Birding in east central Illinois
From where we live in central Illinois, we drove east toward Indiana. No destination in mind – just taking a long ride on a lovely fall day. And we did see a few birds. For me, it is never how many species, but the birds I am seeing – what are they doing? And I will share with you a few of the photos I took from the car with my cell phone. As we all know, birds are skittish and it can be hard to get close to them to take a photo and the zoom on a cell phone only goes so far. Fortunately, the car works well as a blind. I can always get closer to a bird when I am in the car than when I am on foot.
If you look closely near the center of this photo, you will see a female Brown-headed Cowbird. She was sitting on a wire that served as a fence and was well camouflaged. What is interesting about her is that there were no other cowbirds or blackbirds in sight – not anywhere. And cowbirds enjoy being in flocks – especially this time of year. The females are often alone in spring and summer, but in fall, they are with others – in flocks where the birds are always close to each other. So what is she doing? Where are her friends? Her acquaintances? Her colleagues? Her fellow flock members? Why is she all by herself? Was this her doing or did the flock abandon her?
A pair of Mourning Doves – and from their posturing towards each other, I would say a male and female bonded pair. And what are they doing along the edge of this rural road in the middle of farm country? They were ingesting grit from the gravel on the side of the road. And why do they do this? Because their digestion system is quite different from ours. Their gizzards work as grinding stones to crush and grind seed so it is digestible. And ingesting grit greatly helps this process. So when you see doves at roadsides like this, or pecking at sidewalks or at the surfaces of parking lots, this is exactly what they are doing. Ingesting grit. Yummy, right?
A Red-shouldered Hawk. Hawks can be difficult to identify – luckily, this one was right out in the open. If you look in your field guides or online, you will see that hawks in the U.S. are divided into 2 groups – Buteos and Accipiters. There are differences between the 2 groups but the one that is obvious here is this is a big, stocky hawk. Buteos are muscular and blocky. More broad. Accipiters are more slender and stream-lined. So this is a Buteo which eliminates a few hawks.
Common Buteos here in Illinois are the Red-tailed Hawk and the Red-shouldered Hawk. As I wrote in my blog of 11/11, one of the best ID traits of a Red-tailed Hawk here in Illinois is the large, generally circular white area on the upper and middle breast. This is obvious. The hawk here in my photo does not show this. Its entire breast and tummy area is more red – a brownish-red. And when I looked at the bird through my binoculars, the red was actually horizontal streakings with a bit of white showing through only here and there. This is the breast of a Red-shouldered Hawk. And there was one more clue. Red-tailed Hawks like drier areas. Yes, they can be found perched in trees close to a pond, lake, or river, but they are much more often found in drier woods, edges, and tops of utility poles where there is no water in sight. Red-shouldered Hawks like a wetter habitat. And yes, they can be found perched in trees, in edges, on fence posts, or on tops of utility poles where there is no water in sight, but they are more likely to be near a pond, lake, river, or a wetland. And this hawk was perched right neat the edge of a large lake. Perfect habitat for it.