winter wings

autumn texture, humboldt park

The prime consolation of life in a ramshackle walk-up apartment on the city’s west side? My 200-acre backyard.

Humboldt Park was first etched out in the 1870s, pooling the marshland’s wet abundance into precise lagoons. Landscaping stalled as rampant corruption in the Parks District siphoned off funding and, later, forced park superintendent Jens Jensen out of office to stem his inconvenient zeal for reform. When the political tide turned, Jensen was re-installed as General Superintendent and Chief Landscape Architect in 1905. He found a grassy snarl of work never begun and original construction decayed, a perfect climate for re-imagining a signature green space. In his trademark Prairie style Jensen created a boathouse, formal gardens, and artificial watercourses to link the lagoons.

In summer the park is sleepless, always spangled with sunbathers, fishermen, helado vendors, concert-goers and the million faces of a rapidly changing neighborhood. Today the park was dry and empty, as autumn and winter chased each other across the sky. Snow flurries fell, then melted as sunlight welled up from the lagoon’s blue depths. And the whole day, the winds chased each other through the park so that nothing was smooth, no place still for the eye to slide across. Smooth water rumpled and folded, stark lines of trees bent, dry weeds clicking with the snap of skeleton fingers.

bright and budding, francisco avenue

snipe hunt

This one was really hard.

This morning, with the black air thinned to 28 degrees, I headed out to my weekly ritual of scanning the sidewalks for injured migratory birds. The season is almost over. From last Tuesday’s heady 70 degrees, we’ve plummeted into winter sharp and fast. This massive cold front is the signal to the birds: go now. All to the south who are going to the south; you birds, your time is now. So they’re flying in all the wrong weather, flying despite the wind and precipitation. They’re tired and battered, and they’re not making it through.

The American woodcock (Scolopax minor), in the snipe family of shorebirds, is among the last birds to travel every year. Sized like a plump pigeon, the woodcock is lushly speckled in brown and cream. Marshy grasses conceal it, where it belongs, but in a Chicago street it’s exotic, a quaint and gorgeous relic, with long luminous eyes that arabesque outward from an exclamatory bill.

Except this one. This one had fallen into a pile of leaves and twigs, half-tucked beneath a low ledge of shingles. Camouflaged and quiet, so that I was picking up a second woodcock who had died on impact, just inches away, before I saw it. Except this one whose ink-flourish eye was red and clouded with new blood. I circled, all slowness, around the block of skylights to approach it from behind, to capture it unaware. Inches apart and it turned, saw me, my net, and rose to fly.

Two broken wings. Trembles and falters in the air, again and again. When it landed, again and again. Then it ran, on bark-lean legs. It ran out of the skylight atrium, under the ledge I bumbled my way over, after. It inched along a thin ledge, with jutting building’s windows to half-hide it. It stopped at the end, with nothing but a construction pit three stories below, and stayed there, stopped there, while I came close again. Awkward in an angle of ledge and railing and window and nothing, with my net held out over the air, straining to reach, seeing it fall with every inch closer.

It didn’t fall. The net dropped down to blanket it. I scooped it up through the thin fabric, fingers folding wings, lowering it into a bag, clipping it closed. We ran to Michigan Avenue to catch a cab to the treatment center, me and my woodcock quiet in a bag in morning-grey rush hour.

The rehabilitator laying out syringes, telling me “It’s been a bad time for the woodcocks.” The bag opening, and I try to read his face, afraid I’ve brought nothing he can save. Reaching in, he comes out with long toes grasping and an open eye. Anesthetic, anti-inflammatory, a great flapping that sends small feathers flying. It tries a bite with that exquisite bloodstained bill. Fingers calm, the rehabber says, “This one is so skinny.” I say “He fought like hell,” hear back “They’re feisty birds,” feel less sick inside. (Thank you, Jeff.)

A day that begins with blood is a strange day. Confronted with your enterprise, people will say “That’s so nice of you. It’s so nice that you can help save them,” in an engaging tone that holds both true appreciation and awe of eccentricity, in fair measure. For me that’s too much credit. Some mornings it’s bleary routine, drudging as the dishes or the laundry at home. Some mornings a chill dawn bath in futility, a half-hearted meditation on mortality that begins, is forestalled by a sleepy numbness of thought, is shelved until later after coffee, is never resumed.

This morning it was more, and I can’t say why. Maybe it’s the woodcock, my favorite of the many birds that pass through, round and wryly elegant, cryptic-coated. Maybe it’s the dread in all do-gooders, the icy pole a world’s distance from lukewarm smugness, where you fear you do real harm. Chasing a bird with broken wings. Bringing fear, inspiring escape, forcing a fragile thing onto a narrow ledge. It’s been a sick day since it started like this, and I can’t treat myself, can’t heal or tend, can’t release.

rock dove, madison street

Bundle up, kids. It’s cold out there.

walking in the white city

Jackson Park dogears the lake shore on Chicago’s south side. Created in the 1870s, the park would glimmer on the global stage just years later as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Rising like an angel from the stockyards, the “White City” of marble pavilions spun a new fairy-tale for the industrial age. Today the park is a popular destination for beachgoers and hopeful fishermen, who cast into the lagoon where swan boats once paddled placidly. The park is also home to a feral flock of Monk parakeets, descended from an escaped pet who took refuge in the trees. Though I’ve never seen them, birds of a hundred species fill the woods during the spring and fall migration seasons. Bunnies, too.