On his way to setting the Cook County record for spotting the most bird species in a year, one bird in particular eluded Tarik Shahzad.
Every morning and every afternoon for a month last summer, he staked out a spot at the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary in Chicago, searching for the marbled godwit. Every night, he went home empty-handed.
Finally, in August, after heading to the remote Deadstick Pond near Calumet Harbor, he spotted it. “That’s the hardest I’ve ever worked for a bird, or maybe anything,” he said.
Shahzad, who works for the Nature Conservancy, said he spent almost every free moment last year looking for birds. The 27-year-old ended up logging 294 birds, a new record for Cook County, which is a hot spot for bird-watching in the Midwest.
Located along a longtime migratory path on Lake Michigan, Cook County attracts a wide variety of birds to the lakefront, as well as forest preserves, wetlands and prairies.
As if to emphasize that point, Shahzad set the record with his sighting of a short-tailed shearwater, a seabird whose natural habitat is the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand to Alaska, and which has only been sighted a couple of times in the Great Lakes.
Along with the variety of birds, bird-watchers are becoming more diverse, Shahzad said.
“We have a really robust bird-watching community,” he said. “I couldn’t have seen a fraction of my birds without the inclusive, growing Chicago birding community.”
Where birding often used to be more of a solitary pursuit, now people are connected through apps like the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology’s ebird.org.
Through ebird, Shahzad was alerted to a location whenever a birder spotted a bird he was looking for, and he would drive out immediately from his apartment in Evanston to find it.
Every spring, ebird holds a Global Big Day for birders to report their bird sightings. The event attracted nearly 67,000 birders last year, who reported almost 8,000 species worldwide.
The lab also offers tips for helping birds, like putting markers on windows to avoid bird strikes, keeping cats indoors, avoiding pesticides and providing more natural habitat.
In Chicago this June, the Newberry Library will mark growing interest in the field with an exhibit called “Winging It: A Brief History of Humanity’s History with Birds.”
The exhibit will draw from the library’s collection, which includes woodblock carvings of birds from the 1800s by Thomas Bewick, and hand-colored lithographs from the 1700s in the South and the Caribbean by Mark Catesby, long before the more famous bird documentarian John Audubon.
Bob Dolgan, an avid birder who is working on the Newberry exhibit and has made documentaries about piping plovers in Chicago, said the local birding community is thriving. Prime hot spots for viewing include North Park Village, Garfield Park and Washington Park in Chicago, Gillson Park in Wilmette, the Morton Arboretum in Lisle and the Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center in Willow Springs.
All new birders need is a pair of binoculars and an app, book or friend who can help identify birds.
“We have a concentration of good birders here and a lot of potential birds because we have such diversity of habitat,” he said. “So we have a plethora of locations where people can find birds.”
