Seeking Some Birds at Montrose Harbor

Hello again! Hope everyone is staying warm and cozy. The weather here in Chicago has been filled with snow, rain, hail, wind, and 30 degree temperatures. Just when you think that this post may be about sitting next to a fireplace with a warm cup of hot chocolate, BAMN! It’s not that kind of post!

Before the cold weather sits in and decides to stay, I wanted to tell you all of a field trip that I recently took for my Ornithology (study of birds) class. It was an outdoor field trip. Sounds miserable, but it was actually a lot of fun! We went to the Montrose Harbor along Lake Michigan. Our task was to identify birds in six different habitats. The habitats were meadow, mowed grassland, dunes, lake, harbor, and woods. Montrose Harbor is known for being a bird sanctuary in Chicago so it was the perfect place to discover some interesting birds.

We first walked through the woodlands and saw a giant Red-Tailed Hawk just perched on a tree staring at us. Our professor has a huge pair of binoculars that we were allowed to use to get a clear, close-up picture of the bird. We then moved to the dunes and the lake area. The lake area had the most abundant bird species. We saw a rare Great Black-Backed Gull that is almost never seen in Chicago! We snapped as many pictures as we could and wrote down every bird species we identified and how many we saw of each. After that, we made our way over to the mowed grassland area and the meadow. Here we saw Downy Woodpeckers, House Finches, and even an albino American Robin. Try to imagine a robin, but all white. I know, it’s hard huh? Finally our last location was to the harbor area where we spotted a Great Blue Heron.

After recording all our findings, our lab write-up was to take one species of bird from each area and identify whether it was a migrant bird, a winter visitor, or a resident of Chicago. It was really interesting learning all the migratory routes that the birds take and where they are all from.

Even though this field trip was outdoors on a cold day, I had a fun time identifying new birds. I mean, all for the sake of science right???