The Corn Latitudes

I have removed from the original a punning reference to a person then in the news whose name even I no longer recognize.

 

The stout birders of Springfield set out just after New Year’s Day again this year to count birds because, really, what else is there to do this time of year? During what was the eightieth such census since 1909, 23,113 birds were seen or and/or heard within a seven-and-a-half mile radius of the Old State Capitol.

Is that good or bad? Like asking is it good or bad that the General Assembly has 177 members, the answer depends on what you think of such creatures. For many years I thought little about birds. The only birds we talked about in my boyhood house on the far east side were Cardinals and Orioles. The new subdivision where we lived was a cornfield cleared for housing; a bird would have been no more at home in that barren bird habitat than St. Francis would have been in the statehouse. All we saw there were the commonest of the common backyard birds. “Common” in this case describes their manners; to this day I despise “English sparrows”—in fact, weaver finches—and starlings with a fervor that is positively shocking in its unreason.

No wonder then that when I began to think of birds I developed an affection for more exotic species. My bedroom boasted a Baltimore oriole and a scarlet tanager on my bookshelf. They weren’t stuffed; in fact they were hollow, members of the Bachmann Birds of the World series of paint-by-number plastic bird models. As imitations of nature they were in the Joan Rivers class, but I did it because I was interested in models, not in nature.

It was not until I had grown up and got a house of my own that my curiosity about real birds was excited. We had goldfinches and waxwings in season, northern flickers, the odd hummingbird, and house wrens. I was to learn that these marvels are considered common birds, but I could not have been more entranced had I been up the Amazon gazing at a lettered araçari. Their presence was diverting and a compliment to my landscaping skills, and I appreciated both.

Since then I have come to regard birds as I do well-behaved children or people who read books on the bus—the world is a better place with them in it, but one sees them so seldom that one begins to fear that such creatures no longer exist. This year’s Springfield census found members of 85 species. There are more species of Democrat. Recent Christmas bird enumerations have revealed that even when species numbers hold fairly steady, that the number of individual birds of each species is shrinking. That’s especially true of woodland species. Without habitat that provides safety and food, the numbers of smaller and less aggressive birds such as the black-capped chickadee, tufted titmouse, or golden-crowned kinglet have been decreasing.

About eighty species of bird regularly appear in Chicago. (Snowy owls, for instance, are more common up there than a Rauner on the el.) Chicago offers birds huge parks and nature preserves and wetlands and nearly thirty miles of lakefront fit for waterbirds. Springfield, indeed mid-Illinois, is surrounded by cornfields that might as well be paved, for all the hospitality they offer to birds.

It wasn’t always thus. A True Picture of Emigration by Rebecca Burlend recalls her life as a transplanted Yorkshire woman in the Pike County of the 1830s. “America is certainly and emphatically the country for the feathered tribe,” she wrote. Parrots and owls were there in “great numbers.” As for hummingbirds, she wrote, “there are hundreds buzzing about during the summer season.”

Burlend explained the abundance of birds in her backyard 180 years ago like this: “Nor will any one wonder that they are so numerous when he considers the comparative safety with which they rear their young, and the abundance of food that must be found in a country highly productive.” The model backyard for young families today is the manicured neighborhood park, while older folks prefer one that is easy to mow. If birds qualified for FHA mortgages, the typical backyard would be crammed with deciduous shrubs and small trees surrounded by tall shade trees.

Up in Chicago they go to a lot of trouble for their birds. They dim building lights at certain times of the year so as to not confuse migrants in flight. They mark windows so fewer birds fly into them. They use public money to plant bird habitat even though and birds don’t vote, at least not officially. The state’s capital city, alas, is run by aldermen who permit people to build carpet outlets and auto body shops (of which we have many) in brushy floodplains (of which we have few) and endorse commercial landscaping standards that would be decried as exclusionary if birds had standing in our courts. Seen through a good pair of field glasses, a warbler in a bush looks an awful lot like a canary in a coal mine. ●