What’s the Point of Counting Birds?

For many years, Midewin has conducted an annual breeding bird survey using a bird or avian point count system — the scientific standard for sampling bird populations to identify population trends, assess habitat preference and glean other helpful information. The surveys provide critically important data for tracking the restoration of ag and arsenal land at Midewin back to prairie and healthy bird habitat over time.

This year, my morning began with the alarm going off at 4:30 am. I’m out the door with a travel mug of coffee by 4:45 for the hour drive to Midewin. I arrive just before 6 am and join a couple dozen folks, led by Professor Michael P. Ward, the Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick Chair in Sustainability at the University of Illinois and Ornithologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey. Our point count crew includes Bill Glass and Jim Herkert. Now retired, from Midewin and Illinois Audubon Society, respectively, they long had been the leading lights in managing and monitoring the health of Midewin’s bird communities. Just as exciting, our crew includes several grad students, recent graduates and early career staff from Midewin and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, representing the next generation of stewards.

Participating in the annual breeding bird survey at Midewin is a lot of fun. And a lot of hard work. Hiking to each geographic point requires bushwhacking across the landscape. This year, our assigned route led us into South Patrol Road Prairie, the oldest, large-scale restoration at Midewin. A couple months ago, I hiked through this site immediately following a controlled burn. Since then, the charred, easy-to-traverse earth has sprung to life with a profusion of early wildflowers. Prairies are often described as oceans and the dense, waist-high prairie herbage, with some grasses already at head height, makes you feel in fact like you’re wading through water. Certainly, you get wet enough — from the slogs through ankle-deep swampy areas to the dew-soaked flowers and grasses to the sweat of exertion on this unseasonably warm, muggy morning with no breeze but plenty of mosquitoes.

But then…your GPS informs you you’ve arrived at your appointed point. The timer starts and you get five, uninterrupted minutes to look, to listen, to focus on nothing else in the world but the miracle of birds. To test your birding skills, your memory for identification by shape, plumage, song and call. The fact is, I’m a decent birder — I’m pretty good with visual ID but I’m still learning when it comes to bird calls. My ear is well attuned to the ping pong ball of Field Sparrows and the soft hiccup of Henslow’s Sparrows. However, aging CPU that I am, it takes me s little longer to process the subtle distinctions between different kinds of flycatchers and vireos. It helps to have experts like Dr. Ward on your team, which helps the rest of the team to become better birders.

It will take a little time to enter and analyze all the data collected over the two-day period. But, for our team, highlights included a rare glimpse of a Virginia Rail and the unexpected discovery of a song sparrow nest, brimming with gape-mouthed nestlings.

If you haven’t visited Midewin in a while — and especially if you’ve never been there — now is a perfect time to visit. You don’t need to wade into the prairie sea to soak up the birds and blooming prairie. Stand anywhere along the crushed gravel Henslow Trail that snakes its way through South Patrol Road Prairie, or standing just west of the Iron Bridge along the same trail, gazing west. Stand there for just five, uninterrupted minutes — to look, to listen, to be transported nearly 200 years back in time when a traveler named Eliza Steele first encountered the virgin prairie:

I started with surprise and delight. I was in the midst of a prairie! A world of grass and flowers stretched around me, rising and falling in gentle undulations, as if an enchanter had struck the ocean swell, and it was at rest forever. Acres of wildflowers of every hue glowed around me, and the sun was arising from the earth where it touched the horizon, was kissing with golden face the meadows green. What a new and wondrous world of beauty! What a magnificent sight! Imagine yourself in the centre of an immense circle of velvet herbage, the sky for its boundary upon every side, the whole clothed with a radiant efflorescence of every brilliant hue. We rode thus through a perfect wilderness of sweets, sending forth perfume, and animated with myriads of glittering birds and butterflies.