The skies above the White Hen Pantry wehre I was meeting Lizzie Condon for the Evanston North Shore were clear and calm in lovely contrast to last year when we had trouble finding a parking place without getting stuck. Our first stop is a water treatment facility that usually hosts hordes of ducks when no [...]
Continue reading about Tis The Season to be Counting: CBCs Two and Three
My Christmas Bird Count season ended with the January 1 Waukegan CBC. I went on four this year, including the Arboretum Lisle CBC which is mostly a social thing for me as I get to spend time with John Leonard, whom I see little of the rest of the year. So this post will focus [...]
Continue reading about Tis the Season to be Counting: CBC One
Readers of this blog know of my fondness for sandhill cranes and there is no place within two hours of where I live that is better to revel in cranedom than Jasper Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area. The region I inhabit offers spectacular avian displays but with one exception they are highly weather dependent. Three [...]
I have not been to the Illinois Beach State Park hawk watch yet this year. There was one terrific stretch of three or four straight days in October when the sharp-shins and falcons were almost non-stop. But November usually produces some good flights as well, dominated by red-tails with a smattering of rough-legs, harriers, [...]
Continue reading about Come for the Hawks, Stay for the Mountain Bluebird
Cindy said, “You are too wrapped up in your passenger pigeon stuff. You need a hobby.” “Hey,” I said. “How about birding?”
Birders in northern Illinois often, for very good reason, complain about the lack of good birds that are readily accessible. Last weekend, though, offered a nice variety of exciting choices. The outstanding bird is [...]
The charrette ended on Friday and the next chapter of my adventure began. I stood on the corner of Broad and Pine for about thirty minutes (the humanity that passes a busy street corner of a huge city is quite interesting to one who spends most of his time in a small room in front [...]
Philadelphia is a city of firsts. They opened the first zoo in the country a couples of months before Cincinnati. The Academy of Natural Sciences was founded in 1812 and was hosting visitors by 1828. “The first drudgery of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1743, “and there are [...]
One of the joys of my passenger pigeon activities has been meeting people all over the country who share my interest in this long extinct bird. (Readers of this blog have met a number of them.) Garrie Landry is such a person, the authority on passenger pigeon artifacts with a superb network of people who [...]
Sunday we drove through Pennsylvania pigeon country, much of which is protected as the Pennsylvania Wilds. In the late 1860s and 70s, the last period when there were still lots of pigeons, the huge flocks generally gathered to nest (there were exceptions) in either NY, WI, MI, ON, or PA depending on where oak or [...]
Oscar Wilde is said to have commented that Niagara Falls is only the first of many disappointments that will be experienced by American newlyweds. I had not been there since 1965, well before I appreciated its significance. Cindy and I were looking for a place to go for a few days so we headed to [...]
Continue reading about Niagara Falls and the Spirit Rises (Part One)