Birding, like football, is a sport played in all weathers. Birders pursue their sightings through rain, snow, agonizing windchills, and wilting heat. Field-trip schedules usually carry the simple warning: dress for the weather.
The main streets were wet but not slippery, which was good, because our territory was along the Des Plaines River between Dundee Road and Lake Cook Road, and going that far at a safe speed on the skating rinks around my house would have taken until next Tuesday.
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I was trying out my screech-owl call, a tactic that has worked exactly once in my life. A good screech-owl imitation can be very productive. You might get a screech owl to answer it, or you might get a great horned owl coming to eat the screech owl, or a flock of small songbirds coming to mob the screech owl. We got none of the above.
When we reached the bridge at Lake Cook Road, we turned away from the river to explore the woods east of it. This turned out to be an almost total waste of time. Outside of a couple of robins that passed high overhead, we saw absolutely no birds.
By lunchtime, our patience was beginning to wear a bit thin. Our daughter is not what you would call an avid birder to begin with. She would rather search through malls for cool clothes than scour the woods for chickadees, but she handled the morning with a commendably sporting attitude. By noon, she was asking how long it would be before we got to go home, and my wife and I were starting to ask ourselves the same question. By one o’clock, I realized we had covered all the promising places in our territory, with the exception of a furniture-store parking lot where ring-billed gulls were supposed to hang out in some numbers. I decided that the gulls would remain uncounted, and we packed it in.
