The sky was a slate-gray lid, with thin sunbeams breaking through it over Lake Michigan. The water was a cold-looking, roiling gray sea. The wind was a steady chill breeze out of the north. This was Midwest bleak at its finest. The neighborhood was a mix of brick residental high-rises and two story houses. Over breakfast at the Ramada, I saw flocks of Pintail and Mallards ride the wind along the lakeshore, so afterwards I wandered the streets with binoculars.
It has been a week of 12 hour workdays on college campuses on Chicago. I’ve been outside a lot, and so I’ve been able to pay attention to the birds passing through in migration. On Monday at the Illinois Institute of Technology there were an inordinate number of Robins on the lawns. The next day they were gone. The loud, low chuck call of Yellow-rumped Warblers was likewise ubiquitous at the beginning of the week. After a cold front passed through on Wednesday night, they were replaced by the high thin call of kinglets. On Friday, they seemed to be everywhere. Ruby-crowned Kinglets gleaned in the low shrubs on the University of Chicago campus, while Golden-crowned Kinglets flitted through the trees outside the Regenstein library. For three days I had been hearing the squawk of Monk Parakeets, which are not migrating but have naturalized in Hyde Park. I would see their distinctive silhouettes speed past in the distance, but I never saw one close up.
On this last morning in Chicago, I was hoping to come upon a flock. The wind was keeping the birds low however. I looked up, and saw a falcon disappear behind a highrise. When it emerged, I could see the unmistakable shape and color of a Peregrine. It lingered in the vortex of air in the lee of the building where, if you were at the window of the top floor, you would have had an eye level view of this magnificent hunter hovering a few feet away. Then it stooped and descended impossibly fast, and disappeared out of sight behind the Ramada.
A moment later I saw it again, flying to the roof sill of another highrise. The falcon carried something now, its hunt successful. The bulge beneath its body, when I viewed it with binoculars, had yellow and green feathers. I think I finally spied my parakeet.
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