Dan's Feathursday Feature: Purple Sandpiper

At a local park recently I ran into a fellow birder whom I had not seen in quite a while. After comparing notes about what we’d seen so far that morning, she said, “I’ve been following your exploits at Park 566. Really cool, but I worry about you a bit.”

I was touched. To anyone not familiar with the park, Park 566 can be a bit intimidating, even sketchy. It’s a mile long stretch of barren lakeshore on Chicago’s south side that used to be home to a steel mill. Coyotes, stray dogs, and occasional stray small arms fire make it a fascinating place to spend time looking for birds.

Before I was able to thank my friend for her thoughtfulness, she continued, “But then I figured, it takes a good twenty years for the toxins in that land to have any serious impact on your health. No offense, but you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

With friends like that,….

It’s true. Park 566 may not be the best place to plant a vegetable garden. The 70-acre park consists of an under-layer of slag that was dumped there over the first half of the last century. During my daily walk, I try not to think too much about what’s under my feet. It’s also true that I need not worry about the toxins there; I’ll be dead before they have time to kill me. Actually, I’m more concerned about twisting an ankle on the rugged chunks of slag and other scrap that litters the park.

By now, you are probably wondering what all this has to do with the Purple Sandpiper. It was not by design, of course, but as it turns out, the steel mill’s careless and irresponsible dumping of huge plugs of slag from the blast furnaces created about a mile of craggy shoreline that is ideal for the short-legged, plump little Purple Sandpiper. Given a choice between a smooth, sandy beach and slimy algae-covered rocks, the Purple Sandpiper will take the rocks hands down.

Its preferred rocky shores are far north in Greenland and the vast islands of northern Canada, where it nests in the summer. Then in November and December, it migrates south through Nova Scotia, eventually settling along the US’s Atlantic coast, sometimes as far south as the Carolinas. But unlike most other sandpipers, which often fly as far south as Argentina, the Purple Sandpiper never ventures out of the northern hemisphere.

Every winter during migration, small numbers of Purple Sandpipers work their way up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. And among those few wanderers, every once in a while one will find its way to Lake Michigan, where on the lake’s western shore, ten miles south of Chicago’s Loop, a park molded from the detritus of our city’s industrial past awaits, like a home away from home.

2019 is one of those winters. Over this past week, one Purple Sandpiper was sighted briefly at a northern beach, then at a southern breakwater. Then this past weekend, it snuggled in for a couple days among the rocks of Park 566. Obviously feeling very much at home on the rusty red shoreline, and remarkably comfortable around humans, this photogenic visitor from the Arctic posed like a model on the runway for the many birders who made their way to Park 566 to catch a glimpse.

Those who were fortunate to see the Purple Sandpiper at Park 566 did not give a moment’s thought to the toxic waste beneath their feet. And they probably did not note the irony of this delicate two-ounce shorebird scampering among the two-ton plugs of rusting slag. But as one who has spent many hours walking this unusual shoreline, and who has become quite attached to it, I like to think that in playing host to the Purple Sandpiper this week, Park 566 shrugged off the rusty armor of its past and took on the mantle of a rejuvenating South Shore.

I will be looking for that Purple Sandpiper on its way north in spring.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a weekly contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and pictures of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.