In the middle of winter the old squaw is not an uncommon bird at the southern end of Lake Michigan. When the lake is well filled with ice these northern ducks search for the stretches of open water, and there they seek rest and food. A gunner who took station at the end of the government pier in Chicago one winter’s day, killed a hundred old squaws in a few hours’ time. When the killing was complete, he found out that the birds were unfit for food, and the bodies of the beautiful creatures were thrown away. –Edward B. Clark, Birds of Lakeside and Prairie (1901)
I walked to the beach to get a better look, gripped by the notion that warm-blooded life could survive in the icy water. The flock was stretched in a long crescent that bobbed several hundred yards from shore. Through binoculars I could see they were scaups: the males’ plumage light gray and dark blue, the females’ dull brown, with a white band around the base of the bill that gave them a clownish look. Some preened, rubbing their backs or flanks with rounded bills, and once in a while one pattered briefly along the surface chasing another. But most just floated quietly, bobbing on the swells as perfectly as liquid itself.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The scaup raft was there often during the next month, usually stretched out in a thick line roughly parallel to the shore. Some days there might be only two hundred; a few times, I estimated, more than a thousand. One day I must have walked too close, because the largest flock that I saw all autumn abruptly took flight. The ducks flapped heavy-bodied across the surface, each one running away from shore and launching into the air over others still on the water. The movement started at the closer edge of the flock and flowed across it as if the whole great raft were a rug with one edge being pulled into the air, forcing the rest to follow. It was a rare sunny afternoon, and the air grew radiant with the spray the ducks kicked up with feet and wingtips.
Once they were gone I realized how gratifying it was to see such a large flock of wild birds, though in these days of environmental doom and gloom I could hardly help wondering whether the flocks had once been much larger, or help thinking of the flocks of other birds that were certifiably, certainly gone from the woods and fields–the wild turkeys that crashed through the woods when startled into flight, the prairie chickens courting at dawn with their eerie whistlings and stampings, the passenger pigeons settling into great oaks in such numbers that the branches snapped. Whenever I walked in the woods I was haunted by those birds, and haunted by the thought of the great shoots that went on day and night, the pigeons lying dead and dying in the leaf litter in carpets so dense the easiest thing to do was to turn the hogs loose on them. I was haunted by the flocks gone beyond reckoning, and so I decided to watch the ducks.
Like the scaups, the buffleheads were skittish. There was no hunting allowed anywhere near the city. They were safe. But they must have migrated through lakes and marshes where they were hunted; they had learned to stay out of shotgun range. The arc of their migration might take them from the Yukon to the Gulf coast; in thinking of their swift course over cold lakes and tundra ponds, cattail marshes and river sloughs, turbulent surf and quiet backwaters, it seemed to me that space and time were compressed, for these ducks had been following the same course for thousands of years. Their claim to this icy habitat was so much older than ours, and as I watched them fly and float and preen and squabble I thought that the rising of the city along the shore might be a matter of only passing interest to them, a brief interlude in a time scale almost geological in its creeping slowness.
I walked north on the ice. Here and there a goldeneye or bufflehead dove into a swell. They were half obscured by fog, but once or twice I saw, or imagined that I saw, one carried upward in a wave, like a dark imperfection in translucent crystal or a bug in amber. Otherwise it was very still. Then, after half a mile, I saw the falcon. It was a dark shape winging south on swift, tapered wings. I raised my binoculars just in time to see the black face mask of a peregrine. It was gone in seconds, but suddenly the overcast afternoon felt a little lighter.
A herring gull was settling in where I’d left the duck. It flew off as I approached, then circled and settled onto an ice floe 30 yards beyond the riprap. The duck had washed ashore again. This time he was dead for certain. He lay on his flank, head askew. I wondered about his last act. Was it the little paddling of his webbed feet? Or was there some conscious letting go, a final migration, a soaring and rush of flight that now for the first time was truly effortless, leaving only a swift and fading memory of the wind and the sound of pounding wings? Here on the icy shore it was more agreeable to think of that than to look at the gull preening out there and waiting for me to go.
