The immature reddish egret lingers at Lake Calumet. It is a sign that summer is still with us. But walking my dog in Horner Park this morning, I heard in the soft hissing call notes of migrating warblers the first whispers of fall.
I first visited the Calumet marshes in the summer of 1981. Larry and Barbara Balch were my guides. I was working on a story about birding for Outside magazine. At the time Larry was running the Chicago Audubon Society’s rare-bird hotline. He has since served a couple of terms as president of the American Birding Association.
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I was blown away by what Larry and Barbara showed me that day. In the middle of all those steel mills, paint factories, and garbage dumps were these incredible wetlands where migrating dowitchers fed on mud flats. Black terns hawked for insects over the open water between the beds of reeds and cattails. Yellow-headed blackbirds sang their clanking songs, and black-crowned night herons seemed so common you could look up at any time and see at least one passing over.
The battle over the Big Marsh landfill opened up lines of communication between neighborhood people and the mainstream environmental groups, and those lines have stayed open. When Daley decided to bury the southeast side under runways, an effective opposition was already in place. We had shot down other crackpot schemes; we could shoot down this one.
Its food is also typical heron fare: small fish, crayfish, crabs, frogs. Reddish egrets do have an extraordinary hunting method. Standing in shallow water, they spread their wings and lurch about–“drunkenly” is the way all the books describe it. Apparently their staggering causes various potential food items to flee places of shelter on the bottom. The spread wings may be part of the strategy. The disturbed animals would tend to flee the light, heading toward places of sheltering darkness. The urge to escape the light might put them right under the heron’s daggerlike beak.
Thrushes are all ground feeders –like their cousin the robin–so you might want to keep your cats indoors for a while.
