Waiting for the Birds

Chicago was hushed on Tuesday by six or seven inches of snow. On Wednesday we all, humans and animals, crawled out. At the South Pond, the movement of rabbits was easily visible in the new snow. Tracks ran along the edge of the pond, as did scat, and what looked like burrows under the brush.

Is somebody in there?

I brought Mucho with me to walk in the snow. I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, or if he’s more excited by smells here. I like to think it’s new and mysterious smells: rabbits, raccoons, perhaps the coyote or fox that have been spotted nearby. But it could be the regular scents, his everyday sniffing magnified in my mind by this setting. What would he do if I let his leash go? At the North Pond a few weeks ago he smelled something and pulled me into the tall grass. He led me to some bloody goose feathers. I wonder if it was the smell of the goose or the smell of the predator (coyote, I’d guess) that drew him.

What remains of the ice covering the pond has turned a darker gray, except along the shallow edges where it’s pale and mixed with waves of light brown and yellow. It has an otherworldly feel. Broken bits of ice float on the surface, some dissolving in swirling patterns and some in jagged chunks. Small mounds of snow under the pedestrian bridge and near the boathouse look like the surface of the moon. These mounds aren’t curved, like drifts. It’s hard to imagine the wind that would create these shapes.

For some reason, most of the other people at the pond are women. On this day, two of them traversed the boardwalk on cross-country skis. They moved almost silently, except for the rustle of their nylon parkas. I pegged them as birdwatchers, but when they passed me near the tree with the black-crowned night herons, they continued their conversation about pilates and didn’t even pause.

I’ve become as fascinated by the birdwatchers as I have the birds. I watched a documentary this week about birdwatchers in Central Park, among them the novelist Jonathan Franzen. The film shows the birds and bird watchers that show up each spring, which led me to look up migrating birds in my own town. Each spring and fall, Chicago gets hundreds of different species of birds stopping by on their annual migration. This is a great place to watch birds, because it’s on the Mississippi River flyway. The city has a program in place to eliminate decorative lighting on high-rises during the migratory season, to cut down on the number of bird-building collisions. How could I never have known this?

At South Pond on Wednesday, there were two newcomers: a water bird with a black-and-white head. They weren’t swimming together; each had its own end of the pond. I watched one of them dive under water for more than 10 seconds at a time. This doesn’t sound like long, but compared to the diving I’ve seen ducks do, it looks like an Olympic feat. I tried to identify the bird with the help of Google. I’m guessing it was a hooded merganser or a bufflehead. Next week, I plan to walk with the North Pond birdwatchers and to start learning to identify the visitors who will be coming to town.