The Greatest Hits of Nelson Lake Marsh: Bird Songs

Five minutes into a Sunday bird walk I heard one of the sounds I’d come to hear: A Mourning Warbler singing in the thickets next to the main path. I never feel spring season is replete without a glimpse of Mourning and Connecticut Warblers. They always drift through around the fourth week of May, typically near the end of the warbler migration season. They bring up the rear of the migration march like some aging oompah band, one singing its thick little song, “chirry chorry chirry chorry.” and the other “tupa tepo tupa teepo tupateppoh.” If you’re lucky, you’ll see them both, but there are never any guarantees. These secretive woodland species seldom venture out into plain sight. They arrive when the foliage is full and their coloration is perfectly designed to help them remain invisible under the mottled canopy. More than once I’ve hung around a small copse of trees trying to call out a Mourning warbler with my poor imitations of its call, but it skulks around like an unclear thought. When they do flash into sight, it is only for a few moments, as if to say, “There, are you happy now?”

 While searching for the precious glimpse of a Mourning warbler, a Wilson’s warbler arrived on the scene, working its way toward me through a hedgerow of honeysuckle. Wilson’s warbler sings its staccato song with verve and looks like a bird that never got “finished” properly in its plumage design. The bird from the shoulder down looks pretty much like a yellowthroat with no distinct markings. It’s yellow head is topped by a stark black cap that frankly looks out of place. Something in me wants that cap to be a black throat patch, or an eye patch like the yellowthroat. But the Wilson’s goes about its self-absorbed way, singing that “chichichi” song that only another Wilson’s could love.

The warbler that more than knows its place is the yellowthroat, aptly named and easy to see. The male bird’s bright throat is plainly off the charts when it comes to yellowness. The female also has a yellow throat, but it lacks the distinctive black eye patch that make the male so distinctive. The better for camouflage in the female’s case, we must suppose.

All summer long the yellowthroat sings, and at all times of the day. It is as if the bird has put its song on “heavy rotation” like they used to do with those annoying hit singles (“Alone Again, Naturally…) on WLS AM back when they used their 50,000 watt station to play the same 10 songs all day. You have to admit, it was an effective recipe, and WLS still plays repetitive tripe all day long, only now they fill the dial with a recipe of political Starlings convinced they own the country. 

Back at Nelson Lake Marsh, you can find yellowthroats in a whole series of habitats. Some choose to hang with the marsh wrens in cattail havens near water.  Others move out onto the west-side prairie and keep company with sedge wrens. Are you seeing a pattern here? Yellowthroats behave and sing much like wrens, whose niches they share.

In fact you can walk through four or five different habitat zones from cattail marsh to partial swamp to deep woodlands and onto restored prairie and find yellowthroats lurking about in all of them. They all “chirr” at you in that imitation catbird noise that says they’re irritated. Then they burst forth with that famous song! “Wichity witchity whichtity which?” I’ve heard that song clearly through closed windows in a car speeding along the highway at 70 miles an hour.

 It’s time for a list of the most persistent singers at Nelson Lake, and their “greatest hits!”:

 • “Fitz-bew” is highly distinctive call of the Willow flycatcher, a bird species that loves marginal wetlands and transitional zones between prairie and cattail meadows. Its close and nearly identical cousin the Alder Flycatcher has been seen and heard as well at Nelson Lake. It’s “fee-bee-oh!” song is slightly more enunciated than the Willow.

 • The long, rambling call of the Warbling vireo tends to emanate from high trees even on the hottest days. The unmistakable call is a hallmark of summer.

 • One of my favorite songs among all birds is the wren that sounds like an electric sewing machine, the Marsh wren. It sings from dense cattail hideaways and you’ll seldom call it out, but the song of the marsh wren is so distinctive you cannot miss it.

 • Move out onto the prairie and find the slightly less common sedge wren singing in weedy transitional zones between prairie and cultivated field. Sedge wrens like it grassy and thick. They will perch up on pasture rose and sing their distinctive “chap-chap-chap-chapp-chapperrr…”

 • The distinctive “wheeeeiieep!” of the Great Crested Flycatcher fills the summer woodlands, along with the answering, plaintive call of the Wood Pewee that sings its own name “peee-aww-weee?” in questioning fashion. Then you know summer has arrived.

• The varied song of a catbird, filled with quick imitations of other bird species and sounds it hears is a distinctive mark of an Illinois woodland. The bird pictured in the header above was photographed at Nelson Lake in full song. The songs of all these species draw you through the preserve and become part of your "template" in visiting the site. They are some of the “greatest hits” at Nelson Lake Marsh, the sight and sound of a healthy environment.