Immediately after the car’s engine started, The Eels’ song “I Like Birds” came over the stereo. This is one of the signature songs from my favorite movie, The Big Year. My wife Julie and I were off on a quest: to find a bird called the crested caracara that had recently been seen (February 10, 2023) at the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour east of our home.
Julie recognized the song from the movie that we had seen at least five times over the last couple of years. She smiled and asked, “Did you purposely put on this song?”
“Well, yeah, it seemed appropriate. We’re kind of doing a Bostick-like thing today.”
Kenny Bostick is one of the main characters in The Big Year. He gives up nearly everything in his life, including his marriage, in a competition with other serious birders to see who can find the highest number of bird species within a calendar year. In order to accomplish this goal, he has to chase after rarities all over the U.S., especially when a rarity is reported by other birders on rare bird hotlines. If he wasn’t just a movie character, Bostick would be traveling to the Emiquon Refuge to seek out the crested caracara, a large falcon that is typically found in the U.S. only in parts of Texas, Florida, the Gulf Coast, and far southern Arizona. Seeing one in Illinois is a big deal, a sighting not likely to happen again for a long time.
On our way to the Emiquon area, we saw thousands upon thousands of snow geese all over the skies of Fulton County. And just east of Table Grove, an entire farm field of corn stubble was covered by a dense flock of snow geese that extended for what seemed like a half mile and that came almost right up to the highway.
“You know, if we stopped to take a picture, they would all fly,” said Julie. She knew what I was thinking.
“Yeah, they’re very jittery. Just about anything can make them all take flight at once, screaming their heads off the whole time. And then they’ll circle around several times in a giant cloud, and all come back down to the same place where they started out from. It seems to me that they waste a lot of energy. So what does that say about 'optimal foraging theory?'” Julie just looked at me, about to roll her eyes, as I struggled against entering “lecture mode.”
As we passed through Lewistown, I tried to drive slower and pay more attention to any large birds in flight or perching in treetops. We were close to the Illinois River valley and the Emiquon Refuge and Nature Preserve. I was fairly confident of seeing the caracara when we started out on our trip, but as I witnessed the vastness of the river valley before me, I knew that we were looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
“This place is so big,” I said. “Where should we look first? I know, look for the birders. When you see a big group of them, you’ll be able to tell by their behavior if they’ve found the caracara. If they’re all intensely looking in the same direction through spotting scopes, they’ve got something good; if they’re all standing around talking, with each birder looking in a different direction, they haven’t found it.”
“Or we can just ask,” replied Julie.
“Yeah, well…we could do that too.”
Then we saw several cars parked along a gravel lane not far from the main highway. “Look! Birders!” I nearly shouted. “I’ll drive past them, and all you have to do is roll down your window, look them straight in the eyes, and say ‘crested caracara’ like it’s a secret password. But realize, in any other context, you would look like a lunatic.” To our disappointment, though, none of the birders had yet seen the caracara. But the previous day, it was sighted in that exact spot, which is why the birders were gathered there. So we drove onward, thinking that we had as much chance of seeing the bird there as anywhere.
Further away on another gravel road, a car came toward us from the opposite direction. I slowed to a crawl, opened the window, and made a sign for the other car to stop, which it obligingly did. And I simply said, “caracara?” The driver kind of smirked, but said “no” in a suspicious sort of way, as if he actually had seen the bird but did not wish to reveal that fact, keeping the information to himself so that he and only he could count the bird, and thereby beat out his birding competitors by one species on the 2023 list of elite Illinois birders. But no, that’s crazy talk, I thought. Or was it?
At the Emiquon Nature Preserve observatory, a quite friendly, talkative older woman approached us while walking her three highly energetic, unleashed dogs. I felt relief that she wasn’t angry, as one of her pets had just barely escaped being run over by my car.
“What’re you all lookin’ for?” she asked.
“A crested caracara,” I curtly answered while adjusting my spotting scope. “A crusted…what? Wait, I’ll look it up on my phone,” she replied.
“No, it’s crested, crested caracara,” said Julie. “It’s rare around here.”
“Oh,” she replied. And then we heard quite a few details about her personal life and religious interests before she and the dogs went happily on their way.
After that encounter, we drove around a bit more within the Emiquon area on the gravel backroads and on the state highway that sits on top of a narrow levee with no shoulder to speak of: a very dangerous situation for birders who are prone to stop with no warning if they see a bird with even the slightest possibility of it being a rarity. And I began to realize that we probably would not see the caracara.
“You know,” I sadly said, “yesterday was really the day for seeing this bird. Birders came from Chicago, and they saw it, according to the internet birding hotlines.”
Julie gave me a rather strange look.
“I’m not making this up! They’re the hotshot birders, though; they always see the rarities. I guess we shouldn’t have waited, but I had to take my 96-year-old mother to the cardiologist! You know, she does have an aortic aneurysm that’s about to explode.”
Julie turned to face me and raised her eyebrows.
“Still,” I continued, “I’ll bet we would have seen the bird if I had canceled her doctor’s appointment. Next time…well, never mind.” And we headed to Havana, across the Illinois River, for lunch.