Signs of Change

I don't know why we pretend to be surprised that April weather in Illinois can be a little capricious. As I write this there is 3" of snow accumulated. The morning winds were persistent and smelled of precipitation. 

That meant it made sense to enter Nelson Lake close to where I wanted to bird, which required a little cheating. I parked at the "old" entrance that was once the only way to get into the park. I noticed things were different than usual. There were muddy tracks and mounds of black dirt heaped at the spot where a former concrete platform once served as the foundation for a large metal Quonset building. That hut and the mechanical cranes that drove to and fro in the marsh are now long gone, removed by the county. It was quite an effort to extricate one crane literally bogged down in peat and tilted to one side. It took years and lots of volunteer effort to clean up all that industry. The only remaining vestige of the peat mining business is the crushed gravel road bed that leads from the old entrance to the base of the woods on the west side of the marsh. 

The road had been used by hunters as well. Every fall the marsh would convert to an extended hunting lodge, one of the best places for shooting ducks and geese in northern Illinois, it was reported. A small shack at the end of the road held flat-bottomed boats good for waterfowling. Hunters stored decoys in the shacks and would nail the heads of ducks they'd shot to the walls to keep track of the number of species they bagged each fall. 

Back at the entrance there is another vestige of days gone by at Dick Young/Nelson

Lake Forest Preserve––the little flip box that stands mounted to a post. This is where birders could make note of what they'd seen that day at the marsh. The system was

simple. A set of birding lists was kept inside the box. You'd fill out what you'd seen so that other birders would be aware of interesting species. 

Kids visiting the marsh often would open the box and write obscene names on the sheets. They did not seem to know that many bird names already sound obscene. Red-shafted flicker. White breasted nuthatch. Brown creeper. And I dare you to Google that European species, the Great Tit!

Of course words like these were the very reason I took so much grief for being a birder during high school. My classmates would make up even randier sounding false names for birds. Some of these attempts at teasing me about birds including made-up names using the first or last name of a particular promiscuous girl. My sophmoric buddies thought it SO funny to ask me if I'd seen the Paula Boobalicous Bird lately... 

We birders survive these travails one way or another.  These days the guys who used to tease me now call to ask what bird they're seeing at the feeder. This birding avocation has gone mainstream. 

Just past the forlorn little box that no longer gets any attention (thanks to IBET and a hundred other ways to post your bird sightings) a male cardinal was singing his guts out from a windy perch. It was so dark and the wind was so strong I could not get a decent photograph even though the bird was singing tantalizingly close. For all my attempts over the years, I have exactly three good pictures of a cardinal, and dozens of missed opportunities. They are a jinx bird for me when it comes to digiscoping, but no so bad as blue jays, which are an evasive species of bird when it comes to photography. You wouldn't think so, but they are. 

At the first pond a small group of bufflehead ducks was engaging in mating antics. They get quite animated, raising themselves above the surface, diving and chasing the females and each other around. Totally entertaining ducks, these. I took some pics but again, the light was dim and their movements made them blurry. Keep trying...

The county conducted a burn this past week and the marsh was blackened and thinned-out looking. But that's a good thing. Nature will roar back with even more bio-material. The cattails succumbed to the burn to a degree, but it almost seemed like they conspired to let the tops singe off and keep the crucial parts intact. Cattails advance every year at the marsh, doing their natural succession thing. This process is running its course by filling in the old peat ponds. That's how the peat formed in the first place, with vegetation falling into water and rotting at the bottom. No surprise here! But our expectations for stasis in nature tend to be sentimental. Nature doesn't give a rip. Evolution demands that new niches be occupied. Where open water from peat mining once hosted frogs and ducks, red-winged blackbirds and marsh wrens now make their nests. 

For some creatures the cattail zone is like a choked up urban street, a good way to pass undetected from one point to another. I do not suppose deer cut through the cattails in water that runs a foot deep, so I surmise the trail 

may be the work of a beaver or muskrat. At more than a foot wide, the trail suggests something big and persistent makes a habit of cutting through there all winter. 

I met up with a herd of deer in the woods. There were six of them, all with goofily cocked ears and no antlers, of course. These were young specimens as deer go, dainty and coy looking. They were also quite hairy 

looking. Their dull brown winter coats seemed ready to shed. As I stood there taking pictures of some Fox sparrows, the deer struck that balance between curious and being on guard. When I lifted my scope to leave they all ran like a pack of mischievous kids. They were probably headed over to the old lift box to write obscene things about bird watchers. 

I stopped my walk at a spot where the burn was complete. The ground was formed of a thick, loamy peat soil. All around me birds were feeding in the low vegetation, out of the wind. A set of newly bright goldfinches flitted about in their half moulted plumage. Song sparrows and Fox sparrows seemed almost interchangeable in the dull early light. The Fox sparrows sang so beautifully you could not miss their presence. One sat long enough for me to get a half decent photo. The red coloration in their plumage and that perfect white breast make a great looking bird. I wish they stayed with us to breed here in Illinois. 

Far in the distance near the east side viewing deck,  I could see one remaining pelican. The male bird sat on a spit of ground jutting out into the lake. He was resting peacefully enough. A couple years ago one pelican remained for weeks, apparently too sick or hurt to migrate. One wonders where they go to die. Later on IBET there was a report of 7 more pelicans that I did not see. The bird I saw was keeping company with a flock of American wigeon, which tend to be sociable birds. Meanwhile a flock of green-winged teal flew back and forth in that frenetic teal way. They seemed edgy and nervous, whipping around like anxious thoughts over a burned out marsh. Even nature seemed a bit haggard and depressed this morning, stuck in a spin cycle of late winter weather. This too shall pass. 

There is always some change going on at Nelson Lake Marsh, either man-made or natural.