Spring 1998

Black and White?
Photograph by Rob Curtis.

One of the world's most dazzling birds at one of the region's finest birding spots.

A peregrine falcon plummets from the sky to seize its prey at Montrose Beach near Magic Hedge. A kingfisher is about to become food and waste. Trash blows across the sand under the drama. Rob Curtis snaps the picture.

At first the bird and the issues seem black and white. So many things do. Life and death. People and nature. Chicago and wilderness. Killer and saint. Predator and prey. But then come the grays. Grays too are beautiful. Then comes color.

Sternly dividing the world into opposing camps usually makes perception poorer. There's less beauty, less subtlety — and also less reality.

We pick up trash and we make trash; sometimes we kill trees to restore the forest. Predators? The kingfisher, too, is a predator.

Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds (1980) lists the peregrine falcon's habitat as: "Mainly open country...formerly even cities."

But the species gradually died out entirely from the lower 48 states, declining fast in Canada as well. The disasterous data for peregrines helped us see the impact of DDT on the continental ecosystem. EPA (colorless bureaucrats? good guys in white hats?) clamped down hard, as was needed. The Chicago Academy of Sciences headed up successful efforts to restore a population of peregrines in and around Chicago. Now one pair even nests on the Northern Trust building near the Sears Tower. Watch for them over lakefront parks, and around the canyons of the Loop.

People vs. nature. Predator vs. prey. Black vs. white. And grays and color.

Photograph taken at Montrose Beach on Chicago's lakefront by Rob Curtis. Words by Stephen Packard and Judy Pollock.