Usually, birds come to me. To my backyard feeder: robins, sparrows, wrens — little brown birds, mostly, with the occasional red cardinal, gray pigeon or blue warbler offering variety.
I’m generally content with that setup, though chasing off squirrels is a constant challenge. They adapt.
Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, however. So when Bob Dolgan, publicist for the Newberry Library, said he is a regular birder and invited me along, I could not refuse the opportunity to seek out birds. Anything is better than sitting in the kitchen, staring gape-mouthed at the newspaper.
We met in the parking lot of the Sheraton Northbrook and, to my amazement, took just a few steps and might as well have been on Egdon Heath. We were on a grassy bluff above a body of water carrying the lyrical name Techny 32B inline reservoir. A strong, steady wind ruffled our clothes. He carried with him a tripod and a 60x Bushnell spotter scope.
A few dozen European starlings vectored past.
“Europeans starlings — we kinda hate them, right?” I said, tucking myself into the fold of birders. An invasive species, introduced in Central Park by some fool who wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to be found in America, crowding out native birds. A reminder of how much lasting damage one idiot can cause.
“Today, I’m feeling very generous, so I’m not going to say that,” Dolgan replied. “They were introduced more than a century ago. They just take up a lot of habitat from other species. They’re not a great bird.”
Great birds came fast and furious. Three mallards on the water. A killdeer — a large plover on long legs.
“You have a life list, right?” I asked.
“I have been a little bit less focused on my list and more focused on the experience,” he said, not offering the number of distinct species he’s seen in the wild in his birding career. I deliberately didn’t ask for the figure. Guys have a way of turning every pursuit into baseball, every activity into a batting average, a numbers game.
“If you look at birds just to check a name off a list, a lot gets lost,” Dolgan said. “There is less a connection to nature and joy of discovery. At the same time, I am keeping up with it. Looking at how many I’ve seen in Illinois, how many in Cook County. I report it on ebird.org.”
Ebird.org is an engaging, well-crafted website. There Dolgan listed the 22 birds we saw over the next hour — well, birds he saw. I sorta squinted in the direction he pointed, though the geese were my contribution; hard to miss geese.
For those keeping score at home, in addition to my Canada geese, we noted examples of: blue-winged teal, northern shoveler, mallard, green-winged teal, killdeer, Wilson’s snipe, lesser yellowlegs, greater yellowlegs, pectoral sandpiper, ring-billed gull, American herring gull, great egret, great blue heron, barn swallow, European starling, American robin, house finch, song sparrow, eastern meadowlark, red-winged blackbird and common grackle.
I definitely saw the great blue heron, an enormous bird, slowly flapping its wings as if it had just escaped the Pliocene Epoch. And the egret, with its long neck and snowy white plumage.
Dolgan goes birding about twice a week and knows his birds — how they look, how they sound, the way they move. “The plover will take a staccato step — three steps,” he said. “Yellowlegs and sandpiper are more constantly going around.”
And no, he doesn’t get many people inquiring what he’s doing, skulking around peripheral areas with binoculars, though birder colleagues have had the police called on them.
We weren’t done, but relocated to the Glenview Park District’s Kent Fuller Air Station Prairie, directly behind the Evelyn Pease Tyner Interpretive Center. Again, I kicked myself for my lack of initiative. My doctor’s office is directly across the street. I’d pulled into that parking lot dozens of times and never once cast a glance at the lovely Illinois grassland and nature center directly across the street, never mind stepped into it. I own the shame, though in my defense, I got here, eventually.
Our mission was woodcocks. Dolgan assured me that males burst out of the brush and hover in the air in a dramatic mating ritual. We tramped around the prairie as the sun set. No woodcocks presented themselves, but I can’t say I was disappointed. In fact, had we seen no birds at all, the experience of spending an hour in the wetland beyond the Sheraton, and then in this prairie, still would have been well worth it. As the great Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, a change is as good as a rest.