls the flow of water out of–or into–the lake, and it also contains the controls for the lock that would allow boats to pass into the channel. Our problem was that this lock is no longer in operation. So, doing our best to act like none of this was a surprise, we hauled the canoe out of the water and portaged around the building.
We were far enough below street level to escape traffic noise, and the line of trees on each side of the channel hid all the obvious signs of civilization. The occasional bridges were the only intrusions, and their impact was softened by the barn-swallow nests that studded the beams on their undersides.
The painted turtle basking on a downed log is a genuine native species, and so is the snapping turtle we saw catching some rays on the bank. This may have been the most impressive sight of the whole trip. Allen said it was probably a female, because the females are generally larger than the males–and this beast was very large. Its shell looked as big as a garbage-can lid, and its thick tail must have been a foot long. We saw it just downstream from the Howard Street plant, and its size set us all thinking about weird mutant strains of reptiles feeding on toxics pouring out of our sewers.
