The reason we look forward to changes of season in Chicago is that the weather in each season is so awful that any change sounds like an improvement. I find myself looking forward to hearing about wind-chill indexes rather than heat indexes.
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We usually think of bird migration as part of the fall, but nearly all of what we have seen so far is really late-summer activity. Sandpipers and plovers are already heading south by the end of July. The birds, some of which are pausing on a journey that takes them from the arctic to Brazil, feed and rest here on beaches and in marshes. In the days when people raised cattle around here the birds landed in cow pastures. Now they land on sod farms. If you want to see species such as buff-breasted, Baird’s, and upland sandpipers, the nearest sod farm is the place to look. I’m not much of a fan of lawns, so I’m glad to find out that sod farms have some redeeming ecological value as way stations for tired sandpipers.
In keeping with the idea of ending something old before we move on to something new, I’d like to return to the subject of squirrels. Back in January I wrote a column about the two species that live in Chicago. One is the familiar gray squirrel, the other is the less common fox squirrel. Gray squirrels are everywhere, but the only fox squirrel populations I know about are in Lincoln Park in and around the bird sanctuary at Addison and in Horner Park at Montrose and California.
The other two were in 1994. One was in Wunder’s Cemetery, the other in Graceland Cemetery, just across the street from Wunder’s. Bojanowski suggests that “perhaps we have a small population centered on these old cemeteries.”
One day last spring I did go out to her neighborhood in search of fox squirrels. I checked out a small park at George and Kenosha streets where I saw nothing but ordinary gray squirrels. I checked out Kelvyn Park, which is along Kostner just a block south of Diversey, and there I saw a very interesting squirrel. It had the characteristic buff underparts of the fox squirrel, but otherwise it looked like a gray squirrel. It was not as big as a fox squirrel, and the tail and face lacked the mixture of buff hairs I would expect to see in a fox squirrel. So maybe we have some small fox squirrels. Or maybe we have yet another color phase of the gray squirrel. Or maybe we even have a hybrid. In any case, we have something that bears further investigation.
