Snowy owls have been appearing on the lakefront from from Northerly Island to Illinois Beach State Park, north of Waukegan. Nine species of gulls–including the extremely rare, for these parts, mew gull–were discovered at Michigan City. The ducks we call old squaws are diving for zebra mussels in the lake, and northern shrikes have flown in from the taiga. Winter is definitely here.
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The bird is named after Thomas Mayo Brewer, a doctor who collected bird’s eggs (his collection ended up at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard). He also enjoyed the friendship of Audubon and Thomas Nuttall, another early American ornithologist of note. If you were friends with those two you stood a good chance of having a bird named after you. Brewer is memorialized by a blackbird in addition to a sparrow.
Nonbirders would have no trouble understanding the appeal of the sightings of bald eagles at Waukegan and Hegewisch. When I started birding seriously 25 years ago you had to go all the way to the Mississippi to see an eagle. They are still something of a big deal in the Chicago area, but sightings are now in the rare-but-regular category.
Snowy owls nest and hunt on the treeless tundra. The most northerly nest ever found was on Ellesmere Island, at 82 degrees north. The owls seek out low ridges both as vantage points for hunting and as nesting locations. They eat a wide variety of birds and small mammals, with lemmings the most common item in their diet. Audubon saw them catching fish, which they did by lying down at the edge of the water and waiting for a fish to get close enough to hook with one taloned foot.
In the best lemming years, however, there is enough food around to raise a large brood, so all 5 or all 7 or all 13 of those eggs will survive to adulthood. Of course their problems are just beginning, because all these newly fledged lemming hunters are going out into the world at the moment when the lemming population has reached the crash phase of its boom-and-bust cycle. It is at times like these that we get an owl year.
