A pair of bluebirds is nesting at North Park Village. Laurel Ross, the naturalist in charge of the nature preserve at Pulaski and Peterson on the site of the former municipal TB sanatorium, called me Monday morning with the news.
Lately they have been making a modest comeback, thanks in part to the bluebird trails–groups of nest boxes scattered through suitable habitat–that bird lovers have erected to give the species a hand. In Cook County bluebirds nest regularly on the bluebird trail at Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington, and in boxes provided for them in the Ryerson Preserve in Lake County, among other places.
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In eastern North America, they do quite well in a landscape that mixes open land–where they like to hunt–with patches of woods where they can put their nests. The western half of the Somme Preserve is exactly the sort of place they favor, since it has both prairie and dense second-growth woodland.
Red-tails build their nests in the tops of the tallest trees. This time of year the dense foliage could make even the largest nest invisible from the ground, but you can find certain clues by looking at the ground rather than toward the treetops. As soon as baby hawks gain control of their movements they learn to back up to the edge of the nest and shit over the side. This keeps the nest clean–which probably cuts down on disease–and it also coats the ground under the nest with the chalky white excrement of the young hawks. It was the whitewash–as ornithologists delicately call this stuff–that revealed the nest to me.
