Last weekend we held the first ever North Branch Spring Bird Count. When I say we, I mean mainly my friend David Standish and me, along with Jeff Rovner and Judy Pollock. A couple more people had said they would try to get out to one of the restoration sites along the North Branch of the Chicago River late Saturday afternoon, but they didn’t make it.
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Most of our migrants were Tennessee warblers. We heard their emphatic song again and again. When Tennessees are singing their fierce staccato song, their whole bodies jerk convulsively with each note, the effort looks exhausting, but the birds repeat it several times a minute and keep it up much of the day.
The best place to look for warblers at Somme is in the junky second-growth woods west of the Milwaukee Road tracks. I have tried talking to the birds, pointing out that the other side of the tracks supplies authentically restored Illinois oak savannas, a high-class, endangered ecosystem that supported their forebears but which they have probably never seen. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to eat the classy insects that hang out in such a place.
Jeff and Judy found palm warbler, least flycatcher, magnolia warbler, and orange-crowned warbler. We turned up two savannah sparrows on the east side of the tracks and then four more in the big prairie on the west side. This is a species on our wish list for the North Branch prairies. This is a bird of open country. A pair may need only five acres for a nesting territory, but savannah sparrows will not locate their five-acre territory in any prairie or meadow smaller than about 80 acres. These birds are probably just passing through, but we can hope.
And there were surprises here and there. This year, the pond next to the parking area at Somme is displaying at least 50 golden flowers of the yellow water buttercup. This is not one that was planted. The seeds may have come in on a duck’s foot.
So the prairie comes back, pushing through the cracks in little preserves scattered through the metropolis. It evolved on this land over thousands of years. Give it half a chance and its precise adaptation to the climate of this place will help it drive out the aliens. The prairie restored suggests an ancient presence, a thing that has endured millennia and will survive our depredations as well. It is an other that invites us to dialogue.
