northern flicker, michigan avenue

Like all woodpeckers, the northern flicker (Colaptes auratus) has gripping feet adapted to cling to tree-trunks, and a strong sharp bill for puncturing through bark. However, the flicker is unique in preferring to feed on the ground, lapping up ants by the colony.

This male yellow-shafted northern flicker’s migration brought him south to Chicago on Thursday morning. At some point between 9:00 and 11:00, he collided with a black-beamed Mies van der Rohe tower on Michigan Avenue. The head injury killed him quickly, leaving his body perfectly intact. Taupe back inked with black calligraphy, speckled snowy belly, strong yellow feathers that had swept the air bright and clean behind each beat of the wide wings.

know your species: Dusicyon antarcticus

For someone who dislikes being cold—indeed, disapproves of it, on a moral level—it is with perplexity that I explain my fascination with Patagonia. Remote, wind-scoured Patagonia, an earth flat and low beneath an epic weight of sky. Loping to the horizon before exploding into its full power, leaping into mountains. Mix Patagonia fever with a foolish passion for remotest islands, and it’s clear where my heart lies: las Islas Malvinas, the Falkland Islands. Until we can travel there in real life, let’s puzzle together over a mystery from the islands’ past: the Falkland Islands wolf.

Its various names—Antarctic wolf, Falkland Islands fox, Falkland islands dog, and warrah, a corruption of aguara, the Argentinean term for “fox”—signal a fundamental confusion about the species’ place among the canids. The original French settlers of the islands named it loup-renard, or “wolf-fox: so called, because it digs itself an earth and because its tail is longer and more fully furnished with hair than that of a wolf… It is the size of a dog, and also barks like one, but weakly.” Charles Darwin, on his 1834 voyage through the island, assigned it the taxonomy Canis antarcticus, squarely among the domestic dogs, wolves and coyotes.

Perhaps more mysterious than who they were is the question of where they came from. Their existence in utter isolation, with no related species, gave rise to the following theories:

• Brought as domesticated pets by prehistoric settlers, the original population on South America later becoming extinct
• Crossed from South America by a long-lapsed land bridge
• Survived from a distant pre-glacial past when forests, and other woodland species, covered the islands

However mysterious their beginning, the wolves’ end is brutally concise. Darwin foresaw it, writing that “[w]ithin a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled, in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth.” Between the fur trappers on East Falkland and the sheep ranchers on West Falkland, death came quickly. A farmer with a chunk of meat in his hand could easily lure a wolf to arm’s length—and the knife he held in the other hand. This fatal tame trust, common in species that have evolved in an environment free from natural predators, is commemorated in their name: the currently accepted binomial Dusicyon antarcticus means “foolish dog of the south.”

Bonus! The second in our series of extinct species trading cards and greeting cards. Check back often to collect them all… Download the Falkland Islands wolf trading card. Download the Falkland Islands wolf greeting card.

northerly island

The avian care center at Meigs Field sits in the middle of Northerly Island, a 90-acre peninsula diving into Lake Michigan just south of the Loop. Extensive plantings of native prairie species, in the wake of the 2003 closure of the Meigs airport, have created a sanctuary of stillness where butterflies and birds dart among tall grass spangled with wildflowers. It’s an amazing balance of immersion and retreat—home to several museums, 12th Street Beach and a concert pavilion, the park still feels distant and quiet. Last weekend I walked the paths amid a swarm of late-summer dragonflies, a crystalline friction of wings soaring over the cheers of Bears fans at Soldier Field just yards away.

the great migration

For spectacular phenomena in the animal kingdom, the seasonal migration of bird species has to be among the Really Coolest Things There Ever Were. The nightingale’s journey we discussed here of 38 million times its own body length—equivalent to me travelling over 41,000 miles by my own strength—is one typical example of this amazing navigational synthesis between genetic programming, cognitive mapping, electromagnetic orientation, and other skill sets not yet fully understood.

Ancient behaviors are continually adapting to the hazards and opportunities of the changing human landscape. To watch these forces collide, just picture the major bird migration route of the US, the Mississippi Flyway, which leads 250 species of birds across the Great Lakes to the river and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. And now see Chicago: a mass of skyscrapers positioned right at the juncture of lake and river, spiring suddenly up into airspace.

While many species use the sun to orient, small insectivorous birds like warblers and thrushes take advantage of night flight to minimize energy expenditure and maximize access to food species. And so right this minute, midnight central time, these migratory songbirds are moving closer to the place where they’ll find rest and food sources –or where the skyline’s hazards will end all their migrations.

Rooftop lights on skyscrapers disrupt flight and birds fly toward them, mesmerized, to circle endlessly until they drop with exhaustion. As the sky lightens, mirrored walls will throw back the same soft blue and more will collide without seeing. They may survive, dazed, and turn to evade the building only to batter into another building behind. They may avoid all these hazards and land safely, spot a lush spot of greenery promising shelter and insects, and wing towards it, not realizing that it lies in a building foyer behind transparent glass.

Efforts to protect these birds in the U.S. date back to 1918, with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under this agreement, handling bird species for any reason is prohibited except by individuals holding a federal permit. Chicago’s unique location has inspired non-legislative measures to supplement national protection. In 2004, it became the first city to turn building lights off downtown during the spring and fall, increasing survival rates. Volunteer organizations have mobilized to patrol the Loop business district, collecting injured birds to provide veterinary treatment before releasing them to continue on their flight. And in 2006, the city partnered with Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation to establish a treatment center in the former Meigs Field airport. By providing triage and emergency care within minutes of downtown, rather than transporting the birds to existing suburban facilities, rehabilitators can give them every chance for recovery.

	So fall has started, and I’m now waking up at 4:00AM to travel downtown, sleepy-eyed and officially-permitted, net in hand, in search of birds on the streets.
You can expect loads of updates in the weeks to come—so sleep in, and then check back here to get to know the hermit thrushes, American woodcocks, and whatever else the wind brings our way.

differential grasshopper, division street

If you’ve ever seen the 1957 classic Beginning of the End, at this point you’ll be prickling with a vague unease. You’ll feel, perhaps, that an inquisitive mind and Chicago grasshoppers make for a dangerous combination. Let me assure you that, if I am unwittingly setting in motion events which will ultimately threaten human civilization… well then, I’m sorry. Truly. But look at that eye—that spectacular, quicksilver, radiant lunar thing of an eye, that “enormous and complicated” eye, in the words of Mary Oliver—and tell me you aren’t fascinated. Tell me you wouldn’t have to learn more, military conspiracies be damned.

But about the widespread devouring of human flesh and the peril to human civilization… well, that’s a shame. I never meant it to end that way.

from the archives: le mort d’autruche

In 1899, the New York Times reported a tragic tale from Chicago: the suicide, by drowning, of a lovelorn ostrich.

If you wonder by what criteria authorities rule an ostrich death a suicide, you are not alone. Indeed, the Times’ hard-boiled correspondent seems disposed to consider the incident—in which the ostrich escaped from the Lincoln Park Zoo before eluding “pursuers by taking a flying leap from the high bridge across the lagoon into the placid waters”—an accident.

Still more sinister a possibility was raised by “many who claimed that the ostrich was driven to make the jump by the band of implacable hunters,” suggesting yet another category of death. From ostrich mischance, to ostrich manslaughter. The plot thickens.

Making the case for suicide was “Zoo Keeper De Vry.” He insisted the flight was clearly an attempt at suicide, and there was nothing of must or of chance about it. You see, this poor bird’s husband dies some four months ago while the two were in transit to our Zoo here. I have always noticed that this bird seemed to suffer from melancholia or some kindred ailment of a purely mental origin. Now its strange act in leaping from the ‘suicide bridge’ has certainly confirmed my worst suspicions.”

You can read the complete article in the Times’ archive.

Suicide in the animal world is controversial. By general consensus, animals lack both the individual consciousness and the reasoning capacity to plan and perpetrate their own deaths. Survival instinct calls the shots in the animal kingdom—and only humans are compelled by their complexity of intellect to act contrary to this central drive.

But some believe that non-human suicide has been documented, with incidents among dolphins providing the strongest support. Mass beachings, in which the dolphins resist efforts to return them to the water and will repeatedly return to the shore, are frequently termed “mass suicide”; two notable recent examples occurred in Iran, killing 152 striped dolphins in October 2007, and in Cornwall, where 26 common dolphins died in June 2008. On an individual scale, the most prominent suicide story is that of Cathy, the bottlenose dolphin made famous by her title role in the series Flipper. Cathy’s trainer, who was present when she stopped breathing and drowned, believes that her act was a deliberate suicide in response to the stress and isolation of a life in captivity. That experience contributed to his activism in abolishing whale and dolphin captivity.

tiger swallowtail, western playlot park