The storm that hit the day before Halloween marked the end of the soft autumn days that provide Chicago with its annual taste of perfect weather. The seasonal shift announced itself at my house about 3 AM, when the wind blew a large packing box into the fence under my bedroom window. I awoke expecting to see a truck bursting through the wall. The wind–twisting and whirling between apartment buildings–was actually roaring. The bedroom window had been open since May. Now it was time to close it.
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Sandhill cranes are easy to identify and hard to miss. On the ground they stand four feet tall. In the air their wings may span seven feet. If you see some very big birds passing over, check out their legs and their necks. Long legs extending well beyond the tail and a neck held in an S-curve identify a heron or egret. A long neck extended out straight ahead of the body and stubby legs that don’t reach the tip of the tail identify a goose. A long, straight neck and long legs identify a crane.
When the wind is blowing at something less than a roar, we usually hear sandhill cranes before we see them. Cranes have elongated trachea that enable them to make very loud noises. You can hear them literally a mile away. The trachea is coiled in loops along the sternum. In the whooping crane the uncoiled trachea would be longer than the bird.
Raptors like to take advantage of favorable winds too. Those 70 red-tailed hawks were topped by the 220 seen that same day at Illinois Beach State Park. The last bit of natural lakeshore in Illinois had seven other species of hunters as well, including 62 sharp-shinned hawks.
Cerulean warblers–birds weighing less than ten grams–fly from Illinois to the Andes each fall and return in the spring. The champion long-distance migrant is the arctic tern, which makes an annual flight from the arctic to the antarctic and back every year. It has been pointed out that arctic terns spend more of their lives in daylight than any other species on earth.
