I decided to go in search of the gyrfalcons last Friday. I wrote a column about them in January. Two of them have been hanging around the cooling lake at Commonwealth Edison’s LaSalle nuclear power station since Christmas. The obvious attraction is the waterfowl that spend the winter on the lake.
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As a further bonus, the Chicago Audubon Society’s Rare Bird Alert (708-671-1522) reported that a merlin had been seen near the cooling lake. It occurred to me that I could drive to LaSalle County and see the merlin, the prairie falcon, and the gyrfalcons. Then I could drive back to Chicago and find the peregrine falcon that lives along the lake near Montrose Harbor. Add a kestrel or two–you can find them almost anywhere–and I would have seen all but one of North America’s native falcons in a single day. The only one I would be missing would be the Aplomado falcon, which is really a Mexican and Central American bird that shows up very rarely in south Texas and southern Arizona. I would also be picking up no less than three life birds. I have never seen a prairie falcon, a gyrfalcon, or a merlin. And if I did pick up those three species, my North American life list would reach 400 species.
The one thing that made me reluctant to undertake the trip was the fact that I never find any of the rare birds I go searching for. The Rare Bird Alert keeps announcing the presence of extraordinary species and provides very precise directions for finding them. I go out and tromp around all day through snow or mud and see nothing but crows, starlings, and the occasional junco. People who show up the day before me or the day after come back with stories about how the bird landed on a tree branch within 20 feet of them and posed for half an hour.
I drove down into the narrow Illinois River valley, where there were deeply cut ravines thick with trees and my first raptor of the morning: a red-tailed hawk sitting on a utility pole right next to the road. I stopped and looked him over and then drove on into Seneca.
Early in the search I made out the distant shape of a large bird hovering over one spot. Gyrfalcons do hover, but that sort of behavior is more typical of rough-legged hawks, another tundra hunter that comes south in the winter. When I got close enough to see the wing shape, I could tell it was a roughleg. A rough-legged hawk is a good bird, but one you can see every winter if you get out birding much.
Every time I saw something large flying in the distance–and in this kind of landscape you can see large flying birds a long way off–it resolved itself into a crow. Large birds out standing in the fields resolved themselves into pheasants.
