Nine species of birds nest in my neighborhood. Three are the usual urban aliens: pigeon, starling, and house sparrow. A fourth is the semialien house finch, a bird native to the western U.S. that entered Chicago from the east after being accidentally introduced onto Long Island 50 years ago. The other five are native birds: common nighthawk, chimney swift, mourning dove, American robin, and northern cardinal.
Mostly, we have apartments– lots of four-story buildings, some dating from the 20s and some four-plus-ones built circa 1970. A dozen buildings reach eight stories or more, and the neighborhood’s tallest building is 17 floors. Thousands of people live on these 40 acres.
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Now the nighthawks come out. Like the swifts, they live by catching insects in flight. By day they sit on the gravel-and-tar surfaces of flat roofs, where they lay their two eggs and rear their young. By night they swoop and flutter over the city. You can detect them by their calls, blatting noises like a cross between a door buzzer and a whoopee cushion.
The remaining three of my nine neighborhood birds have managed to squeeze into the tiny bits of green space between buildings. We have one vacant lot that has grown into a tangle of shrubs and small trees. As it happens, this lot is right across the street from a formal garden in the rear of the residence of the Sisters of Charity. The combined seminatural landscape of the two places provides a home for one of our three pairs of nesting robins.
However, my neighborhood has more individuals than Somme Woods. We counted a total of 105 nesting pairs of those 32 species at Somme. I can’t make a precise count of the superabundant species in my neighborhood, but even leaving out the chimney swifts, I’m sure we have more than the 210 individuals it would take to make 105 nesting pairs of all species.
