I made a firm resolution that this spring I would get out and do a lot of birding, and so far I have been able to keep it. In the past couple of years, a combination of work, family responsibilities, and household chores reduced my birding opportunities to near zero. I was spending more time sitting and writing about birding than I was actually looking at birds.
Then there is the simple matter of remembering the enormous mass of information that birders have to carry in their heads. Is it the greater scaup or the lesser that has the rounder head? Which waterthrush has the wider eyebrow stripe?
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For the previous week a stationary front had been sitting in central Illinois, holding several million birds behind it. During the night before the count the front moved north, bringing southerly winds in excess of 30 miles an hour and all those millions of birds. Just strolling from harbor to beach and across the lawns I ran up a list of 74 species. The winds were forcing birds that usually stay in the treetops to get down on the ground, and at one point I aimed my binoculars at a patch of grass and counted 15 birds of six different species in my field of view simultaneously.
Watching a flock of red-breasted mergansers in flight, I see a loon flying with them, looking like a Clydesdale in a pasture full of Shetland ponies.
The harriers are the best thing I’ve found so far. I saw one on my first visit, March 17, and two, a male and a female, on April 14. The female gave me a perfect look. Harriers are big hawks whose hunting method involves flying low over open land. Seldom as much as ten feet off the ground, they come upon their prey with terrifying suddenness. I saw the female sitting in a small tree some distance from where I was standing, and as I watched, she took off and flew toward me, quartering over the ground, turning her head from side to side, looking for movement in the grass. I could watch her eyes as she hunted.
