A Hooded Warbler, rare for this area, at the Lincoln Park Zoo where researchers from their Urban Wildlife Institute are surveying birds in order to replicate a 1898 to 1903 study published in Wild Birds in City Parks. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)
Like at least one of them has been doing almost every morning since March, Mason Fidino and Kelvin Limbrick are standing in a flat, grassy patch north of Lincoln Park's nature museum, looking intently at sky and trees and listening like, well, hawks.
The binoculars give one clue about their purpose, the field notebooks another.
And then the dialogue seals it. "Downy woodpecker at 20 to 30 meters," says Fidino, as Limbrick makes notes. "Ring-billed gull flyover ... Another golden-crowned (kinglet) at 30 to 40. ... That's the same flicker ... And that's a branch."
They are making a systematic catalog of the birds near Lincoln Park Zoo. But they aren't just any birders, and this isn't just any ornithological survey. Fidino and Limbrick, both in their mid-20s, are Lincoln Park Zoo urban wildlife specialists, and they are spending the spring re-creating a survey of park birds done more than a century ago — and rediscovered last year in a modest book in a Galena antique shop.
Their job is, literally, a walk in the park. To tag along with them one April morning is to witness science in action and to get at least a starter course in the highly specialized and surprisingly popular pursuit of birding.
Identifying birds, for instance, is done as much with the ears as with the eyes; its call might be the one thing that can help you distinguish one brown sparrow from another. The brown thrasher mimics other birds' calls so well that you think, "Oh, there's, like, 15 species in that one tree," Fidino says. "Oh, wait. It's one single brown thrasher."
Birders hear things others don't: That full-throated avian battle call that accompanies the eagle in the opening credits of "The Colbert Report," Fidino says, belongs more likely to a red-tailed hawk; the bald eagle's cry, which we soon hear while walking past its enclosure in the zoo, is rather meek.
Birders rely on an alphabet soup of acronyms: NOFL, pronounced "nah-ful," for northern flicker, for instance, and CAGO for the ubiquitous, annoying-to-many Canada goose. As Limbrick likes to say, "You can't spell Chicago without CAGO."
Also, birders use the term "birded" as shorthand for spotting birds and, indeed, for doing most anything related to birding. "It's like an all-purpose bird 'aloha,'" says Seth Magle, director of the zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute.
When Limbrick found a kite bearing an eagle pattern abandoned in the park, he mounted it above Fidino's desk with one word written on the accompanying slip of paper: "Birded."
When Fidino spots a rarity on the morning's walk, a hooded warbler (HOWA), the "coolest bird" he's seen in the Chicago area, not only is he moved to high-five his partner, they also say to each other, yes, "Birded."
The idea for the walk is to compare avian populations then and now, a notion that's scientifically valid, of course, and will, it is hoped, lead to a paper in a scientific journal. Fidino, too, will give a public talk on it May 2 in the zoo's education building.
But this one has the added charm of a great back story. It got its start more than a year earlier, when another zoo scientist, antiquing in Galena during a trip celebrating an anniversary, came across an intriguing turn-of-the-last-century book.
"Wild Birds in City Parks" turned out to be a detailed record of the birds its authors witnessed in the park, beginning in 1898.
"Being hints on identifying 145 birds," said the subtitle, "prepared primarily for the spring migration in Lincoln Park, Chicago."
It was written by a couple with the same last name, Herbert Eugene Walter and Alice Hall Walter. Married? Siblings? (Married, it would turn out.)
It had authorial flair, bits of bright verbal plumage: "A pair of field or opera-glasses is a valuable aid, although practice is necessary in learning to adjust them rapidly and to fix them instantly upon the bird," the authors wrote.
And it was a record of urban wildlife, a burgeoning field now but something of a rarity then. The book evangelized, in its way, for what the zoo does through the Urban Wildlife Institute, which is study city fauna: "During the migrations of the birds, city dwellers have one of the keenest delights of country life brought to their very doors, because many birds, migrating largely at night, are attracted by the lights of the city, and stop off on their long journey to feed, so that a city park often contains a greater variety of feathered visitors than an equal area of the country."
"I usually check antique shops for natural history books," said Allison Sacerdote-Velat, Lincoln Park Zoo's reintroduction biologist. "You can usually find some pretty cool field guides with good antique plates of animals and wildflowers."
"Wild Birds" was "a small book tucked away in a shelf of other natural history books. I was picking ones that had interesting bindings. This one had a small, plain, green binding."