Last week’s mail brought my copy of the Cook County results from this year’s State-Wide Spring Bird Count. We birders put together a pretty good year, with 191 total species and 48,353 individuals recorded on count day.
The big news on this year’s count was the ibis seen at Lake Calumet by Walter Marcisz and his party. The bird was in flight when they saw it, and they couldn’t tell if it was a glossy or a white-faced ibis, but whichever it was it was the first member of the genus Plegadis ever seen on a Cook County spring count and only about the 12th ibis ever seen in the Chicago area.
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As usual, the ring-billed gull won the prize for most abundant bird, with 16,274 individuals counted. This species regularly tops the list, and its numbers keep growing. The 1990 count recorded just under 4,000 ring-bills. These gulls are so common in Chicago that even nonbirders notice them. They gather in parking lots all over town, and it is hard to look up at the sky without seeing at least one. However, their seeming abundance may be partly the result of their conspicuousness. Birds that habitually lurk in the weeds may be undercounted, while big birds that hang around shopping centers may be recorded in larger numbers than are actually present.
Record highs for wood warblers are always good news. This whole family of birds, Neotropical migrants all, is suffering a continuing decline. Their numbers have been going down unrelentingly for decades. A slight uptick in the numbers reported from one county’s spring count is the most modest of improvements, but we will take anything we can get at this point.
We do know that all the prairie birds are in trouble in Illinois because of habitat loss. And birders know that here in Cook County prairie birds are usually found in only a few forest preserves, some at the southern end of the county and some in the panhandle around Barrington and Palatine. Birds confined to small areas are always vulnerable.
There are even more complexities in this picture. On some counts Jackson Park is full of birds and the Northwestern landfill in Evanston is lifeless. On other days that pattern is reversed. On some counts the forest preserves along the Des Plaines River have birds fighting each other for perching space on tree limbs, while the North Branch of the Chicago and the North Shore Channel are dead. Other days that pattern is reversed.
