The River Landing

The July Transition

“Seasons turn and bring the change, the shifting of the weather vane”—from the song The Breath Between by David Francey

 

On the prairies, big bluestem panicles have emerged.  Corn tassels have grown out and, later each afternoon, cicadas call.  Swallows gather into flocks and perch on utility wires along country roads.  These are some of the signs I look for every July, of summertime passing, even as the longest day of the year remains a fresh memory.

          As I opened the entrance to our cabin’s driveway, I heard a distant dickcissel calling; and across the road, barn swallows and American goldfiches flew over a prairie planting with blooming gray-headed coneflowers and bee balm.  Through the trees, I saw Quiver Lake; during a typical July, I would expect low water with dispersing herons, egrets, and migrating shorebirds on the mud flats, which in some years can be quite extensive.  But recent heavy rains throughout the watershed have caused the Illinois River to rise, flooding over backwaters connected to the river.

 

Quiver Lake with a green ash struggling to survive against

flooding, drought, wind damage, and the emerald ash borer.

 

          Songs of breeding birds were less apparent than earlier in the month, but as I stood on the bluff edge overlooking the river valley, a tufted titmouse’s song drew my attention, and for a short while I listened to a yellow-throated vireo until the bird went silent.  From the direction of the lake, I heard red-headed woodpeckers calling and growling at each other, and down below, flood waters surrounded the bases of green ash, black willow, and silver maple trees that stood close to the lake’s normal shoreline.  My first thought was that it would be easy to launch my new canoe, chained to a tree above the historic high-water line.  The adventuresome part of me said to seize the moment; but the old man inside countered with:  It’s already a hot, humid day, destined to become hotter and probably too windy for canoeing.  Another time, I thought; but a person cannot say that too often until another time is out of reach.

          When I climbed down the bluff, I saw that grape vines had grown over most of the driftwood left over from previous floods.  Vines and flood debris, including large snags, would completely cover our lakefront if I did not clear things away every so often; this year I had been negligent.  There was plenty of work, which would have to wait for a cooler day; but the vines were winning.  Then I determined through careful consideration that reading a book in the shade while being cooled by slight breezes off the lake was the best option.  Or staring off into the distance, watching weather develop as clouds take shape, change, dissipate, or gather into isolated summer storms. 

          Reading a novel might be looked upon as a form of escapism, but in doing so, I try not to lose awareness of my surroundings, even slight movements, sounds, and subtle details.  Earlier in the month, while lost in the meld of mind and book, when the lake level was lower and slowly heading downward, I saw in my peripheral vision a soft-shelled turtle surface twenty or thirty feet beyond the shoreline seeps; great egrets walked in shallow waters on the other side of the lake stalking fish, and as I watched the egrets, a Caspian tern, the first of the summer, dove several times into the water for a fish before flying toward nearby Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  About a week before, I was surrounded by thousands of mayflies in the air, and then I saw others clinging to every piece of vegetation along the lakeshore.  As I passed by, most would take flight at once, many landing on me; and even when I sat calmly against a large tree, they were drawn to me; so, annoyed, I left the beach area for another day.

 

            Mayflies on grape vines at Quiver Lake.

 

          On this latest visit, though, I saw no mayflies or remnants of mayflies.  But there were new piles of flood debris and stranded duckweed in rows parallel to the shoreline, giving evidence of how high flood waters had only recently been; some of the wood had been broken up into small pieces by previous wave action, looking very much like mulch one would buy at a garden center.  The entrepreneur in me wondered if it would be possible to gather up this free “river mulch” and sell it at a 100% profit:  natural and organic, healthy and chemical free.  So the idea is out there now, for anyone with the initiative.

          As I walked along thinking about river mulch, a spotted sandpiper called and took flight from a nearby partially sunken tree branch.  When the bird flew away from shore, wings beating in their typical vibrating manner, it was joined by another of the same species, possibly a breeding pair that could have been nesting nearby.  Then a killdeer called and flew from the bluff side of the lake toward open water and downriver out of sight, searching for open ground for foraging, with or without mud flats.

          Later I heard a calling eastern kingbird and saw it perched on an ash tree’s dead branch; the large branch extended over the water, and every once in a while, the kingbird left its perch and flew over the lake to catch a flying insect high above, and then return to the same tree.  I recalled earlier seeing a red-headed woodpecker performing a similar flycatching maneuver, but in a more awkward manner than the kingbird, flying after an insect one way and then another way and then another before making its catch.  I’ve always thought it strange for a woodpecker to engage in such an activity, which the species does not appear well suited for.  As I contemplated returning to the cabin, two great egrets flew over the flooded willow forest just beyond the other side of the lake; they were heading toward the wildlife refuge and would be searching for shallower waters.

          Conditions along the river and its floodplain are always changing, and that is what makes them interesting, even as the yearly cycle is predictable in a general sense.  So I look forward to the coming mud flats over the rest of summer and shorebirds from the Arctic, along with migrating osprey before too long, and then higher water levels in the fall with the waterfowl migration.  Autumn colors, bare trees, and then snow and the shortest day. 

          The years go by as they will, lengthening daylight for half of the year, progressively shorter daylight the other half, with time moving faster as I age.  And although those shorter days begin after the summer solstice in June, it’s not until the middle of July that I truly sense the transition.

 

Quiver Lake seeps exposed as lake levels drop with the Illinois River, August 10, 2024.

 

Quiver Lake on August 18, 2024 with great egrets foraging in the 

shallow lake waters (a sweep of the binoculars from north to south

yielded 47 great egrets).

 

When to Give Up: Chronicle of a Cormorant Colony

 

“…there’s no success like failure, and…failure’s no success at all”—from the song Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Bob Dylan

 

On a mid-April visit to our cabin at Quiver Lake, near Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, I was looking for signs of the advancing season, such as flowering plants and bird sightings.  Then, over the brisk winds blowing off the lake, there came, from the flooded black willow forest across the lake, the unmistakable guttural sounds of double-crested cormorants.  They were re-establishing their nesting colony of the previous year, which had failed for unknown reasons by early May; they simply left, all of the nests abandoned.

      This year I vowed to keep better track of the situation.  I was not sure when the colony became active again, but it was definitely not active two weeks before this recent cabin visit.  So, with eight weeks or more for egg incubation and time to fledge, I was expecting to see and hear a lot of cormorant activity this year.  When conditions were right, I would canoe over to the colony for a closer look.

      But by my next visit on May 4^th, the cormorants had already abandoned the colony!  I kept hoping that I was wrong and that they were all out foraging for fish, but if that were the case, I should have seen cormorants coming and going.  During the intervening days since the last cabin visit, the Illinois River had dropped quite a bit, and since the river is connected to Quiver Lake, the lake level had also fallen.  I wondered if the dry ground under the colony had given predators, such as raccoons, easy access to the nests.  Was that the reason the cormorants abandoned their colony?  I wanted to take a closer look, but time and opportunity did not converge until twelve days later.

 

***

Cottonwood seeds floated in the air like a light snow flurry and this year’s crop of silver maple seedlings grew well during the longer days of mid-May, in some areas forming lines parallel to the lakeshore, marking a previous high-water level.  The river itself had probably already hit its peak spring flood, and would be slowly falling toward its normal summer low period, but that would only be an average expectation; another big flood would not really be surprising.

      At the lake’s shoreline, I was surrounded by vigorous bird songs and calls from house wrens, warbling vireos, Carolina wrens, Baltimore orioles, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and bobwhite quail.  Yellow-billed cuckoos had already arrived, which for me signaled the end of the spring migration, but there were still some Tennessee warblers passing through on their way to the boreal forests of Canada.  Buffalo gnats were becoming annoying—as they always are in May—but to endure them, I reminded myself of the fact that insects of all kinds are the protein source needed to grow healthy nestlings that must be ready to fly before too long.  All of these environmental cues together formed the backdrop to the advancing bird breeding season, and I imagined those cues to be a strong reinforcement of the drive to reproduce.  And yet, the cormorants abandoned their colony.  I launched my canoe with little delay, and in the time it took for only a few strokes of the paddle, I was on the far side of the lake, heading for the failed cormorant colony.

      It was almost like a dystopian scene, with all of the abandoned nests in surrounding trees appearing newly rehabilitated but completely unused.  An active colony would be chaotic, with tree branches and leaves covered in bird droppings and messes.  It seemed like such a waste, after going through all of the trouble to migrate to Illinois and then assemble at this particular location, to engage in numerous flights back and forth to gather so much nesting material of twigs and larger sticks, and then, somehow collectively to make the decision to give up and leave.  How would they even communicate such a decision throughout the colony?  I can imagine some individual birds giving up and moving on for whatever reason, and some birds staying, but for all of them to leave, there must have been a compelling reason.

 

Abandoned double-crested cormorant colony at Quiver Lake, 16 May 2023

 

      Was it, in fact, predation?  Or could they have been somehow harassed into leaving?  In some circles, the fish-eating double-crested cormorant is not a popular bird.  It’s curious that the colony was abandoned two years in a row.  And a similar sequence of events happened in 2019:  There was an active cormorant colony by the third week of April, and it was abandoned sometime between then and the middle of May.  Before that, since 2011 when we acquired our cabin, either there was not a colony at Quiver Lake bottoms or I never noticed one if it was there.

      In the end, double-crested cormorant colonies will succeed somewhere and fail elsewhere, maybe more failures than successes.  Otherwise, the population might grow exponentially to the point where we would have so many cormorants (individuals live for six years on average), a population crash— related to an increase in diseases and overexploitation of habitat and food resources—would be inevitable.  Their reproductive drive accounts for failure.  That’s why each pair usually raises three or four young each year, sometimes with two broods.  As another example:  Why does a cottonwood tree produce so many seeds, when most of them never germinate?  How many years must go by before even one makes it into a tree?  What would the landscape look like if all of the seeds each year grew into trees?  At any rate, it seems that the Quiver Lake cormorant colony might be due for success.  For this year, though, they’ve apparently run out of time.

 

References

Dorr, B.S., K.L. Sullivan, P.D. Curtis, R.B. Chipman, and R.D. McCullough.  2016.  Double-crested cormorants.  Wildlife Damage Management Technical Series.  U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services.

Kleen, V.M., L. Cordle, and R.A. Montgomery.  2004.  The Illinois breeding bird atlas.  Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication No. 26.  xviii + 459 pp.

On a Search for the Floodplain Warbler

 

“…right now I’ll just sit here...and watch the river flow.”— from the song Watching the River Flow by Bob Dylan

 

It was a mid-summer day in July as I stood before Killjordan Creek in our nearby well-manicured city park, once again lamenting the tradeoffs of moving into town from the country.  Birding is one of those tradeoffs, but I guess I always knew that birding in Macomb would be less of an experience than it was near the Illinois River valley.  Thoughts of the river conjured up images in my mind of wood ducks, pileated woodpeckers, and especially the prothonotary warbler, which I think of as the “floodplain warbler.”

        But I would never expect to see a prothonotary warbler in my town, even along the creek, because this species is so closely tied to wild floodplain forests that it is rarely seen anywhere else during the breeding season.  So I began making plans to visit remote forests along the Illinois River, places that would pull me as far from a tame town life as I could get.  (Too much domestication cannot be good for the soul.)  And I needed to do this soon, because the season was quickly moving along:  swallows were already loosely staging for their fall flights back to wintering territories, mid-summer cicadas had begun calling, and corn crops were in the tasseling stage; soon the warblers would cease their territorial behavior, and would be harder than ever to find.

        Within a few days, the weather and river levels converged to present an excellent set of conditions:  clear, mild weather with light breezes combined with a long-sustained flood on the Illinois River.  The river was four feet above flood stage.  And with that kind of depth, I could canoe through any of the floodplain forests at Quiver Lake—an Illinois River backwater—and Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  The day would be mine; in the flooded forest, there would be no hikers, no ATVs, no fancy glitter-painted power boats, and no personal watercraft.  I would stay the night before at our lake cabin for an early start the following morning.

 

                        *                 *                 *

Soon after sunrise, I carried my canoe and gear to the water’s edge, which was high up onto Quiver Lake’s flooded shoreline.  I quickly floated out into the open water and immediately felt the warmth of the early morning sun on my back; but it was slow to dissipate the night’s humidity, which hung on as a fading mist over the nearby wildlife refuge and as a complex aroma of vegetation, fish, damp wood, mud, and a certain unique quality of the river water that I’ve never been able to identify.

 

               Quiver Lake and its flooded shoreline.

 

          With the river spreading onto its floodplain and into connected backwaters, there was only a slight downstream movement of water.  So, smoothly passing over the bottoms, with only slight paddle strokes, I meandered around small stands of black willows, a couple of which had an eastern kingbird on the highest branches; and I shared the open water with numerous tree swallows that flew quite close to the canoe.  Then a group of great egrets caught my attention, perched in the topmost branches of a tall tree.  Just beyond the egrets was a towboat heading upriver, its loud, rumbling diesel engines dominating all sounds.  Continuing toward the sound of the towboat, I floated across a low ridge covered with vegetation that formed a narrow band parallel to the river; the water was only a foot and a half deep here, and I could see the river about fifty feet ahead.

 

Floating over a natural river levee.  The Illinois River is beyond the trees.

 

          As I reached the edge of the trees, the water quickly became deeper, and I was suddenly floating in the Illinois River itself, finding myself being pulled downstream by the gentle, but quite noticeable, current.  More swallows (barn, bank, northern rough-winged, and tree) flew on all sides as I crossed the river in a beeline to the opposite shore while also moving sideways downstream.  Then I saw some rather large, wide swells (about one foot in height) approaching, undoubtedly caused by the towboat that was out of sight around the river bend.  They were a not-so-gentle reminder to pay attention and leave the daydreaming and birding for later.

          Eventually, I settled the canoe against a shoreline thicket of willow and swamp privet, facing the river, with the current keeping it locked in place.  Only then was I able to truly relax; and so, with my breakfast unpacked, I sat back to absorb the river and river life around me, to memorize the scene in such a way as to be able to retrieve it at critical moments when it feels as if the constraints of town life are closing in.  And just then a prothonotary warbler loudly sang its simple song, truly completing the scene very much as I earlier envisioned, and fully cementing it to memory.  Soon a nearby American redstart’s song rang out against the calls of a quite agitated red-headed woodpecker, with a yellow-billed cuckoo joining in.  And I sat there thinking about my circumstances:  sitting on the bottom of a canoe over several feet of water, being held in place by a flowing river well over flood stage, shade trees towering overhead, schools of young-of-the-year fish about a half inch long just below the water’s surface, no sounds except for bird songs and calls echoing throughout the trees, Lake Michigan upstream, the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico downstream.  Of the 12.8 million people living in Illinois, how many have had such an experience or for that matter were having a similar experience at that exact moment?  My guess is not that many.

 

                  The Illinois River from a canoe.

 

          That last idea, of course, represented the world beyond the river intruding.  Ah, the rest of the world…I trusted that it had survived just fine in my absence.  Although I was where I wanted to be, watching the river flow, the noon hour was approaching; and I could actually see and feel the mid-day summer heat building.  It was time to go.  And so, I eased the canoe out of the current, floated back over the natural levee, through the forest, and into the open backwaters beyond—listening one last time, in vain as it turned out, for another prothonotary warbler.  Circumstances would surely converge again, before too long I hoped, for a return.

 

Towboat pushing barges on the Illinois River.  (Illustration by the late Patti Malmborg Reilly).  This illustration originally appeared in the book Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, available on this blog as a free ebook download (click here).

 

Bird List for the Morning (July 7, 2021):  Prothonotary warbler, American redstart, warbling vireo, blue-gray gnatcatcher, red-headed woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, northern flicker, tree swallow, barn swallow, bank swallow, northern rough-winged swallow, great egret, great blue heron, double-crested cormorant, killdeer, spotted sandpiper, house wren, Baltimore oriole, eastern wood-pewee, great crested flycatcher, eastern kingbird, American goldfinch, Carolina wren, black-capped chickadee, northern cardinal, American robin, yellow-billed cuckoo, mourning dove, red-winged blackbird, common grackle, indigo bunting, ring-billed gull, gray catbird, white-breasted nuthatch, wood duck.

Always an Eagle

 

“My mind ain’t nothing but a total blank…”— Merle Haggard

 

Arriving at the Quiver Lake cabin on an early May afternoon, the first sounds I heard were the clear song notes of a Baltimore oriole.  That was a good start, but having missed most of the bird migration this spring, I was nearly desperate to see as many species as possible during this all too brief cabin visit.

        My preference would have been to be at the cabin during sunrise just after a strong storm system had passed in the night, bringing the migrating birds down into the trees; but time and circumstances offered only a windy afternoon.  Even so, I enthusiastically exited my vehicle, grabbed my binoculars, and began to stalk slowly around our wooded 1.75-acre property.

        There certainly were more birds around than a month before, but the wind made it difficult to hear faint call notes or songs of whatever migrants, especially warblers, might be high in the tree canopies.  And with most trees leafed out, finding tiny songbirds by sight in the chaotically blowing tree branches became an exercise in futility.  Glancing outward over the Illinois River valley, I saw that water levels had risen quite a bit since my last visit, flooding out mud flats along Quiver Lake that may have attracted herons, egrets, or migrating shorebirds.  My afternoon dedicated to birding was by every turn becoming a bust.

        So I gave up on the upland woods and headed to the lakeshore.  Midway down the steep river valley bluff, I recalled that a bald eagle nest was visible, maybe a half mile away, just barely protruding above the floodplain forest canopy between Quiver Lake and the Illinois River:  higher up the bluff, nearby tree branches blocked the view; only a few feet further down the bluff, the nest was hidden by surrounding forests.  Only at one unique elevation was the nest in clear view.

        With my spotting scope set on full power, I clearly saw an adult eagle on its nest, white head and yellow beak shining in the sunlight; and it was attending to at least one nestling.  I had been loosely monitoring this nest for the last four years, and it looked as if at least one eagle had fledged each year.  I also knew there were three other bald eagle nests along the river within a few miles.  So the Quiver Lake nest is not just an isolated case; there is a small local population here between Havana and the National Wildlife Refuges (Chautauqua and Emiquon).  During winter, there are even more eagles around, most having migrated from the north; seeing twenty or more within a few hours of birding along the river valley is not unusual.  Whatever else may seem tenuous or unpredictable these days, a bald eagle sighting in this area is a near certainty at any time of the year.  And that fact alone is enough to bolster my mood; because by the early 1970s, eagle populations had declined so much nationwide that there were no eagles nesting in Illinois.

 

Bald eagle nest at Sangamon Bay along the Illinois River

(near Browning), 1996.  Many trees died in this area due to

extended  flooding in 1993.  See The Eagle Quest link below.

 

Bald eagle nest at Meredosia National Wildlife Refuge along

the Illinois River, 1999.  Many trees died in this area due to

extended  flooding in 1993.

 
 

        In the late 1980s, I remember feeling extremely excited seeing a bald eagle, but also troubled because I was not sure how long they would be able to survive against increasing loss or disturbance of natural areas and the continued, widespread use of a variety of toxic chemicals that can enter food chains ending with the eagle.  In my mind, the bald eagle had become a sad symbol of our nation’s carelessness toward the environment. But now, almost fifty years after the pesticide DDT had been banned in the United States (DDT had been linked to the decline of several bird species, including the bald eagle) and following years of targeted efforts by wildlife agencies to increase bald eagle populations, the species has been deemed officially “recovered.”

                                            *  *  *

        I spent more time than usual watching the nesting eagles before continuing down the bluff side to the lakeshore.  Good things are happening these days, I kept reminding myself, even as my mind was filled with thoughts of the COVID pandemic and the recent foreign cyberattacks on our nation’s petroleum pipelines that instantaneously resulted in panic buying and gasoline shortages on the East Coast.  One lesson of these modern times, it seems, is not to take anything for granted.  I say “anything” because who would have ever expected that at the first mention of a possible pandemic in early 2020, the first thought in the minds of many across the country would be to run to the local supermarket and buy up all of the toilet paper in sight?  Not the number two thought, but number one!

        When I eventually emerged from the dense tree cover bordering Quiver Lake, my view expanded to the open skies.  I panned for soaring raptors, searching especially for broad-winged hawks or ospreys, another species severely impacted by DDT and still recovering. Then I saw a soaring adult bald eagle, which very likely was the mate from the Quiver Lake nest.  And still panning, I immediately saw an immature bald eagle, probably two or three years old, with little doubt, part of the local population.  Feeling the same excitement as my first bald eagle sighting four decades ago in the wilds of northeastern Minnesota, I knew that I would never take an eagle sighting for granted. 

        As I began climbing back up the bluff to the cabin, I heard a singing black-throated green warbler.  Following the repeating song, I found the bird in a small red cedar tree, alternating between singing and energetically foraging for insects.  I simply stood there watching this bird, who was unconcerned about my presence a mere fifteen feet away, minute after minute; the best sighting ever.  I could have easily begun thinking about declining warbler populations and multiple threats these Neotropical migrants face, such as loss of overwintering forests in Central America or crashing into glass-walled buildings, but I didn’t; I just watched, mesmerized, I guess, my mind a total blank.

 

References

Campbell, M.F., editor.  2002.  Finding bald eagles in Illinois.  Illinois Audubon Society, Danville, Illinois.

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., and Christie, D.A., eds.  2010.  Handbook of the birds of the world, vol. 15.  Weavers to New World warblers.  Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

 

Links to Bald Eagle-related Posts on this Blog:

 

Bald Eagle Swims with Fish in Talons

Bald Eagle Takes Down a Canada Goose in Flight

The Eagle Quest 

Timeless Scenes Along the Illinois River

Bald Eagles on a Morning Commute

 

Falling Ice

The other night, a red fox passed through our backyard.  It barked a few times, sounding a bit like a cat trying to sound like a dog. The next morning, I saw unmistakable fox tracks in the snow among numerous rabbit tracks.  And for the next two days, I often thought of the fox and of another, earlier time when my wife Julie and I saw a fox at our Quiver Lake cabin along the Illinois River valley. 

        We were relaxing on the cabin’s screened front porch on a late summer afternoon, quietly looking out over the bluff side and lake, getting ready to head back to our home in Macomb.  Reluctant to leave, our attention was unfocused, trying to absorb the scene one last time before packing up the car.  So when a fox ran across our view, quickly out of the brush and then back into it, we both looked at each other as if to ask, Is that really what we just saw?  The sighting made the entire day stand out against an already unusual year (2020):  warm memories to reflect upon during cold winter days.  The recollection made me want to visit the cabin again, even though it was shut down for the winter.

        So on the first good day following the weekend’s winter storms, I quickly dispensed with the few errands that demanded attention and headed for the Illinois River valley, nearly an hour away.  The town roads and rural highways were clear, but the surrounding countryside was blanketed in a continuous layer of snow and ice, and the exceptionally bright morning sun glared downward, reflecting off a glistening plain of white in every direction as far as I could see across the barren farm fields.  As I approached the Illinois River bluffs, the thickness and pervasiveness of the ice cover increased.  Tree branches drooped from the weight; fallen limbs lined the roads; and with temperatures just above freezing, ice and melt water literally rained from roadside trees, every now and again crashing down in great cascades upon the vehicle’s windshield as if I were traveling through a melting glacier.

        At the cabin, raccoon and squirrel tracks ran up and down our cement walkway leading to the sandy beach far below.  But fox tracks, I did not see.  So I focused my attentions on the blue sky, the half-frozen Quiver Lake, and distant floodplain forests, all covered in ice, across the lake and at Chautuaqua National Wildlife Refuge.  A group of Wilson’s snipe, which had been foraging in the seeps along the water’s edge, took flight as I emerged from beneath tall cottonwoods; across the lake, a bald eagle perched near the top of a tree; Canada geese and greater white-fronted geese lounged on the ice; and within minutes, a group of common mergansers executed flawless soft landings in the water near the geese.  I could have stayed there all day, reveling in this classic winter scene, but cold breezes off the lake were already beginning to penetrate my thin clothing.

 

Quiver Lake with trees glazed in ice, January 5, 2021

 

        With an extra jacket and hood, I ate a sandwich on the cabin’s front porch, much quicker than I normally would have.  My bare hands became colder by the minute, but I enjoyed listening to the honking geese, searching for an elusive fox, and watching ice fall from trees.  And with every crystal changing from solid to liquid, with every drip, it was one more step toward spring, still many weeks and winter storms away.

 

Birding to a Time and Place

 

“I remember everything, things I can’t forget…” – from the song I Remember Everything by John Prine

 

In our small Macomb backyard, under warm Indian Summer breezes and falling leaves, I looked beyond the overhead electrical wires into the unblemished blue sky, thinking about great egrets.  (Egrets are large [39 inches from bill tip to tail tip] long-legged, pure white birds usually seen only in wetlands or near lake shores or river banks.)  I was thinking about them because they seemed so remote from my urban surroundings; even a flyover would be unlikely; they also reminded me of some of my favorite wild places, from which, at that moment, I was far removed.  Comforting images among the sound of leaf blowers and mulching mowers.

 

Great egret at Shem Creek Park, South Carolina, 2019

 

          I saw my first great egret in 1984 at a small wetland near Chicago.  I was back at home in Berwyn, a Chicago suburb, after living two years in southern Illinois.  Never wanting to move back, I preferred the small university town of Carbondale near the forested Shawnee Hills; but this decision was forced by personal finances, of which there was not much, with only slight improvements on the horizon (the classic boomerang trajectory).  Living in the attic again, with its low, sloping ceiling and one small window, I missed the openness and abundant public lands of southern Illinois.  And so I was often drawn to the Cook County Forest Preserves, most of which were kept in a natural state with only minimal management focused on maintaining specific habitats such as prairie, open oak woodlands, or wetlands.  There were many official and unofficial trails, and I soon had a favored route. 

        Mostly I followed an unmarked game trail heavily used by the preserve’s abundant white-tailed deer population, and rarely did I encounter people, as most folks gathered near the picnic shelters or stayed on the marked trail system.  So I was rather startled early one morning, when I thought no one else was around, to hear a man, only a few feet away, say, “Did you see the crane?  I see him here all the time.”  “No,” I curtly replied.  I never saw the man until he spoke up, so I was immediately on my guard, much as I would be if similarly approached in a dark Chicago alley.  The “crane” stood in the shallows of a marsh, just on the edge of open water.  I took a quick look at the bird and then quickly continued on my way, thinking that in the future I would need to pay more attention to surroundings, even on a remote trail; this was Cook County, after all.

        Later on, I looked up the “crane” in a field guide and saw that it was, in fact, not a crane, but a great egret.  At the time, I was only beginning to learn how to identify birds, and I was quite excited at seeing what seemed like a rare species.  That excitement stayed with me throughout the summer as I encountered many other bird species for the first time, and I had a feeling that I was on the cusp of a major life change; I see now that there was my life before becoming a birder and another more fulfilling, questioning, and aware life thereafter.

        Yet simply keeping track of the birds that I saw (the very basic definition of a birder) would not have sustained my interest for very long.  The aesthetic aspect of birds is, of course, highly appealing; and many times, especially in recent years, I will watch birds simply because they are beautiful and they make me feel good.  But what has really kept my interest has been trying to understand each species’ relationship to its habitat, and this necessarily requires watching and interpreting behavior, sometimes in detail for long periods.      

        Our cabin along the Illinois River bluffs provides the perfect setting for serious birding; there is an expansive view of the three-mile-wide river valley and access to Quiver Lake, a large backwater connected to the river and adjacent to Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  From my perspective, once living in a big city and now in a small town, the river valley is a wilderness, and my access is through the cabin.  It’s where I can sit for hours on end to see the day unfold, to consider meanings. 

        From April to October, great egrets are fairly common at Quiver Lake, depending upon what the river is doing.  During floods, there is often little shallow water for them to slowly stalk prey (small fish), and the egrets must fly elsewhere in search of appropriate wetland habitats.  Sometimes even the forests are flooded.  But during other times, especially in August and September when the river is usually at its lowest levels, much of upper Quiver Lake, near the cabin and Chautauqua Refuge, is a series of mudflats with several shallow streams of water fed by Quiver Creek near the refuge boundary.  Fish are then easy to spot and catch in the shallow waters, and this attracts great egrets and many other large fish-eating birds such as great blue herons, snowy egrets, ring-billed gulls, Caspian terns, and American white pelicans in deeper water.  And, of course, the mud flats usually attract shorebirds from a variety of species.

 

Quiver Lake at low water, showing mud flats and seeps

 

        When conditions are just right and the river valley is teaming with birds, I’ll bring a folding chair down to the lakeside, which is lined with seeps of pure groundwater gently flowing into countless tiny channels from the sandy bluff side bottom into the muddy lake bed.  Through a spotting telescope, I’ll pick out a single bird to watch until my attention inevitably begins to dissipate or my eyes begin to strain.  There is always a reward, from the dramatic scene of an osprey diving into the water, emerging with a fish in its talons, to a small nugget of information on how an egret swallows a fish larger than its own head.  In my field notes on September 22, 2020, I wrote the following:  The egret struggled to position the fish (a gizzard shad about 6 to 8 inches long) correctly so that it could swallow, and even dropped it a few times in the water, but quickly retrieving it each time.  Eventually through sheer persistence, the egret flipped its head and neck in just the right way, and the fish moved right into its beak and down its throat.  Here the neck muscles took over, and I could see the bulge in the egret’s neck, caused by the fish, slowly move downward.  In doing this, it took frequent sips of water to help move the fish downward.  I fully expected the egret to give up, as the shad simply seemed too big to swallow; and then, after the fish had actually entered its throat, I expected the bird to choke.  But it never showed any sign of distress or impatience, obviously having successfully performed such an act many times before.

 

                                       *        *        *

        Soon after that warm November day in my urban backyard, when I was connecting to wild areas through thoughts of the great egret, I returned to the cabin, knowing that within a few days I would have to close it down for the winter.  But so far the warm weather had continued, and it truly felt like summer again; I was beginning to forget about the coming cold weather, even though fall colors reminded me otherwise.  The river had stayed low; mud flats were still there; and quite a few shorebirds were still around, but I could find no great egrets.  They had gone south for the year, and I probably would not see another one until April of the following year, which seemed so far away.  How would the world change between now and then?  I hoped that changes would be for the better, but for this year, at least, most trends were going in the other direction. 

        Later in the day, just after sundown, when the dark forest trees on the other side of Quiver Lake stood in contrast against the yellow-and-orange glare of the western sky, two great horned owls called.  One of the owls then flew to a nearby tree, and was soon followed by the other owl from across the lake.  I took this to be a positive sign for the future, and thought about my first great horned owl over thirty-five years ago, not far from that first great egret.  My mind became filled with images, as if I had forgotten not one detail over the years.  Powerful memories they were.  And I was transported in time and place.

 

Quiver Lake just after sundown, November 6, 2020
     

 

If a Tree Falls

The sun had already been up for a couple of hours when I finally ventured out on the morning of July 17^th, coffee in hand, to check on the neighborhood bird life.  But the birds were not so active or vocal.  Even the robins, whose songs usually were the most dominating throughout the day, barely made a few calls.  Of course, the breeding season was winding down, and many bird species were beginning to prepare for fall migrations.  I had barely gotten used to the summer bird community of my new town, having moved to Macomb only in late February, and I now regretted not spending time outside just after sunrise listening to the morning chorus.

          The strange quiet reminded me of a time three years ago, waking up one winter morning to find the hearing in my right ear muffled and down to only about thirty percent capacity.  After a few days with no improvement, I feared permanent hearing loss.  Months thereafter followed, trying every solution in the general practitioner’s tool box, before being referred to a specialist (Dr. Gary Shaw of Graham Hospital in Canton) who suggested that nasal surgery with a tube placed into my eardrum was the only viable option to restore my hearing. 

            I was fully conscious during the tube placement, which involved drilling a hole through my eardrum; the pain was at a scale unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it sounded like ten 747 jet engines screaming at full throttle.  I tried to remain as stoic and still as I could manage; my wife Julie could not watch without crying.  And less than a year later when the tube needed to be reinstalled, she could not be in the same room.  As if that were not bad enough, soon after the initial tube placement I would find myself on a hospital cart saying farewell to Julie (there are certainly cases of patients not waking up from anesthesia), then being wheeled into an operating room full of strangers in masks; I watched the anesthetic flow into my veins, and then…blackness.  My nasal passages would be excavated and widened using surgical tools inserted through the nostril.  Recovery took weeks; and in the end, my hearing returned and I could breathe better.  I felt thankful for the expertise and knowledge of Dr. Shaw, the many years he spent learning his craft, and to live at a time and in a country where such a complex surgery could be available, attainable, and successfully completed; because it was not so long ago that a simple ailment such as a toothache might have meant an agonizing, prolonged death from infection.  So I looked forward to the following spring, when I would fully hear bird songs again, and appreciate those songs as never before. 

          And yet, it still was not long before I once again began to slip back into the old pattern of taking life’s simple pleasures and comforts for granted.  To ease my conscience, I decided that such a state of mind must be a natural tendency and necessary for a relaxed life.  Is the better alternative to live as if each moment were the last, as if everything familiar and loved could vanish without warning in mere seconds, living life always at a high state of anxiety?  And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has descended upon the world, being a grim reminder once again, like the 9/11 attacks in 2001, not to take anything for granted, not even something as simple as a reliable supply of bathroom tissue.

          So at the very least, as I lie in bed each morning, hearing the first northern cardinal of the day singing as if it knew that that song would be its last ever, I’ll take a moment to really listen.  For if I did not acknowledge this bird’s efforts, would it then be completely ignored?  I am reminded of the age-old question:  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?  Imagine a continuous bird song chorus each morning tracking the sunrise the world over, moving from east to west across the continents, shifting each year between hemispheres;  and, wildlife notwithstanding, much of it not heard by anyone.  But the songs are still there.

 

[Audio extra:  On June 13, 2020, from a canoe I recorded the morning songbird chorus in a flooded forest along the Illinois River at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  To hear the recording, click this link: 

Download Sounds of a flooded forest at Quiver Lake-Chautauqua NWR 13-June-2020 ]

   

 

From a Gathering of Blackbirds

Even though the air temperature was 93 degrees F, where I sat, under the shade of a large cottonwood tree, it was pleasant, especially when the wind gusted off Quiver Lake.  There I could sit for hours watching the white caps roll, with swallows foraging for insects just above the water and turkey vultures soaring beneath billowy clouds.  But it was late in the day, and I needed to return home, an hour away in Macomb, for dinner with my wife, Julie.

 

Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, at the cabin

 

          Just when I was about to slowly stand up, several red-winged blackbirds and common grackles flew across my view, then landed in a silver maple tree just above the water’s edge.  More calling blackbirds then arrived from further up the shoreline toward Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge to join with those perching in the maple tree, but some of the original birds flew onward to other trees down the lakeshore.  This loosely knit flock was the first gathering of blackbirds that I had seen this summer.  The flocks often include brown-headed cowbirds, rusty blackbirds, and European starlings (this species, though, is not in the blackbird family), and they usually begin coalescing every year sometime in the middle of July just after the breeding season is completed.  It is a benchmark in the year, an event that I use to mark the seasonal progression, a moment when I begin to think of the fall and coming winter—though summer’s heat and humidity may be extreme—and what surprises the following year may bring, both good and bad.

          But it’s obviously easier to look backward than attempt to predict what may come to pass.  For example, one year ago, I could not have anticipated how abruptly we would move from our primary residence in the rural countryside of Mason County to the small western Illinois town of Macomb.  Such thoughts were, of course, in our minds as a distinct possibility for several years; but the fact of the move, and that it happened so quickly after the process had begun in October, shocked and transformed our placid lives in a way that has yet to return to an equilibrium.  When we return to Mason County to manage our remaining affairs or to visit the cabin at Quiver Lake, we still cannot help but feel, even after six months, that we are back home.

          Last July we had not yet even talked about taking a trip of a lifetime in the coming November to visit several southeastern states, waters with wild manatees and alligators, and to spend a late afternoon drinking wine and watching hang gliders above northwestern Georgia’s Lookout Mountain.  The thought had never entered my mind at any time in the past, let alone last July, that in recent weeks a black bear from Wisconsin would swim across the Mississippi River twice, into and out of Iowa, before entering western Illinois, all the while traveling quickly in a purposeful southern direction, passing around ten miles west of our new home in town, then swim across the river again to Missouri north of St. Louis, and all the while be tracked by the media and thousands of people concerned about the bear’s welfare (Bruno the bear he would be dubbed); in October, I would discover through an internet search that a good childhood friend, Sigi Bigelis, had been dead from cancer for five years, sadly answering a nagging question in my mind of why we had lost touch; I’m sure that few last year would have predicted the world would soon be in an upheaval from the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) and plunged into a self-inflicted, deep economic recession from governmental mandates attempting to control the virus’s spread, perhaps permanently changing the way people interact in public, from wearing face masks to social distancing to relegating handshaking as a thing of the past; and I never expected to be witness to widespread civil unrest, racial tensions, and domestic violence at scales and intensities not recalled in my memory since the late 1960s. 

        The prosperity of last summer seems more than a lifetime ago.  But from those good times, well before everything had collapsed amid the virus and social anarchy, NASA—ever optimistic about the future—announced concrete plans to not only return to the Moon by 2024, but to use the new Moon missions to establish a gateway toward sending astronauts to Mars, hopefully still within my lifetime (effects from the COVID-19 pandemic apparently have not significantly altered those plans).

          And so, the next year will unfold as it will, no matter what I do, say, or think, just as the case has always been.  But with so many negative arrows hitting their targets, it’s a struggle to remain upright and positive, even with NASA in my corner, especially with multiple daily reminders of life-threatening dangers ready to strike by merely breathing the air at a supermarket checkout line, while at the same moment attempting and often failing to stay at least six feet away from others, reminding myself not to think of them as walking contagions, and keeping my hands away from my face. 

        Under my cottonwood tree at Quiver Lake with its floodplain forest wilderness along the Illinois River, I feel safe from threats, finding solace in nature as I always have.  Surrounded by such peace, I am always reluctant to leave; but leave I must, in order to live, just as I must confront the world outside and all that it may hurl in my direction.

 

The Tree Swallow Threshold

By the middle of March here in central Illinois, signs of the transitioning seasons have been apparent for several weeks, although most are easily missed, such as the minor swelling of buds on what otherwise appear to be dormant plants. Changes in bird behavior or the sudden appearance of some species and lack of others are more obvious. But even with the birds, one has to be attentive to subtleties.

        On Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge’s Beer-can Trail, which follows the bluff top for a half-mile before dropping to the shoreline, the cool winds robbed much of the warmth from under my thin jacket. I walked quickly. Abundant lesser scaup and ruddy ducks bobbed within the white-capped waves of the refuge’s north pool; bright black and white male buffleheads occasionally stood out in contrast from the other waterfowl. Bald eagles soared over the refuge as they had all through the winter. Silver maple trees along the Illinois River showed a hint of pink from millions of miniature flower buds nearly ready to open. Though I panned back and forth with binoculars, there was little else to draw my attention. So I rested on a log for a few minutes behind a sheltering bur oak tree, picked out a bald eagle nest on the far side of the refuge, and then, because the lower shoreline return loop was submerged in flood waters, walked back on the same trail.

 

Trail intersection at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Mason Co.

 

        Before heading home, I stopped at our Quiver Lake cabin, still shut down for the winter. Half way down the steps to the sandy beach, I trained my spotting scope on a bald eagle nest, just barely visible above the floodplain forest canopy between Quiver Lake and the Illinois River. An eagle perched on a dead branch above the nest. I looked forward to watching the young eaglets develop in the coming months.

        On the beach, I sat back in a comfortable chair, scanning the water and skies; and within a few minutes, found what I searched for all day (March 17th): the first tree swallows of the year. Several flew over the lake with more over the floodplain forest.

        The tree swallows mark a significant threshold in the spring bird migration. They are aerial insectivores, picking individual insects out of the air without a hitch as they fly up to great heights, dip down to the water level, climb back up to higher altitudes, or sharply turn as if pulled with reins—wherever an insect is detected. Energy is burned and replenished at the same time. Without the insects, the swallows would stay further south. Individuals that I saw were, in fact, the vanguard; if winter briefly returned with Arctic winds and snow, these birds would suffer, or possibly die; if not, they would have the first choice of the best nesting cavities. It’s a gamble. But this is how species adapt to expand their ranges or alter migration timing. Individuals are always testing the edge, pushing the envelope.

        More species will soon follow, now that the trees swallows have led the way. But my notes from previous years show that eastern phoebes, a flycatcher, should have already arrived. In some others years, American hazelnut began blooming in late February; this year it was mid-March. The seasonal transition seems a bit behind schedule. But is it? The timing of events in nature from year to year is an illustration of how variability is an inherent quality of nature, which is more like an ancient grandfather clock with slightly worn gears than a modern, precisely engineered Rolex watch. So taking that into consideration, this particular season seems to be right on track.

Not a Good Day for Canoeing

        For several days I had looked forward to today’s (October 17th) weather; the forecast was for sunny skies, temperatures in the lower fifties, with sustained winds no more than 10 miles per hour. Also, the Illinois River was well into its usual fall rise, following the low waters of late summer, when even a canoe would have trouble in the shallow backwaters of Quiver Lake. I longed to be in my canoe, heading across the backwaters to the river beyond, a day to be lost to the elements. But a simple glance at the treetops around my home, three miles from the river, showed that even at mid-morning, the wind was strong, reaching at least to the forecasted high level.
        So before heading to the cabin on Quiver Lake and my canoe, I took a slight detour to Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge to test the winds, so to speak. Here I felt nearly thrust forward into mid-winter as the cold northwest winds came screaming off the refuge’s vast open waters and lowland marshes. I bundled up with scarf and winter hat, scanning with my spotting scope at the distant rafts of waterfowl bobbing in the roiling waves, but was soon defeated by the frigid wind chills. There were gadwall, northern pintail, mallard, ruddy ducks, northern shovelers, a lone ring-necked duck, and Canada geese; at one point, a bald eagle flew low over the ducks causing many to fly in various directions, providing a scene of confusion to a formidable predator.
        Leaving the refuge I recalled that only ten days before I was lamenting the hot, humid weather that made it feel like July all over again. Most of the trees had yet to change color, but it already felt like winter. In truth, paddling a canoe I could have handled the 15 mile per hour winds and higher gusts, but it would have been hard work maintaining a constant direction, especially if the wind blew crosswise in open waters. So feeling rather low on energy at mid-day, I instead opted for a quiet afternoon at the Quiver Lake cabin, reading, playing my guitar, perhaps a nap or two, and feeding wood to the fireplace.

Bird Song Cabin at Quiver Lake

 

        Later I would walk down the bluffs to the sandy waterfront and view the lake, sky, and forests of the opposite lakeshore. From that vantage point I would hear a towboat-barge chugging along on the river about a mile away, leisurely watch a large group of American white pelicans soaring ever higher on the high winds, search for the last few tree swallows of the season, and question my decision to stay shore bound…especially knowing that truly cold weather would soon arrive for months, and canoeing would not even be an option.

Backwater Morning – A Season in Transition

        The sun had been up for four hours by the time I arrived at the Quiver Lake cabin, but vestiges of an early July morning held on: a blue-tint calm, quiet waters perfectly mirroring the morning sky, the feeling and smell of the night’s humidity, and a fragile peace awaiting the day’s first intrusion. I placed my chair under a tall cottonwood tree and relaxed in the shade of the Illinois River valley bluffs. In a few moments, as an immature bald eagle flew over the lake, harassed by an irritated tree swallow, a Carolina wren sounded off behind me; and a prothonotary warbler, warbling vireo, and house wren sang from the flooded bottomland forests across the lake. I listened closely for singing Baltimore orioles, but heard not one; like other years, the orioles are less vocal by early July. It was a subtle sign, not hearing a bird song, but one that clearly identified the season progressing toward autumn.

        The gradually falling lake level, happening over several weeks, showed that the protracted spring flood of the Illinois River and its backwaters was in its final stages, moving toward the usual low-water period of summer and early fall. Though some bottomlands were still under shallow water, if the river continued to fall, following the normal pattern, Quiver Lake would eventually be too shallow for boats, and large expanses would show exposed lake bottom (mud flats), attractive to migrating shorebirds.

        Along the lakeshore, vegetation was recovering from weeks of being inundated by flood waters. Wild grape vines made up for lost time, beginning to cover the large piles of woody debris (large logs, branches of all sizes stripped of bark, and natural mulch created from wood being sorted and re-sorted during wave action) left behind from the floods. While it was still fairly cool, I decided to clear a pathway to the shore leading to my favorite observation post beneath a small silver maple tree and between two swamp privet thickets; there was a lot of wood to move, so I grabbed only enough for a narrow passageway to the water. Being at the shoreline reminded me that on June 27th there was a massive emergence of mayflies, with thousands of individuals covering the shoreline vegetation, flying about in the gentle lake breezes, and writhing on the ground in great numbers, just before dying; such activity must have been occurring all along Quiver Lake’s shoreline. But during this recent visit, only six days later, not a single live mayfly did I find, and the many dead bodies in the shoreline debris of twigs, wood chips, and leaves were barely discernable. In the shallows—which slowly flowed southward toward the lower end of Quiver Lake, where the lake imperceptibly merges with the Illinois River—I noticed thousands of small fish, each no more than about an inch long, the results of a highly successful spawning season during the spring flood. These fish would be drawn outward from shore with a falling lake level.

        The exertion of untangling branches and moving wood eventually sapped my energy. And the sun’s heat had clearly won its daily battle with night’s coolness. So I returned to my shaded chair to rest. I always bring several books to read when I plan to spend a few hours or a day at the Quiver Lake cabin, but not at the expense of also spending time simply observing my surroundings, trying not to miss important events that last only seconds. Even while reading I often looked up to glance back and forth; so at one of those moments, just after a john boat zoomed past, I caught sight of an osprey flying from downriver toward Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, only two-thirds of a mile north from where I sat. There is an active osprey nest at the refuge, so this bird was likely one of the pair. Later a Caspian tern flew past, making its distinctive call; not an Illinois breeder, the presence of this bird along the Illinois River valley signifies the post-breeding season for this species, another sign of the season in transition.

 

Quiver Lake with distant Chautauqua NWR

 

        And so the morning developed: a cucumber breakfast sandwich, reading a few pages, a calling pileated woodpecker, quarrelling red-headed woodpeckers, more reading, a distant American white pelican over Chautauqua Refuge, a calling yellow-billed cuckoo from the tree above; and I suddenly noticed that the bright sun at its zenith, which glared off the water and sky, had greatly diminished my shade. This signaled the time had come to move on with the day, and maybe accomplish something. So I gathered up my chair and other gear, and climbed the river bluff back to the cabin, nestled in the shade of many surrounding trees. The morning was satisfying; and although the summer was young, as a person who prefers cooler weather, it felt good to see signs of the season already transitioning toward fall.

Quiver Lake bird list, July 3, 2017

Double-crested cormorant
American white pelican
Bald eagle (immature)
Osprey
Killdeer
Caspian Tern
Ring-billed gull
Mourning dove
Yellow-billed cuckoo
Downy woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Red-headed woodpecker
Northern flicker
Pileated woodpecker
Great-crested flycatcher
Eastern wood-pewee
Warbling vireo
Barn swallow
Tree swallow
White-breasted nuthatch
Tufted titmouse
House wren
Carolina wren
American robin
Gray catbird
European starling
Prothonotary warbler
Common grackle
Red-winged blackbird
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch

 

Up in the Clouds: Reflections on Hawkwatching

          As I scanned the early August skies above Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, my mind was on migrating shorebirds.  The river level was still high, but falling; so it would be at least a few days before mudflats would form and provide suitable shorebird stopover habitat.  A few ring-billed gulls soared above nearby Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge holding my attention, just as a steadily flying double-crested cormorant came into view over the distant tree line.  At that instant, in my mind’s eye, I was abruptly transported back to the late 1980s.

          At that time, I had only recently discovered a popular activity known as “hawkwatching,” which involves placing oneself at a strategic location where migrating raptors tend to pass over, all the while scanning the skies over and over for hours, in order to count every raptor within sight.  A gathering of like-minded folks at such a location engaged in watching and counting hawks is what constitutes the phenomenon known as a “hawkwatch,” although it is certainly possible to watch hawks alone.

          My first hawkwatch experience was at the Blackwell Forest Preserve in DuPage County, Illinois, on top of an old landfill, called Mt. Hoy, that was converted to a park.  The landfill, covered with mowed grass with numerous vents that allow for escaping gases from the breakdown of garbage, is the highest elevation for miles around in the otherwise rather flat terrain of northeastern Illinois.  Fall migrating raptors from the north tend to be guided by the north-south oriented shoreline of Lake Michigan.  So Mt. Hoy, only about 30 miles west of the lake, is a good place to intercept the migration before the birds move further south and disperse into the vast Midwestern interior.

 

At the top of Mt. Hoy with gas vent.

 

          Sitting on top of Mt. Hoy, staring into the clouds for hours at a time, almost seemed like the act of flying itself.  Sometimes I would lose the sense of being on the ground and see nothing but sky.  After finding a high-flying raptor, I would keep the bird in sight as long as possible, watching it fly into and out of billowy clouds, soaring ever higher, until settling upon a purposeful glide, sometimes directly overhead, and then continuing southward out of sight.  If there were other hawkwatchers, they would continually be calling out sightings of different raptors:  “Red-tailed hawk!”  “Cooper’s hawk; I’ve got a Cooper’s hawk just over the tree line at 45 degrees.”  “Adult bald eagle!”  With many eyes and binoculars focused on the sky, it is doubtful that any raptor could pass overhead without being noticed.

          Some of the hawkwatchers are competitive; they wish to be the first to sight a bird and the first to proclaim a positive identification.  When the less experienced attempt to join in the competition, the result can sometimes be a humiliation, which is what happened years ago when I misidentified a double-crested cormorant for a migrating hawk.  “Raptor in the west,” I proudly announced.  “No, it’s a cormorant,” someone quickly and authoritatively corrected.  One soon learns to defer to the more experienced hawkwatchers; challenging an identification is not a smart move for a novice.  Sometimes the more experienced of the novices will engage in a debate, for example, discussing the finer points of differentiating between a red-tailed hawk and a red-shouldered hawk.  I recall one instance when the red-tail advocate was shouting at one individual he must have deemed his subordinate:  “Look at the belly band!  Look at the belly band!”  Red-tailed hawks have a dark, mottled pattern across their otherwise light-colored underside; seeing the belly band pretty much clinches the identification.

 

A hawkwatch at Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania.

 

          The social interactions and debates can be amusing, and listening is a great way to learn hawk identification.  But my preference is for a lonely, remote hillside near my home at Sand Ridge State Forest, along the Illinois River valley.  Few visit this site, except the occasional botanist looking for the unique plants that occur there.  The river presents somewhat of a leading line for hawks to follow, but it is not like Lake Michigan.  At Sand Ridge, I’ve never seen more than a trickle of raptors even on days when, according to my understanding, the birds should be moving.  At Mt. Hoy, much greater numbers of raptors over the course of a day are not uncommon.  Counts closer to the lakeshore, such as Illinois Beach State Park, are even better.

          It has been years since I have attended an official hawkwatch.  In my part of central Illinois, far from a large urban area with an energetic birding community, few seem excited by such an activity.  Even so, I’ll try to visit my favorite hillside perch at Sand Ridge Forest at least a few times during both spring and fall migrations.  This year, the first osprey of August along Quiver Lake has already signaled the beginning of the fall hawk migration.  And soon, when weather conditions are right, large numbers of broad-winged hawks will be soaring overhead.  Though I sometimes wonder what is happening at Mt. Hoy, for the time being I’m content with a good memory.  And I will never again mistake a cormorant for a hawk.

 

[To read more about hawks and hawkwatching, readers may download chapter 16, “When Hawks Fly” (Download Chapter 16 - When Hawks Fly) from my book Side Channels.]     

Waiting for the Mud

          A little over a week ago, the late July Illinois River level was holding steady at about 12.9 feet, which is more than several feet above its normal low level at this time of the year.  My hope was for falling river levels.  So I was not happy with the high water.  While a spring flood is a normal part of the river’s yearly pattern of highs and lows (hydrology), by late July into August and September, the expectation is for relatively steady, low levels, which would expose mud flats in the many floodplain lakes that flank and are connected to the river.  These flats attract migrating shorebirds, the objects of my attention at this time of year.

 

 

          A favored vantage point for observing shorebirds is on the upper end of Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, where my small, rustic cabin is located.  Typically, I’ll find a shady spot along the shore to set up a spotting scope, and then leisurely wait for the birds to show up.  But Quiver Lake is directly connected to the Illinois River; so when the river’s level changes, as it usually does, the same happens to Quiver Lake.  Even in August, I cannot always count on seeing mud flats.

          And yet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the river’s level is projected to gradually fall through at least the middle of August.  If this does, indeed, happen, then the lake bottom will eventually be exposed all around the lake’s periphery.  And if the river continues to fall, mud flats from more exposed lake bottom will expand in area and become an irresistible target for shorebirds.

 

*  *  *   

          Since my observations about a week earlier, the river has fallen over five feet.  Along the mainland shore of Quiver Lake, sandy seeps have become exposed, feeding pure groundwater to the lake and river.  Elsewhere, further out, there are narrow strips of mud along the shoreline.  The bulk of the lake, though, is still open water.  From a quick scan of the shoreline, I counted 50 great egrets in the shallows, about a third as many great blue herons, and a few killdeer, but no other shorebirds.  Yet I know that they are in the area, because at nearby Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, which is along the northern boundary of Quiver Lake, observers on July 27^th noted 20 shorebird species (from the Illinois Birders Exchanging Thoughts web site, posted on July 27, 2016 by Colin and Sharon Dobson).  Shorebirds were at the refuge because within the levee system (an earthen walled enclosure) refuge managers have kept water levels low so that mud flats are exposed and marsh vegetation can grow.

 

 

          For the time being, I will remain patient and hope that our regular summer drought period begins and river levels continue to fall and then somewhat stabilize.  An examination of NOAA‘s data from recent years, however, leaves some doubt that this will happen.  For example, last year the river topped out at 27.24 feet on July 1^st, breaking the 1943 record of 27.10 feet; and the previous year, it crested at 17.34 feet on July 5^th and crested again at 14.36 feet on September 13^th.  River levels are, of course, directly related to precipitation.  And according to the Illinois State Water Survey, this year’s July was the third wettest on record for Illinois (7.12 inches).  Another year that stands out in memory is 2008; I vividly recall the summer of that year, when July turned out to be the 10^th wettest on record (see chapter 19, “As the Rivers Rise Again” [ Download Chapter 19 - As the Rivers Rise Again] in my book Side Channels).  In recent years, only 2012 provided good shorebird habitat at the Quiver Lake bottoms; but that year also presented Illinois with severe drought conditions.

 

Quiver Lake, September 23, 2015 during medium water levels.

 

          It has always been give and take along the Illinois River.  Boaters prefer the river at higher levels, so obstructions are kept well under water.  For fishing, lower levels might be better, with fish more concentrated at habitat structures that still remain submersed.  Birders looking for shorebirds should prefer the lowest river levels throughout the late summer season, before marsh vegetation grows too high; but at that point, countless flowers will provide nectar sources for migrating monarch butterflies; and in the fall, seeds from maturing vegetation will attract thousands of migrating ducks.  At the same time, one summer flood can overwhelm all of the shorebird habitat and severely set back vegetation growth.

 

Quiver Lake, 28 July 2012 during low water.

 

          And though each year is unique, I look forward to witnessing these natural repeating patterns from year to year, which are still evident despite all of our modifications to the river and its floodplain.  And that is what I intend to do in my folding lawn chair, in the shade along Quiver Lake, while waiting for the mud.

Searching for Ospreys along the Illinois River

    On September 20, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web site predicted a rise in the Illinois River of about two feet over the next twenty-four hours.  So I knew all of the mudflats at Quiver Lake, which has a direct connection to the river, would soon be under water.  That was unfortunate because the shallow water and mudflats were just beginning to attract shorebirds.  I had yet to spend much time looking for shorebirds during this particular fall migration, and so I was disappointed.  But ospreys were also on the move.  Over the last few years, I have learned that Quiver Lake, just south of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, is a good place to view ospreys migrating along the Illinois River valley.  My focus shifted to ospreys.

 

Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater 

 

    The next day, after a lazy breakfast, I moved a fold-up chair to the water's edge at Quiver Lake in the shade of a silver maple, and remained mostly hidden from view by a swamp privet shrub, black willow tree, and a pile of driftwood deposited in the last flood.  Tree swallows were very numerous, quickly flying back and forth at high altitudes as well as just over the water's surface.  But even more numerous, it seemed, were the American white pelicans, which engaged in all types of activities including soaring in large flocks so high they were at times almost beyond sight, even with binoculars.  There also were double-crested cormorants, great blue herons, great egrets, ring-billed gulls, Caspian terns, and turkey vultures.  The light blue sky behind high, wispy clouds with light south winds seemed a good backdrop for detecting migrating raptors. 

     For the next few hours, I alternated between reading and watching birds flying over Quiver Lake, the floodplain forests between the lake and the Illinois River, and the nearby refuge.  And yet, even after a couple of hours I saw no osprey, and I was beginning to become discouraged.  An additional factor, though, was that the majority of my attention was focused on reading a novel called Bootheel Man by Morley Swingle, and I was thinking more about southeastern Missouri and the pre-historic Mississippian Indians than the birds right in front of me.  But because I was not finding any osprey, even during September along a backwater lake with abundant fish, located on a major migration flyway, I wondered whether it was a good day for migration after all.

     Then just as I finished making some quick notes about the lack of ospreys, I looked up:  about 50 feet over the water, directly in front of me, an osprey flew past heading southward.  In less than a minute, it was out of sight; but those few moments made my day.

     And so, I went back to my book.  About a half hour later I finished another chapter and my thoughts once again re-emerged to the present time.  I put the book down, glanced around, and instantly made eye contact with an osprey that had been perching almost directly overhead on the top of a tall cottonwood tree.  The bird immediately left its perch, a bit awkwardly, I thought, and quickly flew in the direction of the far lakeshore.  Then it soon abruptly stopped in mid-air, held its wings back, and dived straight into the water, far enough away from me that there was a slight delay between the sight of the bird making contact with the water and the sound of the splash.  Immediately the osprey emerged from the water and continued flying southward out of sight.  I returned to my book, feeling a bit like the birder who was photographed looking for birds with a bird perching on his binoculars.

*  *  *

Additional reading on the Illinois River and birding can be found in my book Side Channels.  For information on the book, please link to my Amazon author page.

 

Bald Eagle Takes Down a Canada Goose in Flight

January 17, 2015

    At mid-winter, the surfaces of both the north and south pools of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, in Mason County, Illinois, have been nearly all frozen for quite some time.  As a consequence, waterfowl numbers have been low, except for small groups of mallards, Canada geese, and greater white-fronted geese.  So on the morning of January 17, 2015, appreciating the recent above-freezing temperatures and light breezes, I patiently sat at one of the observation decks along the Chautauqua Nature Trail, near the refuge headquarters, to see what else might show up.

    Soon, two large birds, rapidly flying just a few feet above the ice, caught my attention.  My first thought was that both were Canada geese.  But after bringing up my binoculars for a closer look I saw that one bird was, indeed, a Canada goose; the other bird not far behind, however, was an adult bald eagle, and it was in pursuit of the goose.

    The eagle, though, quickly closed the gap and then passed in front of the goose.  I thought this was strange, because it looked as if both birds were actually racing toward some common destination.  And then in a flash, faster than I could detail the movements, the eagle attacked the goose with its talons and caused it to abruptly crash down hard onto the icy lake’s surface.  The goose seemed momentarily dazed, like a fighter after being hit with a clean knockout punch.  The eagle wasted no time, and quickly landed on the ice; now, with both birds standing, facing each other with outstretched wings, the eagle attacked again and again.  But the goose held fast and fought off the eagle’s advances.  At this point, the eagle must have sensed that it no longer held a significant advantage over the goose:  it took flight and hastily left the scene. 

    Now the goose stood alone on the ice.  I trained my spotting scope on the bird and saw that it stood on one leg, its other leg gingerly held above the ground.  As it attempted to walk, it limped.  So the goose was clearly wounded, perhaps from its hard fall.  When I left, about fifteen minutes later, the goose still stood on its one good leg.  The eagle did not return, but I had little doubt that it was watching not far away.

_________________________________________________________________ 

    To read more stories about birding along the Illinois River, please see my book, Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, available at selected locations and from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

 

Bald Eagle Swims with Fish in Talons

December 13, 2014

        The recent mild weather has allowed ice cover at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, in Mason County, Illinois, to dissipate; so open lake water is once again widespread, as it had been before November’s freak Polar front.  With open water, more bald eagles and waterfowl are attracted to the refuge.  From one of the observation decks along the Chautauqua Nature Trail, I was watching six bald eagles (2 immatures, 4 adults) standing close together on the narrow levee-island that runs through the center of the refuge’s south pool.  Floating nearby on the calm waters was a large fish carcass.  Closely watching this scene, I had a feeling that some type of interaction among the eagles, involving the fish, would soon commence.  My attention, though, was quickly commanded by hundreds of snow geese flying and calling overhead.

 

Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, South Pool

 

        As my gaze shifted to the snow geese, a steeply diving adult bald eagle, with talons extended, crossed my line of sight and diverted my attention from the snow geese.  The eagle came down hard, directly onto the floating fish carcass, and then promptly sank into the cold water, looking almost as if it were surprised to find the water’s surface was not ice.  Because I could not determine the water’s depth, it was not clear if the eagle was floating or standing on the muddy lake bottom.  During all of this action, the six eagles on the levee-island maintained their positions, making no attempt to approach the partially submerged eagle.  I wondered whether I was about to see a bald eagle drown.

        After a few minutes of standing and looking around, the eagle began aggressively flapping its wings, attempting to take flight.  But it was as if a weight were holding it down, and so it eventually settled back down into the water.  Following this unsuccessful flight attempt, the eagle remained partially submerged for a few more minutes, and then began using its wings to swim toward the levee-island, at a location further away from the watching group of eagles.    

        When it eventually reached shallower water, the eagle awkwardly climbed onto the partially submerged levee-island.  At that moment, I saw that the eagle still held the large fish carcass in its massive talons, the underwater weight that earlier must have prevented it from flying.  After reaching the highest part of the levee-island, which was barely under water, the eagle threw back its head and emitted a high-pitched call.  Then, still holding the dead fish in its talons, the eagle began tearing at the carcass, ripping off flesh with its hooked beak.

Illinois River Flood Essays

Floating the Floodplain:  A June Gift 

For a couple of days it looked like Sunday’s weather (June 30, 2013) would be a gift.  And when Sunday arrived, the predictions, for a change, proved true:  cool and sunny, with a strong breeze from the north.  So I wasted little time before dragging my canoe to the water’s edge at Quiver Lake, a backwater of the Illinois River near Havana.  I needed at once to take advantage of this fine early morning.  Because as the day wore on, winds would increase, always a problem for a canoeist; temperatures would rise; and the river would become busy with recreational boaters.

Aerial photo of the Havana area, about 40 miles southwest of Peoria 

Another reason this day was a gift was because the river was still in flood, as it had been since April; the river, in fact, broke its 1943 high-water record on April 25.  And although it had gone down quite a bit, I suspected that I could still canoe through the flooded forests, which lay between Quiver Lake and the river, and then cross over the river to the Thompson Lake levee, which separates the floodplain beyond from the river.  As I paddled against the increasing north winds, I could just barely hear a towboat-barge chugging upriver, and I imagined its powerful diesel engines driving a massive propeller, leaving behind a turbid, foaming wake.  That’s where I was heading now, about a mile to the west.  But first I needed to cross Quiver Lake and, hopefully, its surrounding forest.

Boathouse at Quiver Lake at the height of the 2013 flood    

I quickly made it to the levee that forms the southern boundary of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge at the head of Quiver Lake.  The water in the refuge was higher than Quiver Lake and just barely poured over the levee’s spillway.  Snowy egrets foraged on the spillway, occasionally grabbing small fish from the cascading flood waters.  Part of me wanted to stay and watch the egrets, and to see what other birds were at the refuge, but I felt like the morning was slipping away.  And so, I paddled onward, anxious and regretful at the same time.

As I entered the deep shade of the floodplain forest at Chautauqua Refuge’s southwest corner, I could see continuous water all the way to the Illinois River.  At 15.9 feet, the river was about a foot over the forest floor, allowing more than enough depth for my canoe.  As I negotiated around trees, floating logs, and other debris, the forest came alive with bird song.  Highlights included the prothonotary warbler, warbling vireo, Carolina wren, American redstart, red-headed woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, and the strange clucking-like “song” of the yellow-billed cuckoo.  Surrounded by every shade of green imaginable, I felt as if I were in some ancient southern swamp, where it still might be possible to see the rare ivory-billed woodpecker, as some have claimed in recent years.  I wanted to linger, but the wind in the forest canopy and a fast-moving John boat on the river reminded me to move along.

At the edge of the forest, I slowly floated out into the river, looked up- and downriver and saw no one.  Even in the river’s main channel, the current was slight, despite flood conditions.  But I paddled hard and fast, not wishing to be caught in the open water if a swift cruiser or bass boat should make its way around the river bend.  I was also concerned about the river’s famous “jumping” Asian carp, which can grow very large and heavy.  I’ve had these slimy, bleeding, highly energetic, flapping fish jump into my canoe before, and it was not a pleasant experience, for me or the fish.  So when I soon reached the Thompson Lake levee, I was a bit relieved.

Here I beached the canoe and climbed the levee, perhaps 10 to 15 feet above the river.  Before me an extensive cattail marsh, with small patches of open water, stretched for about 5 miles.  The recently restored Thompson Lake was beyond the marsh, and beyond that, about 2 miles away, the Fulton County bluffs.  This entire area, which was a highly productive farm up until the early 2000s, is now referred to as the Emiquon Nature Preserve.

I soon found a place to sit on the levee high above the marsh, unpacked my breakfast, and simply observed the scene before me.  I had dreamed about doing this very thing ever since my wife Julie and I purchased a cabin on Quiver Lake two years ago, but until this recent flood the river had not been high enough to make it through the forest in a canoe.  I thought again about how this day was a gift.

With my binoculars I saw several dead trees, which could not survive within the restored waters of Thompson Lake, with double-crested cormorants on each branch, and what looked like cormorant nests.  In the air I saw several American white pelicans attempting to find rising air columns for soaring.  Red-winged blackbirds were the most common bird in the marsh.  And while I listened to common yellowthroats and a calling least bittern, a black-crowned night heron emerged from the cattails, and flew out of sight to the southwest.  Before too long, the least bittern also emerged from the cattails for only a few seconds, flew past, and quickly disappeared again.  As far as I knew, it never appeared in the open again during my visit.  The phrase “being in the right place at the right time” came to mind.

By 10:30, I realized it would not be long before more boaters and personal watercraft would be on the river.  And as I tend to like a quiet river, I usually leave well before they are active.  So with a satisfied mind, I quickly re-crossed the Illinois River, glided through its floodplain forests, and entered Quiver Creek, just below Chautauqua Refuge’s water-control structure.  The snowy egrets were gone from the spillway and replaced by a pack of turkey vultures, standing ghoul-like with their red skinheads, watching me with nervous side glances.  The wind and current quickly carried me into Quiver Lake, and I rode the white-capped waves like a surfer, hardly paddling, all the way home to my sandy beach and cabin.  I would savor this gift of a day for a long time.

 

The Dynamic Illinois River

 [This essay originally appeared in the online Pekin Daily Times in May 2012, a year in which Illinois experienced a severe drought.]

One week ago the Illinois River was still high from a moderate flood event that inundated most of the lower-lying areas, including bottomland forests.  But the peak was short lived, and the river had gradually begun to fall.  Between last Wednesday and Friday, though, its level precipitously dropped four feet before somewhat stabilizing.

I know when the river level has changed because at my cabin along Quiver Lake, north of Havana, it is easy to see when the lake level has changed, even in small amounts.  Also, Quiver Lake is connected to the Illinois River, and whatever happens to the river, happens to Quiver Lake.

What I have seen, which is well known, is that the lake level and the river are usually in a constant state of flux.  Obviously, a large amount of rain upstream will eventually cause the river and Quiver Lake to rise.  But the river’s level will also change when the navigation dams at Peoria and below Beardstown have their gates opened or closed.  When the operators close the gates in Peoria, for example, due to falling river levels upstream, the river level below the dam drops; the water level drops in Quiver Lake sometime thereafter.  Just the opposite occurs when the gates are opened.  It’s all part of a plan to manage the river for boat traffic and towboat-barges, which need at least a nine-foot depth.

River users must adapt.  Fish adapt to these changes by moving into or out of backwaters connected to the river.  Birds also adapt:  when the river drops, waterbirds, such as ducks and double-crested cormorants, move elsewhere, because mud flats may have replaced their open-water habitats.  But shorebirds will be attracted to the mudflats…until the river rises again.

For the next few days, the Illinois River is projected to continue a gradual fall.  So mud flat habitats will continue to increase.  If that trend continues long enough, much of Quiver Lake will eventually become a mosaic of mudflats and small pools too shallow even for a canoe; Quiver Creek, which feeds into the upper end of Quiver Lake, will then become a more important source of water for the lake. 

Before that happens, though, it is much more likely that the river will experience one or more short-duration floods, like the last few weeks, before settling into its normal summer low period, the only time it is ever really close to being “stable.”  Exactly what will happen and when, no one can say.  One thing I do know for certain is that the Illinois River will eventually rise again.  At my cabin, I’ll be watching.

 

An Illinois River July Rise

 [This essay originally appeared in the online Pekin Daily Times in July 2012.]

Earlier in the week, I had read that northern Illinois experienced some very active thunderstorms and had actually received quite a bit of rain in some areas.  This, I knew, would eventually affect downstream rivers.  And so I was not surprised to see the National Weather Service’s forecast, which showed that the Illinois River in my part of central Illinois would rise about a foot between July 19 and 21.

Previous to this point in time, the Illinois River and its connected backwaters, such as Quiver Lake, had been at a stable, low level for weeks.  The lake at its upper end, near Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, in fact, held only a trickle of water delivered by Quiver Creek; and mud flats had been exposed long enough for lush vegetation to grow.

Quiver Lake in 2012 during a drought year

So not having been to my Quiver Lake cabin for a few days, I was anxious Saturday morning (July 21) to see the lake’s condition.  How much would the lake have risen along with the river?  And what else would I find?

As soon as I arrived at the cabin, looking out on the lake from the bluff top, it was immediately obvious that the lake had risen as expected.  But it was not deep enough to prevent great blue herons and great egrets from standing in the shallows, watching for small fish to catch in their spear-like bills.  So without delay, I readied my spotting scope and binoculars and headed down the bluff side to the lakeshore.

On the way I noticed a strange splashing sound coming from the lake, sounding very much like someone washing clothes (the sound reminded me of the old semi-manual washing machine that my grandmother once used in the early 1960s).  The sound seemingly came from everywhere in the lake at once.

When I emerged from the trees at the base of the bluffs, I could see that the splashing sound came from large fish spasmodically moving about all over the lake, even in the marsh vegetation over newly flooded bottomlands.  I had witnessed this phenomenon many times:  when the river rises, fish move into the backwaters from the river and sometimes engage in spawning if conditions are favorable.  All of the fish that I could see, though, were very large common carp, a species that is not native to North America and which tends to thrive in polluted waters where other species cannot live.  Most people consider the common carp undesirable.   

Though Quiver Lake appeared to be wall-to-wall carp, it is almost unreal to think that they were once apparently even more numerous.  In 1908, for example, 24 million pounds of fish were harvested from the Illinois River; and of the total catch, about two thirds were common carp (see Man’s Effect on the Fish and Wildlife of the Illinois River, published in 1966 as Illinois Natural History Survey Biological Notes No. 57, by H.B. Mills, W.C. Starrett, and F.C. Bellrose).

(It is interesting to note that the 24-million-pound statistic has often been cited in recent years to laud the great capacity that the river and its backwaters once had for producing fish biomass.  The carp component of that statistic, however, is usually overlooked.)

Still, Quiver Lake on Saturday, with its fresh, green marsh vegetation, blue skies, brown sandy beaches, and distant forested bluffs in Fulton County, was a scene of beauty.  It made me glad to live in central Illinois near the river.

[Note:  These essays also appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of Illinois Audubon magazine, pages 16-18.]

 

More Illinois River stories can be found in my book Side Channels published in 2011.

Birding the Flooded Forest

[Author’s Note:  The Illinois River recently experienced a record flood event (27.78 feet).  Last year about this same time, the river was also in flood, but at a much lower level, when this essay was written and originally published in the online Pekin Daily Times blog, A View of Nature.]

Last week as I drove north of Peoria to a business meeting, all of the Illinois River’s tributaries were running fast, high, and muddy.  The Illinois River had risen only slightly in recent days, but from what I was seeing, with so much water flowing in, it would soon be in flood.

When I returned from my meeting the next day, I wasted no time heading off to my cabin on Quiver Lake, a backwater connected to the Illinois River.  Soon I was sliding my canoe into the water and was on my way.  The river was either at or just below the official flood stage of 14 feet, with many of the lower lying areas under water.  I headed into the wind and slight current toward Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.

Bird life in the flooded forests was active and loud.  Since it was early May, I was hearing resident species as well as migrants.  The latter group included the strange yellow-billed cuckoo, which returns to nest in Illinois from as far south as Argentina.  On the lake waters were a few mallards, wood ducks, and double-crested cormorants.

At the refuge’s old washed-out levee, I beached the canoe and walked toward the river.  But I could only get to about 100 feet of its normal banks because of the flooding.  Here I saw many species or heard their songs; but especially noteworthy were the American redstart, prothonotary warbler, blackpoll warbler, magnolia warbler, Tennessee warbler, and northern waterthrush.  A Swainson’s thrush brought my gaze closer to ground level, and it was then that I saw movements of a very large fish near the water’s surface.

It was a grass carp at least two feet in length, and it was feeding on submerged vegetation, reminding me of a cow grazing in a grassy field.  Grass carp are from Asia; they were brought to North America as a way to control vegetation from taking over farm ponds and other man-made bodies of water. 

But, of course, just like the jumping silver carp from Asia, grass carp eventually escaped into the natural environment.  I was concerned about the silver carp, though, because they are well known to jump into boats and slam without warming into boaters and canoeists.  That has happened to me before, but, fortunately, not on this canoe trip.

It was smooth sailing back to the cabin, with both the wind and current on my back, and no jumping carp.  And so, my afternoon of bird and carp watching came to a close. 

The Best Waterfowl-Bald Eagle Viewing

Up until major freezing begins this fall, probably the best viewing of waterfowl and bald eagles in the Midwest is at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge in Mason County, Illinois.  The reason the viewing is so good is because of several factors.  First, the best viewing can be done from several easily accessible observation decks located along a short nature trail near the refuge headquarters.  These decks are far enough away from any roads so that traffic noise does not interfere with quiet listening, even of faint bird calls from far away.  This allows the observer to combine sounds with sight for a much more meaningful experience.

Secondly, the observation decks are in a remote, natural setting of forest, overlooking wetlands and open water, and they all offer a full open-sky view of the refuge; the two bluff-top decks give the best views.  This allows for excellent viewing of ducks in flight, from close-up to distant views, giving ample opportunities for comparing similar species in flight for subtle differences.  When the ducks fly past, it is not unusual to hear individual wing beats as well as contact calls.   Also, the decks face the northwest, so sun interference with viewing is usually minimal.

But it is the interaction between the various waterfowl species and bald eagles that really makes this site at this time of year special.  For an example of what one may experience at Chautauqua Refuge, in terms of eagle-waterfowl interactions, I am offering readers a free Download Of Chapter 7, “Timeless Scenes along the Illinois River,” from my book Side Channels:  A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir.

I last visited Chautauqua Refuge on November 25, 2012, and the sightings were spectacular:   thousands upon thousands of individual waterfowl of at least 14 species and 20 to 30 bald eagles from first-year plumage to adult, all sighted within the first fifteen minutes.  Later I saw hundreds of snow geese and about 20 American white pelicans. 

My favorite sighting of the day, though, was watching a group of about 50 greater white-fronted geese slowly and methodically decreasing in altitude from a great height, gliding down a wide, spiraling flight path over the refuge’s open waters, and then gently landing alongside a large resting group of the same species.  The nearby eagles watched these intricate flight maneuvers with great interest, looking for a weakened or hurt individual no doubt.

*  *  *

Chautauqua Refuge is only 160 miles southwest of Chicago or 130 miles northeast of St.  Louis, Missouri.  In nearby Havana, there are two mom-and-pop-type motels (The Red Lion Motor Lodge, Sycamore Motor Lodge) and plenty of restaurants, including family style, fast food, fine food, and bar and grill.  Interested birders may wish to visit the refuge’s web site for more information.

Eagle Bluff: Side Channels Illustration, Page 30

 

 

This photograph was taken several years ago at the Eagle Bluff Access area at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Mason County, Illinois.  Patti Malmborg Reilly did the illustration for the book Side Channels using this photograph as a template.

The view, framed by a bur oak tree branch, is from the observation deck.  Out on the lake, a large bed of American lotus is visible.  This bed was growing slighly larger every year until refuge managers replaced periodic drawdowns of the lake with sustained high water, a decision designed to control the growing black willow stands, which were taking over too much of the lake.  Eventually, the willows were controlled, but the lotus bed disappeared in the process.  A few years after this photo was taken, the bur oak lost its branch in a wind storm.

For more information on Side Channels, please visit my Amazon author page.    

Chautauqua NWR Spillway: Side Channels Cover Photo

This photograph, one of three used on the cover of Side Channels: A Collection of Nature Writing and Memoir, shows water from the Illinois River, in the summer of 2007, flowing over a spillway into the south pool of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  In the unaltered river system, summer floods would have been rare; low summer water levels, then, would have allowed marsh vegetation to grow on the floodplains.  The present system, though, was designed to allow larger floods to connect the south pool and its bottomlands with the river. Such floods during the summer, however, are detrimental to the wetland communities in the refuge because plants may be completely drowned or seed production may be hampered. If this happens, migratory birds later in the year will find less food. If mudflats are flooded over when the shorebirds are migrating, they will fly elsewhere.  The spillway also allows non-native Asian carp and common carp to enter the refuge, both of which are undesirable.

Chapters 9, 15, and 18 in Side Channels discuss the Illinois River's hydrological cycle in more detail.

 

 

For more information on Side Channels, see my Amazon author page.

 

[Photograph by Thomas V. Lerczak.]

Birding from an Illinois River Logjam

As luck would have it, the day of my voluntary furlough day from work (i.e., day off, no pay) was predicted to be sunny and warm, with light breezes and low humidity. A perfect summer day for a canoe-birding trip to the Illinois River. And so, by 7:30 a.m. I was launching my canoe into the south pool of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge. In the aftermath of a rainy spring, the Illinois River was about eight feet above flood stage, high enough to be completely over the refuge’s south levee system, giving free access to the Illinois River, about one and a half miles to the northwest.

Once on the water, my view of the refuge opened up to the broad Lake Chautauqua and the four-mile-wide Illinois River valley. Briefly I glanced at seven American white pelicans scattered about, a few double-crested cormorants, several ring-billed gulls, and a belted kingfisher; but otherwise, I concentrated on paddling to the river, where I planned to eat breakfast, read, and relax.

Chautauqua Refuge's south pool.

In a very short time, I sailed right over the refuge’s levee, crossed the Liverpool Island side channel, and entered the flooded forests of Liverpool Island. Floating high above the ground surface, there were few obstructions, and it was easy to paddle through the forest around the mature cottonwood and silver maple trees. A variety of bird songs and calls echoed from the tree canopy high overhead; prothonotary warblers, warbling vireos, and house wrens led the chorus in volume and repetition more than other species. But such diversions notwithstanding, I still headed straight for the river on the opposite side of the island, to find a place along the river’s edge where I planned to remain for the better part of the morning.

The problem was that even within the forest, the water was flowing, although at a lesser velocity than in the main river, and I did not have an anchor. Yet with a bit of maneuvering, I was able to wedge the canoe within a logjam of several large silver maple logs and branches on the island’s edge, which prevented the canoe from drifting downstream. Then once ensconced within the logjam, water flowed and eddied all around and under me, but the canoe was held in place against the trees by the flowing water. Finally I relaxed and could pay more attention to my surroundings, watch and literally feel the river’s flow, and enjoy the abundant bird life.

After an hour or so, I counted 26 bird species within the flooded island forest (see accompanying table); if it had been earlier in the breeding season, there would have been more. Occasional barn, tree, and northern rough-winged swallows flew over the river, briefly crossing my field of view. All was calm for a long time. But when a large v-bottomed cruiser passed, it set up a commotion of large swells that went crashing through the forest; still my logjam held fast, and I simply rode out the waves. Later a towboat-barge, with a busy crew on deck and a sign reading "Dangerous Cargo," passed, sending out another series of waves, though these were much smaller than the cruiser-generated waves. And no one, except the birds, knew of the canoe hidden within the deep shade of silver maples, wedged inside of a half-sunken pile of snags.

Eventually the sounds of leaves rustling in the upper tree canopies signaled that the wind, in the warm morning sun, was picking up speed. I took that as a sign to leave, and I expected to fight the wind on the open expanse of Lake Chautauqua as I returned to the refuge boat ramp. But before extracting the canoe from the logjam, I thought how unusual it was and how fortunate I was to have a day with such favorable conditions all converging at once, and how such a day cannot be planned for and may not occur again for quite some time. Circumstances have a way of changing. So on the return trip, I paddled slower than on the way out, savoring every moment, wind and all.

A Coyote Encounter at Icy Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge

February 27, 2010

The day’s weather was expected to be mostly cloudy, quite windy, and cold. But snow geese were beginning to show up in ever larger numbers in the skies over Havana. So it was time to make a short visit to Chautauqua Refuge; even though I knew beforehand, because of a long stretch of below-freezing weather, that its surface would mostly be frozen, and wildlife would likely be scarce.

At the head of the nature trail, the winds seemed almost calm, and I optimistically thought of having a chance to sit at one of the observation decks for a couple of hours without enduring much cold. But as I followed the trail through the forest, I could hear the winds become progressively louder through the treetops as the trail approached the bluff edge. At the furthest deck, northwest winds screamed without obstruction off the frozen lake surface directly into my face, and I knew my time for observations would be limited. And so I wrapped my head in a thick scarf, cleaned ice and snow off the bench, and poured a cup of hot coffee from my thermos.

Chautuaqua Nature Trail

A few Canada geese and several hundred greater white-fronted geese followed the Illinois River valley northward, and an adult eagle soared over the river near what I assumed was its nest. The Arctic scene before me inspired thoughts of admiration for any wildlife that could scratch food and shelter from such circumstances; it must not be an easy life. But this was good. The coffee kept me warm, and I was comfortable in my heavy clothing.

Every once in a while the ice cracked loudly and made other strange sounds, which suggested that while the ice may have been thick and solid, as a mass it moves and heaves with the waters below as pressures change and build. In fact, after a closer look, I noticed that all of the willow thickets, with their bases in water below the ice sheet, were leaning at about a 20 degree angle. Was this due to one massive movement of ice or had it been imperceptibly gradual over several weeks or days? [Recently, there has been an effect of the same process at Thompson Lake (Emiquon) across the Illinois River, where utility poles, with their bases locked within lake ice, have been pushed and snapped by the moving ice sheet.]

Thompson Lake "Emiquon" at Route 78

Then as I took another sip of coffee and re-adjusted my scarf to seal in the warmth, I noticed a coyote on the frozen lake surface, trotting along probably a quarter mile away. I set my coffee down, and through binoculars could see that it was a healthy-looking animal, solidly built and with a good coat. The coyote loped at a brisk no-nonsense pace, alert eyes and ears facing forward, moving almost in a straight line. At a certain point, though, one of the coyote’s senses must have detected something, because the animal quickly stopped to investigate the ice more closely: perhaps a dead fish frozen in the ice or a scent mark by another coyote. But after a few seconds, with wind chill in the low teens and its energy being drained away in the cold, the coyote plodded onward.

When I took another sip of coffee, its heat too had been dissipated by the cold and was gone forever; it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics after all. And on that note, I packed up my belongings and followed the snow-covered trail back to the parking lot. It was time for lunch, which at least I would have no trouble finding.

A Tale of Two Floodplain Lakes

– November 27, 2009 –

A panoramic view of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge opened before me as I stood on the observation platform at the bluff edge. Looking directly west, expanses of open water, floodplain forests, and blue skies dominated my view; the Illinois River was obscured by the intervening forests, and beyond the river was another large floodplain lake called "Thompson Lake." Since it has been my experience from previous years that the waters of Lake Chautauqua in late autumn would be teeming with waterfowl, with my binoculars I took a quick sweep of the wide view. But surprisingly, except for a small group of mallards, I saw few waterfowl. This I found to be strange indeed, especially in late November; and so, I decided to sit on a nearby bench for a while, and hope that other birds might show up.

Eagle Bluff Access in summer, Chautauqua Refuge.

After five or ten minutes, a small group of greater white-fronted geese flew over the refuge and continued onward to the northeast. Soon a few Bonapart’s gulls passed, alternately flying and diving into the water. But during my observation period, other than one fast-moving group of five common goldeneyes, a single bufflehead, two American black ducks, and twenty Canada geese, this large waterfowl refuge continued to seem rather empty of waterfowl. But it made me wonder what might be happening at Thompson Lake. Was the waterfowl migration simply in a regional slump, with few ducks anywhere, or was there a difference between bird use of these two floodplain lakes. Of course, the only way to find the answers would be to immediately travel to Thompson Lake.

Though Thompson Lake was about three miles away from Chautauqua Refuge’s headquarters by line of sight, to reach it I first had to drive six miles south to Havana, cross the Illinois River, and then drive another two or three miles northward on state route 78, before finding a place to pull off of the two-lane levee road, just beyond reach of the rather constant highway traffic. I did not say "safe place to pull off" because there really is no such thing on SR 78. The busy highway traffic on the levee road seems to be mostly composed of folks engaged in serious travel, not slow-moving wildlife watchers looking for rare birds. So just before reaching one of several steep exit lanes that abruptly lead, at right angles, off of the highway levee, I quickly checked my rearview mirror, to make sure I was not being tailgated by a massive semi truck, and turned off the road. The exit ramp was muddy, soft, and steep; and even with a four-wheel drive vehicle, I was not confident that I could make the climb back up the levee. So I stayed parked near the top, just beyond the highway pavement. (It should be noted that wildlife viewing on Thompson Lake can also be accomplished at the boat launching area a bit further north on SR 78.)

But what I saw next almost allowed me to forget all about automobiles, loud pickup trucks, loud motorcycles, and semi trucks. Thompson Lake, nearly two miles wide and three or four miles long, seemed to be literally bank to bank full of waterfowl! There were thousands of waterbirds in view in every direction, as far as I could see. American coots were overwhelmingly the most abundant species. Ruddy ducks and ring-necked ducks were also quite numerous, though much less so than the coots. Northern shoveler, gadwall, canvasback, lesser scaup, pied-billed grebe, and horned grebe were also present. The contrast with Lake Chautauqua could not have been greater.

Later, as I waited for a break in the fast-moving vehicles so that I could safely enter the stream of highway traffic, I began to think more in depth about what I had just witnessed. Why was Chautauqua Refuge so little used compared with Thompson Lake? I felt certain the answer involved factors such as habitat quality, habitat structure, and food availability, or a certain combination of these and perhaps other factors. Of course, one major factor, the "elephant in the room," is the Illinois River itself. Thompson Lake is protected from the river’s degrading influences¹ by a massive levee, while Chautauqua Refuge is frequently connected to the river through a system of spillways and gates. At any rate, because these two floodplain lakes are part of my regular route for making natural history observations, I hoped to  answer my own questions one day soon.

Illinois River (left), levee, Thompson Lake (right), in 2009.

Chautauqua Refuge spillway with flooding river, in 2007.

¹ For more information on the Illinois River, see the "River Reading List" in the "Categories" section on The River Landing’s home page (left panel).

Canoeing the Willow Thickets of Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge

September 19, 2009

I launched my canoe at the old boat ramp at Chautauqua Refuge’s south pool. At this time of the year, the water would normally be quite low, sometimes even too shallow for a canoe. But refuge managers have kept the water levels deep for the last couple of years in an attempt to set back the black willow thicket that is threatening to take over the south pool. Extensive rains and a frequently flooding Illinois River this year have encouraged this effort.

From a distance, the flooded willow thickets look impenetrable. But a closer approach would show that the trees are spaced far enough apart for canoe travel. The thickets, which began growing in earnest about 15 years ago, have been self-thinning and growing taller ever since; beavers have also been thinning the willows a bit as attested by their numerous cuttings and occasional lodges. But the flooding keeps succession from proceeding as it normally would toward a silver maple-green ash forest. This thicket that is becoming a forest is solid black willow, with the largest individuals about 10 inches in diameter and 25 to 30 feet tall.

Out in the open water, migrating tree swallows kept me company, darting close to the canoe as they gulped insects to fuel their southward migrations. At the willow thicket, which seemed to cover a not insignificant proportion of the south pool, a great blue heron took flight from a willow perch. And great egrets stood on branches that barely protruded from the water. A belted kingfisher perched on a higher snag, and let out its usual rattle call as I floated past. Though I was still on the open water, from within the flooded willow forest I heard wood duck calls echoing from the trees. At one point, ten wood ducks flew from the shelter of the willows; and I speculated that a true survey of the entire thicket-forest would undoubtedly yield many more. The willows are clearly providing birds with needed habitat, though obviously not the open-water diving ducks or ducks of open marshes.

For a few moments, I enjoyed the warm morning sun on my back; but I paddled onward, bound for the cool shelter of the willows, where I planned to have an early lunch and read. Then a loud, high-pitched calling from the willow edge commanded my attention. My first thought was "shorebird," but then I estimated the shallowest water in the willows was about four feet deep; so, I reasoned, a shorebird could not have made that sound. And then I saw the osprey, flying directly toward me. It probably used the willows as a night roost and early morning foraging perch, and was awaiting mid-morning thermal activity before continuing southward on its journey. The bird circled around and then rapidly gained altitude, before soaring away toward the southwest. I struggled to keep the bird in my binoculars as the breeze continually turned my canoe in the wrong direction for viewing. But within a few minutes, the osprey was nearly beyond sight, and so I continued with my paddling business, to the willows and shade.

Hiding in the black willows at Chautauqua NWR.

American White Pelicans Coming Home to Roost

August 25, 2009

We came out to the Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, my wife and I, in the early evening for a fruit and cheese supper at the Eagle Bluff Access area, to relax on our fold-up chairs for a quiet time observing life on the refuge, perhaps a bit of reading, and to watch the sun fall below the bluffs across the Illinois River valley. But except for a few swallows of various kinds, great blue herons, and double-crested cormorants, there was not much wildlife activity on the refuge; not even a need for setting up the spotting scope.

After our supper, and just before sundown, we left the observation deck for a walk across the refuge, toward the Illinois River, on the levee that separates the refuge’s north and south pools of Lake Chautauqua. And that was also when many birds became increasingly active. There were more foraging swallows, which passed over the cross levee on their way between the two refuge pools; several loudly calling Caspian terns; a great horned owl hooting from obscurity within the black willow thickets; and a lone pectoral sandpiper that drew our attention on the barren sand along the water’s edge. Then at once, we saw a line of American white pelicans flying in an long, undulating, repeating pattern across the sky, then another group, and then still another, which abruptly changed direction as the group flew low directly above us, apparently nervous about flying so close to two human beings. Before too long, more pelicans flew over, and we estimated a couple thousand that joined together into one large grouping in the far corner of the refuge’s north pool, gathering together in a large night roost on the water.

As the sun sank below the horizon, we heard loudly calling cicadas, another sure sign of summer’s imminent end.