If Andy Sigler tends to target specific birds and is willing to chase them, Walter Marcisz focuses on one area, a place of great biological richness that he knows better than anyone else. The area where Walter birds, and where he has spent all of his life, is the Calumet region, sprawling across Chicago’s southeast [...]
Last Sunday, a consultant working for a pipeline company found and photographed a tropical/Couch’s type kingbird in Fayette County, Illinois, not far from Lake Carlyle (an artificial lake, which is the largest body of water totally within the state’s borders.) Not knowing any Illinois birders, he e-mailed his pictures to the secretary of the Illinois [...]
Chasing rare birds may be the most exciting aspect of local birding. It is a race against time and the elements, with an outcome that can be determined by something as minor as the serendipity of the target to swim a few feet to the left (or walk over a hillock or fly to the [...]
I have just returned from six days in the beautiful Driftless Region, an area of rugged hills straddling the Mississippi River and spanning the corners of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northwestern Illinois, and northeastern Iowa. (The lobes of ice that moved southward during the last glacial incursion missed this section, thus sparing it the filling [...]