Increasingly, pedestrians in the Loop have been encountering disquieting bits of birds–a sparrow’s wing here, a clump of feathers there–lying about on the sidewalks.
Also, with more regularity, many a bird-loving Chicagoan, dutifully filling back-yard feeders with seeds for feasting robins and cardinals, has been startled to see a favorite songbird disappear in a sudden, violent blur of feathers.
Such occurrences can seem downright spooky, like the calls emanating in the dark of night in recent years from Graceland Cemetery, where screech owls and great horned owls have been taking up residence.
Raptors–meat-eating birds of prey–chased out or killed off by human presence in the Chicago area, are making a small but visible comeback in the city and suburbs, making life miserable for rodents and assorted pigeons and songbirds.
The resurgence of the hunting birds, in the making for some time, offers a real-life look at nature, a sort of “Wild Kingdom” in the back yard–for those who can stomach it.
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The Cooper’s hawk, a long-tailed, crow-size hunter that disappeared from the Chicago area in the 1950s and 1960s, became so rare it was listed as an endangered species. Now the birds are spotted fairly regularly swooping through suburban back yards, using bird feeders like fast-food restaurants as they snatch feeding songbirds.
“They just come out of nowhere, spooking the feeding birds into massed flight, choosing one to snatch in midair,” said Downers Grove resident Bob Fisher, who has had two Cooper’s hawks hunting the 12 feeders in his back yard this winter.
“They usually go sit on a limb, pluck their prey clean and enjoy their meal, the feathers piled neatly on the ground below. I’ve also seen frantic birds hide in the bushes and watched the hawks hop on foot after them, dragging them out.”
Reflecting the resurgence, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon Drive, has launched an exhibit on raptors that illustrates how improvements in the environment have boosted the birds’ numbers, even in the city.
Running through April 22, the “Hunters of the Sky” exhibit is an uncompromisingly graphic look at the haughty savagery of raptors: eagles, hawks, ospreys, falcons, owls, buzzards and condors.
Raptors such as eagles have been so admired for their majesty and ferocity that many nations, including the United States, adopted them as national symbols.
Symbolism, in fact, was probably all that saved the bald eagle in this country when the birds nearly became extinct 50 years ago as widespread use of pesticides disrupted the ability of eagles, peregrine falcons and osprey to reproduce.
Embarrassed by the prospect of seeing the national symbol go extinct, the government in the 1970s placed strict controls on pesticide use, banning DDT altogether. The raptors have been making a comeback since then.
Dave Willard, a Field Museum ornithologist, said, “When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we had to travel a long ways to get someplace where we had a chance to see a bald eagle in the wild. Now I occasionally see one soaring above Grant Park. Now peregrines live and hunt in the Loop, and we see osprey migrating along the lakeshore.”
Raptors range in size from California condors, with 9 1/2-foot wingspans, to robin-size flammulated owls and northern pygmy owls. In appearance, they range from adorably cute owl species to hard-eyed eagles to plug-ugly vultures.
In behavior, raptors are not your grandma’s songbirds or placid swans. They are killers, and the exhibit, created by the Science Museum of Minnesota, shows them explicitly in those terms.
Stuffed specimens of raptors line one exhibit case. Under each species is a dinner plate loaded with carcasses of the kinds of animals it eats.
A snowy owl, for example, has a plate full of lemmings at its feet; an osprey has a plate of bluegill, perch and crappies; a black vulture has a handsome gray squirrel as its meal.
A short-eared owl in another exhibit case is perched beside a pile of 800 dead mice, the estimated number the owl eats each year.
Because of their roles as hunters and scavengers, raptors are not considered very attractive creatures by many people. But letting them fall into extinction would be a disaster because of the roles they play in the environment, said Mary Hennen, the Nature Museum’s resident ornithologist.
“You are talking about the top of the food chain when you are talking about raptors,” she said. “If something goes wrong in the environment and they start dying, whatever is harming their food supply could have serious repercussions for humans too.”
For that reason, ecologists have undertaken heroic efforts to bring back raptor species that have become endangered.
Since 1985, bird experts have been trying to populate captive-bred peregrine falcons in the “wilds” of Chicago’s Loop. There are now eight nesting pairs in the city, Hennen said. Diving at 150 to 200 m.p.h. (the world’s fastest animals), the peregrines grab slower, lower-flying birds, accounting for the pieces of wing and clumps of feathers that litter Loop sidewalks and streets.
Since the banning of DDT, Cooper’s hawks have come back on their own and were removed from the state endangered-species list on March 3, 1997. Still, they are relatively rare. An annual Christmas-season bird count by area bird clubs six weeks ago made just 51 sightings of them in the Chicago region.
Some raptors, such as red-tailed hawks, historically rarely seen, now are spotted all over in the suburbs, said Bernadette Richter, who runs a Naperville raptor rehabilitation center that treats injured birds and places them back in the wild.
“Everybody thinks there are a lot more red-tailed hawks around than there used to be,” Richter said. “We just see them more often because we’ve been moving into the places where they live. The hawks have taken to perching on telephone poles and power-line towers, highly visible as they hunt for animals in median strips and ditches along new roads and highways.”
One of the best places to see the birds has always been along Lake Michigan.
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“The lakefront in autumn and spring has always been a migration corridor for some raptor species passing through,” Hennen said.