By Sergio Barreto
Birutis, who lives three blocks from Graceland, often gets up early to search the cemetery for migratory birds. “Morning is the best time to catch them,” he says. “They’re up and running because they’re hungry, and during migration they’re especially hungry because they’ve just flown in.”
Birutis’s bird tally after this late April visit to Graceland: 157, including migrants like a pied-billed grebe, a hermit thrush, and three ruby-crowned kinglets.
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Eric Latturner, who grew up near Rosehill in the 1970s, remembers running through the woods at the cemetery’s western edge with his childhood buddies. “We went hunting for snakes, moth cocoons,” he says. “They also had walking sticks and some pheasants. We were usually run off by the management. They didn’t want young kids there.”
Chicago Audubon Society president Jerry Garden says he made a habit of visiting Montrose Cemetery daily in the winter of 1988 to see a pair of subarctic great horned owls. “They are pretty rare around here, and they usually establish territories of a half mile to two miles–but due to urban pressure, I guess you could call it, they were nesting within a hundred yards from each other,” he says.
“That was a wonderful chunk of land,” recalls Krawiec’s friend, Donald Brenner. “It was marshland, at least some of it. Sometimes you had to wear rubber boots back there. I don’t come much to the area anymore. It’s unpleasant. They’ve lost much land for migrating birds.”
Tom Nelson, executive director of the Devon North Town Business and Professional Association, recalls how the developers overcame a potential stumbling block. “According to Burnham’s 1909 city plan, these cemeteries were designated as open land and were not to be touched, but they found a precedent,” he says. “There was this auto place at the southeast corner of Foster and Pulaski that was built on land that used to house livery stables that served the cemeteries in the old days. They said, ‘If they can build an auto place on cemetery land, we can build a Jewel’ and they got the zoning change approved.”
