There's a little bit of birdwatching I've done lately. Nothing spectacular, but I've been quite pleased with the little, day-to-day common birds of this area, and spotted a couple less-than-common birds, too. First up was this Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) who seemed to have won the jackpot- a whole fast food bag to itself! It kept trying to fly off with it, and watching it struggle with the bag was quite hilarious. It finally gave up when a few Pokemon Go players began their usual face-down rapid walk around Marina Point and disturbed it.
As usual, I have to clarify that I'm not completely anti- Pokemon Go, but those who play it do seem to shut their eyes to the world around them and disturb the local birds, especially the ones I'm trying to photograph. There are a few birders I know, mostly by repute and not personally, who truly despise Pokemon Go's effect on local birdwatching spots. The heavy traffic seems to scare everything away, especially back when the game was popular in July and August 2016. I don't think it will be half as much a problem this spring, however, and they can go back to grousing about honeysuckle and bad weather patterns.
One thing I've learned is that there are evidently no optimistic nature-lovers, at least none who write the articles and guides I read. Love of nature and optimism somehow seem incompatible.* Everything is always going wrong, about to go wrong, or never far from danger of going wrong. For instance, take this warm winter. Birders aren't too thrilled about it, because it never got consistently cold enough to bring down most of the rarer northern birds like Snowy Owls or Pine Siskins to central Illinois. (Well, that and the obvious sign that localized warm weather means global warming in a beautiful fallacy of composition.**)
One of those groups that didn't make it here in numbers is larger northern gull species, leaving us with Ring-billed Gulls (Larus delawarensis), like the ones above. There's still been plenty, but not nearly as many as there would be with a colder winter. On the other hand, fewer gulls leaves the garbage on Marine Point more or less to the crows, which I'm sure they appreciate:
Now, you may have thought you were safer from last year's series of blurry photos of distant ducks, but they have finally returned, as I saw a LOT of ducks recently at Marine Point:
For Illinois duck species, there are basically four major divisions. There are the big sea ducks, the eiders and scoters that I rarely see, then the long, thin-billed mergansers that seem to have mostly flown north this year. Following this are the diving ducks, the Ring-billed Ducks, Scaups, Redheads, etc that make up much of the photo above, and then the most numerous are the dabbling ducks, like the Gadwalls, Green-winged Teal, American Wigeons, and Mallards that are also in the photo above. (The Ruddy Duck is sort of in its own little group, too, I suppose.)
I then went over to the Lake Springfield Beach House, where the earliest flowers locally, the Bird's Eye Speedwells (Veronica persica), grow en masse. One of the best bird's eyes around watched me as I took photos of the speedwells:
The Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) that lived at the Beach House last year has returned. I suspect it follows the gulls, since I usually see it at the same time as large numbers of gulls congregate on Lake Springfield. However, there's one other possibility:
The American Coots (Fulica americana) have returned in good numbers, and it definitely feels like spring has come. Little rafts of them floated up and down the shoreline, diving and splashing merrily.
Every so often, another sign of spring would poke its head up out of the water. This is the head of a Red-eared Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans) , and it's the first turtle I've seen this year.
I saw three more in the same area, however, so clearly they're coming up in the warmer waters. Some turtles, like this species, spend the winter sitting in the mud on the bottom, occasionally moving around and eating a bit of food. They come up to bask during thaws in the weather, but on rare occasions people see turtles moving under the ice, even in the middle of January!
I visited Centennial Park fairly recently, and spotted this American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) above, my favorite species of hawk, albeit one of the most common species. It was hovering over Centennial Hill, and eventually dove after a mouse behind the hill. I didn't see it again, so I assume the hunt went well for this bird.
Nearby, dozens of Horned Larks (Eremophila alpestris) flew away from me. I improvised a disguise for myself, however- I hid in my car and let them get closer, allowing me to get a few pictures before they flew. These little birds love the short mowed grasses that dominate half of Centennial Park.
My best recent sighting, however, was on a brief stroll through my neighborhood. My mother and I were enjoying the fresh air when off in the distance at a local park, we spotted a large dark shape. As we got closer, we saw a white head and tail on that dark shape. It turned out that a Bald Eagle had decided to land in this tree, miles from the nearest large body of water!
I ran back home and got my camera, just in time to get the eagle before it soared away. This is about as close to a Bald Eagle as I've ever gotten, within twenty-five feet overhead. I may have seen nothing spectacular, nothing out of the ordinary, but I've enjoyed my time here locally just the same.
* I should specify that I have met a few optimistic-minded birders, but they are in the minority of all nature enthusiasts I have met.
** I do not mean that global warming is not happening, I merely refer to the fallacy that local newscasters often make when saying that a local warm winter is clearly indicative of global warming. This is also known as the part-to-whole fallacy.
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