Blue-headed vireo photographed by John Cassady.
Ken Brock suggested that we make an effort to collaborate on some birding this spring. I said that I would love to, particularly if Jeff McCoy and John Cassiday could join us on a week day. Wednesday was the day selected and I arrived early at Forsythe Park in Hammond, Indiana. Heavy fog blanketed the park and although it lightened over time never really burned off completely. (Ken said the temperature never exceeded 51 degrees.) As I scanned from the car, I saw a northern waterthrush feeding at the edge of a puddle in the park and a veery hopping on the lawn of a house across the street.
As we birded Forsythe, it seemed that new birds kept seeping in through the fog. Among them were two individuals of my favorite vireo, the blue-headed (although I do prefer its old name, solitary). We wound up with a total of 15 species of warbler. One noteworthy moment occurred when I spotted a very plain looking warbler that could have been an orange-crowned. Just as the bird provided a view that allowed confirmation of the identification, John yelled “orange-crowned warbler.” I assumed we were looking at the same bird but when I glanced his way, I realized he was viewing a different bird in a different tree.
Scott's mutant/hybrid butterfly.
At one point during our stay at Forsythe, a Scott’s lawn care truck pulled up and stopped, while the driver figured out where his next yard was. I have seen these before and they amuse me no end. The graphic on the truck’s side depicts a colorful butterfly that is supposed to assure customers that the chemicals being applied threaten nothing but the targeted weeds. That may be but they undercut their message by showing a mutant/hybrid butterfly that does not exist. Most of the organism illustrated is a monarch, but the lower part of the hind wings is a swallowtail of some ilk, perhaps tiger. The millions of years of evolution that have led to the monarch as we know it were not enough for someone at the company who felt the real thing was somehow wanting. But the image selected is quite fitting: the perfect butterfly for the perfect lawn, neither of which exist in nature.
Nineteen warblers awaited us at the Hammond Bird Sanctuary (aka Migrant Trap). Orange-crowned warblers are usually in the first wave of warblers and the Connecticut the very last. On this day both species were present. Another noteworthy find was an Acadian flycatcher. This species is not uncommon in the lowland woods of the Indiana Dunes (much less common in other parts of the Chicago region) but rarely shows up on in the lakefront traps. Adding to its scarcity is that most of the species belonging to the Epidonax genus are very difficult to identify by visual characteristics. This bird fortunately was calling and thus making us sure of its identity.
Wolf Lake straddles the Indiana/Illinois borders. Along one portion of it is a woods called appropriately enough, Stae Line Woods. As I mentioned in one of the earlierst blogs, the Indiana birders focus on their side- it would take a mighty rare bird indeed for them to make th e effort to turn the 180 degrees so they could see Illinois. Jeff had tarried at another spot, so Ken, John, and I split up and each reached the same conclusion that the woods were rather empty. Perhaps the most interesting result was finding
ten yellow-rumped warblers, twice the number of the next most common, yellow and common yellowthroat. It is always surprising to me how species composition of migrant warblers can change so dramatically from place to place. Last week on the spring bird count, yellow-rumps were overwhelmingly the most abundant. The following day (May 9), Cindy and I spent a couple of hours at Montrose on Chicago’s Lakefront. While others saw a few, I did not see a single yellow-rumped, although northern yellowthroats were thick.
I stayed with the group for one final location after lunch. It was Whiting Park, home of the infamous “Great Wall of Whiting” which I have written about in an earlier blog. (Rumor has it that 15 people died during its construction. Or maybe dieted. The rumors are garbled on this point.) As John was peering over the wall, he saw a black-throated blue warbler and a very pale female warbler that he thought might have been a Brewster’s (blue-winged/golden-winged hybrid). The even taller Ken enjoyed the black-throated blue and had a quick view of the possible Brewster’s which he thought looked promising. Your blogger, on the other hand, made a series of ineffectual hops to try to glimpse these birds (achieving any sort of height, by the way, is not easy for kwashiorkor sufferers who have largely abandoned walking in favor of sitting as they spend most of their time writing about passenger pigeons). But fortunately for him, a quick decision was made to walk around the wall and search for the birds where they would be most observable. The possible Brewster was relocated, and it was identified as a washed-out female golden-winged, of which another individual was also found.
Ken Brock and John Cassady peering over the Great Wall of Whiting.
Common yellowthroat photographed by John Casssady.
Tags: blue-headed vireo, common yellowthroat, John Cassady, Ken Brock, Scott's Lawn Service