Birding Through the Year: June 2022

by David Hoyt

Summer birding is arduous. The birds are up well before dawn, which through most of June is close to 5 o’clock in the morning. The open patch of woods you thought you knew in March has been transformed into a trackless jungle, its landmarks consumed by brush like abandoned Mayan temples. The high branches where you scanned for warblers have been withdrawn behind a mysterious green veil. It is easy to trip on logs hidden in the grass, the heat is already oppressive, and you may find yourself in water up to your chest. You wonder how long you have until a tick finally penetrates all your carefully arranged defenses—to say nothing of the mosquitos. You might even be growled at by a bobcat.

This is why, before I took on my new role as breeding bird monitor for a nearby tract of forest preserve, I was politely asked whether I had “any hesitations about getting off the trail.” Still full of the rashness of youth though well into middle age, and naïve as to how easy it would be to die in the woods less than a mile from my house, I declared I had none.

Dawn thus finds me entering the woods to a chorus of birdsong and an audience of young deer curious as to what on earth I am doing there. In my bag is a satellite map of my somewhat forlorn and overlooked tract, divided into habitat types, and individual observation points marked within each of these areas. Most of them I have no trouble finding again, but one of them, which I had originally noted was “next to an old snag,” causes me some embarrassment. At each point I have five minutes to listen and look and report everything within a certain radius before stopping and moving on.

The walk begins with the welcoming call of an Eastern Wood-Peewee, from the left, where it was last time. A Red-bellied Woodpecker is gurgling, to the right. I climb out of a ravine and into a savanna of grasses, young buckthorn, and a number of tall snags. A breeding pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers lives in one of them. I hear one, then spot them both. On to the next point. Indigo Buntings are calling all around, their turquoise plumage still muted in the dimness. Red-eyed Vireos and robins and House Wrens are invisible but full-throated. Unlike many recorded bird calls in Cornell’s Macaulay Library, the background to this music is the roar of traffic on nearby 1st Avenue, and not a mountain stream in Maine or the Adirondacks.

My last point is a glade above the Des Plaines River. It’s been an hour, and the sun is now shining at a low angle over the treetops and deep into the forest. The bugs are up in swarms over the water. A coyote trots down the sunlit path, hears the click of my camera, and retreats. There is a family of peewees on some low branches. One of them has caught a dragonfly and shares it with their chicks. I disturb a nest of wrens, and juveniles launch on parallel trajectories into the safety of a nearby hawthorn. Somewhere there is a nest of Song Sparrows, innocently laid in the grass, and I watch the adults pass across the glade bearing small insects in their beaks. A Great Crested Flycatcher bleats overhead.

My five minutes are up. My data collection is complete, and my stomach is growling. It’s time to go, but I linger. I’ve decided that this last “point” is now part of “my patch.” I’ve found what Florence Merriam Bailey called, in her pioneering bird guide of 1889, “a good, birdy place, the bushy bank of a stream,” where you can sit “with your back to the sun, to look and listen in silence.”