Birding Through the Year: September 2022

by David Hoyt

Since my early teens, I’ve been a canoer. I learned on the muddy impoundments that served as lakes for Midwestern summer camps, passed on to the equally muddy creeks and rivers that fed the impoundments, and then moved on to larger, clearer, and more distant rivers. By my late teens, I was spending weeks at a time paddling the chains of lakes that stretched between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay.

For all that, you’d think that I would have become familiar with the varieties of birds that every spring so impatiently make their way northwards to the cool, mosquito-filled forests that blanket the region. To my profound regret, I did not.

In the summertime wilderness of the Northwoods, it was the large mammals that captured my imagination: bear, moose, and wolf. Not the birds.

But we come to the things that move us in circuitous ways. There was one exception to my restricted awareness of the time, which, in retrospect, was prophetic of a later interest: the Common Loon. I don’t know if I’ve ever come closer than a hundred yards to this creature, but I’ve heard it a thousand times while floating on a glassy lake as the water turns violet and then purple in the fading light of a ten o’clock sunset.

The loon is my favorite bird. It is my favorite animal. It’s my eBird handle. And I only know it because one day I got in a canoe and paddled to where the loons are.

There are no loons near us now, though people occasionally try to convince me that one was spotted on the golf course reservoir near the dam where the pontoon boats are docked. But there are other birds to be sought from between the gunwales of a canoe, birds that have tenaciously persisted upon some of the most heavily transformed landscapes on earth.

For me, the Great Blue Heron evokes the ancient landscape of the marshy Chicago region much as the call of the loon unfolds the cosmos of the Northwoods. The difference is that this landscape has been almost entirely transformed to meet the needs of humanity. Approaching a heron by canoe where possible seems only appropriate in a landscape left waterlogged by melting glaciers, between a great lake and a great swamp once known as the Kankakee Marsh.

The Great Blue Heron is a different creature when viewed while floating with the current, at the level of the water. It is a figure of monastic stillness in an environment in which much else is moving. Even when disturbed, there is nothing frantic or pitched in its movements. On the Des Plaines, my son and I followed one down the river’s wooded corridor, the bird gracefully disappearing ahead of us around one bend and then another, until it tired of the game and waited from a high snag for us to pass.

On the broader Kankakee, which meets the Des Plaines to form the Illinois River less than fifty miles from Chicago, the aspect is much different. The river becomes less of a channel and more of a network of passageways between islands and shallows and snags. It is on these latter that the herons stand like gaunt nautical markers. We raise our paddles to drift as close as possible in silence. We pass one fifty yards to port, unperturbed, absorbed in the hunt. We approach another, on a trunk beached in the shallows. This time we get too close. It ascends, we witness the power of its vertical lift as it rises directly into the air and then, not ten yards off the bow, sails over the water, croaking as it passes like an angry driver.

“Sounds like you,” my son remarks.

A few miles downstream from the herons, the river divides to pass around the first of two long islands. They are made of the same layered, horizontal dolomite rocks that rise here and there from the riverbed to support platforms of hibiscus and monkeyflowers that appear to be floating on the water. When Jens Jensen modeled the designs of Chicago’s Humboldt and Columbus Parks after what he referred to as “our prairie rivers,” I feel that he must have passed by this very place.

We paddle along the northeastern side of the island, close to the bank and in the shade. I am immediately struck by the density of bird life on the island. In a single glance, stolen from overhanging shrubs while navigating the canoe among flat rocks exposed by low water, I see a Baltimore Oriole, then a Common Yellowthroat, and then an Indigo Bunting, each emerging from the woods and then disappearing again.

A little further on, and the island’s forest canopy opens, the sky is visible through the scattered oaks which rise above what appears to be open grassland. The channel narrows as we approach the end of the island.

The Bald Eagle comes from this direction, from over the open water, not more than forty or fifty feet above. It flies at the canoe, as if we were violating an established flight path charted well before. As unperturbed as the motionless heron, it drops its flight feathers down and forward to gain lift and rises up in a single arc to find its perch atop an oak or hickory. The current is swifter here; in a few moments, the eagle and the island are behind us.

Certain places exert their attraction well after your visit. In the months after our paddle past the island, I’ve been back twice, now as a volunteer to help with conservation work.

On a recent Saturday morning, I stand on the shore with my binoculars. A pair of bluebirds call from the island, and it rings with wild confidence across the river. Something else moves in a pair along the shore, though what it is, I can’t identify. Following the line of the shore to the point of the island, I find another heron, neck decurved in profound study. On a log further out sits a Belted Kingfisher.

There is more, to be sure, but I have to join the team, just arriving. We push out into the current. In a boat once more, I see a mature Bald Eagle, brilliant white against black in the clear, full sunlight. It glides from the main channel toward the island. I have a feeling, though I can’t be sure, that I’ve seen this bird before.