As many as 16 of Illinois’ 43 species of endangered and threatened birds may have nested in Cook County in 1993. I’d bet that no other county in the state could boast a total that high.
And when he finally gets all their reports, he sits down and compiles them the old-fashioned way–with pencil and paper. He does not have a computer.
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I just got my copy of his report for 1993. It makes for fascinating reading. The convention in birding reports is to list the names of all contributors at the beginning of the report. Those whose contributions are cited in the text are given distinctive initials, which are printed after the citation. So naturally the first thing I did when I got my copy was skim the report in search of the initials “JSu.” Getting my byline in a birding report is as big a kick as getting it in the New Yorker would be. It just doesn’t pay as well.
Chicago Audubon has no plans to petition the county to make Bartel Grasslands an official name. The plan is just to spread the word among birders that this is what these lands should be called. Several such unofficial place names already exist. Montrose’s Magic Hedge and Lake Calumet’s Big Marsh and Dead Stick Pond appear on no maps (though Dead Stick Pond did make it into a Sara Paretsky novel), but every active birder in the Chicago area knows exactly where they are.
The first Chicago-area nesting record for the red-breasted merganser was the big news of the 1991 season. The birds nested on Metropolitan Water Reclamation District ponds in Stickney. They were back in 1992 and again this year, but this year we also have confirmed nesting for this species at the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve near Barrington. A female with flightless young was seen three times in early June, and Annalee Fjellberg photographed the birds. Males were also seen at Wolf Lake and Lake Calumet during the summer.
And birds are only part of the story. We currently have volunteers at work studying lichens, sedges, butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, and practically every other group of plants or animals known to inhabit this part of the world. Thanks to groups of volunteers–in numbers and in skill they outdo everybody–we know more about the natural areas of Cook County than we do about natural areas anywhere else on earth.
