The Birdzilla Blog with Joel Greenberg

Blogging and Bogging Through the Spring Bird Count

My first foray into the world of blogging! I feel like Margaret Mead in Samoa. This seems especially strange given that I am a Luddite at heart, slowly being dragged into the 21st century. (I am not yet convinced that anything of importance has happened since Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in 1914. We are just killing time now.)

But if the technology is not in my blood, the subject matter surely is. Birds and other aspects of natural history have been my passion for decades. That is what I do now, for they are the subjects of my consulting, writing, lecturing, and now blogging. I hope you all enjoy this blog and please suggest ways that it can be made better.

Spring in the Chicago area has been a long time coming. We had temperatures in the 60s in March and a nine-inch snowfall in mid April, when my vehicle became stuck as I was covering one of my sites. Two weeks after that I was pelted with sleet. When the mild weather finally arrived, I was still thinking hoax, but I figured if the singing chorus frogs and cranes on territory were fooled, than I would let down my guard, as well.

One highlight of the spring for me is the Spring Bird Count. I organize Lake County, Illinois’ northeastern most county. During most years we come in second behind Cook County; we have come in first a few times and have fallen to third on occasion. The highest total for any county came in 1983, when Lake tallied 205 species and Cook 204.

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Yellow-headed blackbird with odanate snack.
Photographed in Lake County, Illinois by Tim Wallace.

I meet my group at 3:30am so we can be on site by 4 am. That first location is a vast marsh that is generally closed to the public. We play owl tapes and usually get a great-horned and screech. Then we try for the bitterns and rails. Being in the middle of such a place, as it comes awake in the morning, is to be enchanted by the medley of whinnies, trumpets, oonk-a-choonks, and kiddicks. Unfortunately, this year, brutal winds and rain stifled the music and left us shivering during the ever so slow arrival of dawn. There was still beauty, however, in the banks of dark clouds and changing patterns in the lake as the wind alternately gusted and abated.

The birds did make their appearance eventually. Almost in an effort to get us to quit playing its call, a Virginia rail shrieked a few times. A pair of sandhill cranes flew across the cattails while serenading us with their magnificent utterances. Four Forester’s terns floated on the wind like kites, rising and falling to touch the water’s surface. Far out on the lake, I could just barely make out a gadwall, with its dark rear end and white wing patch. Other groups have better woods, and to them go the warblers, but we have the lakes and marshes where ducks linger. In addition to the gadwalls (and I have not heard of anyone else getting them on this year’s count), we also saw four lesser scaup.

The overall paucity of birds enabled us to finish the area sooner than we usually do. I have a detailed route for us to follow so we headed off. Less than an hour later, we hit our best woods, along an over grown lane that crosses Mill Creek. A dam creates a lovely riffle and birds often gather there. We did have a phoebe, two northern waterthrushes, several palm warblers, and a small flock of yellow-rumps. It had stopped raining by then and the temperatures had risen so our group of four were quite content, even if out totals were wanting.

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Yellow-headed blackbird.
Photographed in Lake County, Illinois by Tim Wallace.

Two spots that we usually cover had been holding good numbers of shorebirds, including such hard to find count birds as Wilson’s phalaropes and black-bellied plover. But we had much less- four lesser yellowlegs at one spot and two least sandpipers in another, seen only because I flushed them out of wet grass. Horned larks and pipits, increasingly difficult to find as open fields become converted to homes, skittered across the ground or flew up for short distances.

I try to get to sleep early the night before the count, and I was pleased that after making lunch for the next day, I was in bed by 8:30. (All right, to be truthful, not that much earlier than my usual big fade.) But at 11, the phone rang and it was another birder calling to give me directions for a wetland that he had scouted out earlier in the week. While not thrilled with being so rudely roused, the hemme marsh he described proved to be our best spot. Immediately upon stopping, I heard the shrill calls of the yellow- headed blackbird. It is one of my favorite vocalizations, although not particularly beautiful: Kenn Kaufman describes it as a “long, strangled buzzing noise.” But it is evocative of the vibrant prairie pothole country, of which the blackbird is the only surviving local representative. (Whoever gave the species its Latin name- perhaps Mary Hartman- did not want anyone to miss the point: Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus- yellow-head, yellow-head.) We later spotted ring-necked ducks, redheads, and a flock of ruddy ducks.

My group left me to go their separate ways around four. (I went another couple of hours) One member, Jolynn, had just spent more hours birding than she had ever done during the previous decades of her life combined. I commented that for a novice to have endured so many hours in such inclement weather she was in remarkable fine spriits. (At that point in the day, even I sometimes get cranky, and its my damn project.) The key will be whether she, Phil, and Jennifer (who joined me for a few hours last year) will agree to partake of the madness nest year.

I will let you know how the county did when I get the totals back. How many of you went on spring counts or big days? Please share some of your highlights.