Been a while. Mostly because good bird blogging is hard work. But we're off to Minnesota next week for about 10 days, so there should be some good action. There may be live blogging, too, since I'll try it from my iPod, as I'm doing now. We shall see what we shall see. And maybe you will, too.
There's a Green-breasted Mango in Beloit, Wisconsin, just over the Illinois border. This hummingbird's home is in Central America, so such a bird out of water created a lot of racket on the bird lists. It seems that everybody -- us included -- went to check it out. The bird shows up a few times a day at the backyard feeders of a couple of adjacent houses. The homeowners whose feeder the bird seems to favor don't mind a row of scopes pointing at their house as long as we stay behind the fence. They seem to get a kick out of the notoriety and even have a book for people to sign. So today we made our first visit.
IBET, the Illinois birding email list, alerted us to the presence of an ORANGE BISHOP at Montrose Beach. It was there all right. All the way from Africa maybe? No, all the way from some moron who released it from its cage. Since it's almost certainly an escape, we can't claim it as a lifer, bitchin' as it was. Apparently, the same poor fella showed up the last year or two, but he's just a cipher in the birding community until he hooks up with some of his kind and starts a breeding flock. But what do we care if he counts? We've got the His Eminence the Northern Cardinal who is just as bitchin' and outranks our foreign ecclesiastic to boot.
I received a letter from the Chicago Botanic Garden about my membership. It started like this:
Dear Scrubb,This shows how ignorant the CBG management is. They think wetlands ought to be improved. It's the kind of mentality people had 100 years ago, the kind of mentality that has led to the disappearance of wetlands today. What a bunch of ecological philistines.We've noticed that your Garden membership has expired.
Thirty years ago, who would have thought swampy land and foggy lagoons would become the Chicago Botanic Garden we see today? Our members did.
Everybody has to start somewhereWe headed back to Chicago today, but we made three stops first: Fayette State Park, the Mead Paper Company's Auto Tour, and the Nahma Marsh Trail. Nothing at Fayette, Nahma was a decrepit dump, and so the Mead corporation's ill-kept trail provided the only thrill: a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. Not worthy of a post, really, except I wanted to show the sign above, which we saw on our way south to Menomonee. That's worth a bird or two, so I hereby declare today a success.
