I needed to visit my Mom In Chicago, and also visit my brother and his family, who live in Detroit, so I decided to add a day to the trip and visit my North American Birding friends Greg Neise and Jeff Skrentny- if they could fit me into their schedules.  After a bit of trouble getting myself organized, I found that Jeff was the one for me to use as the communications center.   I flew into Chicago at about 10 pm Tuesday evening and was picked up by my Mom at  O’Hare, and promptly found out about Chicago traffic.  There was standstill traffic on the freeway at 10:30 at night!  And it wasn’t even the weekend, so I don’t want to hear about Houston traffic after that.

    I get to the house at about 11:00 and am in no position to go to sleep, despite the fact that I need to be out of the house by 4:00 to get to Greg’s house by 5:00, despite the relatively short distance from Hyde Park to Berwyn.  I got there just on time and got my first chance to meet Greg face to face.  Then Jeff showed up in his Hybrid Prius.  We all piled into the car and headed south to do some birding.  The three of us are not the prototypical birders, at least if you were to ask people what they envisioned when they thought of birders.  We joked about that in the car, but I can’t really remember the punchline .

     So we took off, and made a quick stop for some coffee for Greg.  Then we headed southwest towards our first destination, Goofy Ridge at Lake Chautauqua, which was about 3 ½ hours away.  We actually made pretty good time despite the fact that we stopped at several McDonalds trying unsuccessfully  to find the McSkillet burritos that he had bought before.  It turns out that McDonalds does not sell those anymore, but we did eventually get something to eat and continue down the road.

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    When I was communicating with Jeff, before I went to Chicago, he asked me what I wanted to see.  Since I had never birded there before, my response was lots of variety.  I had no specific birds that I wanted to see, but the guys had something that they knew that I had never seen before… Eurasian Tree Sparrows! Also, since it was late summer, they planned on checking out the waders and shorebirds, so that meant bring my scope.

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    We finally got to Goofy Ridge, and I got my gear out of the car (my scope, tripod,  and camera with “Bigma”  150-500 mm lens.  I had been having problems with that lens, but it was all that I had.  Right off the bat,  I found my lifer Eurasian Tree Sparrow, on my own, and that got me pumped for the rest of the day.

    Walking down the trail towards the lake,  we saw a flock of Canada Geese flying in.  It’s funny, but I didn’t get my lifer Canada Goose until last August in Colorado.  I bet that they would probably be in the the first 100 birds on just about any birder who lives just a little north of here.  What a difference the birding is in Texas compared to other locations around the country.

    We didn’t see much in the way of shore birds so we headed towards the dike on the other side of the lake and got a chance to scope a number of shorebirds.  Things were a little too far away to get any good shots, but there were a number of birds that I got a chance to work on a definite weakness… Sandpipers.  I wasn’t very good at it and it showed!  Oh well, I enjoyed it anyways.  The bad thing about Texas birding is that there is so much variety in the birds, that if you don’t fwant to work on one type of bird, you can always find another somewhere else.  So I went for the easy birding, where you didn’t have to look through dozens or even hundreds of birds to find a third or fourth species in the group.  Not only that, I struggle with species differentiation when they all seem to look the same!  I put the gulls in the same category, but I couldn’t practice on them if I wanted to since we only see a few species of gulls anyways.

    Back to the dike… The had draind the lake to kill the invasive Asian Carp in the lake and there were thousands of dead and dying carp out there.  Funny, but there were no birds eating the fish!  It was amazing that there was nothing out there paying the slightest attention to the smelly fish at all… except my nose.  I have been around a LOT of nasty smelling stuff, and feel like the formaldehyde has deadened my sense of smell, but even I smelled that!

    We spent some time scoping the area and then we headed toward Havana.  On the way, Greg spotted something that looked “different” on a power line 25 yards off of the road.  We backed up and found a Western Kingbird, a nice bird for the area.

    We stopped for lunch in Havana and then headed down to Sand Lake, where we saw Eared Grebes and more shorebirds.  We did get to see a Lark Sparrow and more Eurasian Tree Sparrows too.

    Next was Emiquon National Wildlife Reserve where we saw even more shorebirds.  While scanning the distant shorebirds with our scopes, Greg asked Jeff what his nemesis bird was, knowing that Jeff had been chasing Marbled Godwits without success.  Jeff answered the question and before Greg could say anything, he got really excited , knowing that Greg had found it form him.  The fact that it was almost unrecognizable until we knew what it was made for an amazing ID ( at least in my eyes).

    This brings me to my thoughts about Greg and Jeff in terms of birding abilities.  Greg reminds me a lot of my friend Steve.   They both are very strong birders who surprise me in IDs that they make and bird by ear very well.  Jeff reminds me of my friend Geoff, except that Geoff also birds by ear.  They are both birders who I trust and enjoy birding with.

    We headed from Emiquon to Hennipen and Hopper Lakes, where we looked at more shorebirds from the top of a really nice tower.  We got more variety there to include a Bald Eagle, even more Eurasian Tree Sparrows, and we had a Barred Owl call back to us from tapes.  By the end of the day, I bet that we saw over 250 Eurasian Tree Sparrows, despite the fact that we never got within 120 miles of St.Louis, where these birds are considered to be isolated to.

    On our way back to Chicago, we stopped at some nice habitats and played some tapes , calling in the passerines in the area.  The best birds seen were a Blue Grosbeak and Grasshopper Sparrow.

  Later, we went looking for a staked out Western Meadowlark among the Eastern Meadowlarks, and actually found it. This brought our count up to 99 species for the day. I haven’t gotten my list from Jeff yet, so that number is not official, but the number is respectable compared to their big day scouting trip a week later where Greg and his friend Andy had 108 species.  

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 I had a great time with these guys and would welcome the opportunity to bird with them any time in the future.   They like to bird hard and long, which is typical of my style. This is what I like about our hobby, despite our differences away from birding, we can base a whole friendship on our love for birding.  Thank you, guys, for your hospitality and patience for a less talented compatriot.