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Summer 2004
Excerpts from
Hunting for Frogs on Elston
by Jerry Sullivan Hunting for Frogs on Elston Avenue
On the evening of May 5, I went along with a party of six frog surveyors whose territory is the northwest side of Chicago and adjacent suburbs. Party is the right word here. You put seven people in a van and send them in search of frogs along Elston Avenue, and a certain hilarity is almost bound to result....
We started at North Park Village, where American toads were trilling in the marshy pond near the nature center... We got our second species, the western chorus frog, at stop number four, the northeast corner of LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve...
Once we turned onto Elston Avenue, our chances of hearing frogs dropped to about zero. One of our stops was right in front of the secretary of state's driver testing facility, where, needless to say, we heard no frogs. Since the secretary of state will be up for reelection soon, we might consider asking him just what he plans to do about reintroducing a healthy amphibian population to his branch offices.
We didn't hear another frog until the last stop on our itinerary, a forest preserve north of Oakton Street along the North Branch of the Chicago River. These were chorus frogs again, and we sat along the roadside to enjoy the music. Our presence attracted the police, but after [one of us] offered the sensible explanation that we were counting frogs, the policeman drove off, his expression suggesting that we were nuts but probably harmless nuts.
How to Find Nests
Give birds enough time, and they will show you their nests. In years past I couldn't fully appreciate this truth because I didn't know how to approach the birds, how to persuade them to reveal their secrets. Looking back I realize that what I thought of as nest hunting was really mostly random wandering and aimless staring. I may have thought I was searching diligently, but mostly I was standing around hoping a bird would walk by carrying a nest... Sitting down and shutting up turns out to be the secret of nest finding. It's a learnable skill...
I spent over two hours hanging around one little patch of ground watching and listening to [a male blue-winged warbler], but I knew that my chances of finding the nest were slim. Blue-wings nest down in the brush where things are dense, and their nests are only three or four inches across.
But I watched and listened and sat still until the male landed on one of his singing perches with a caterpillar in his beak. This was the break I needed. I watched him fly into a narrow strip of trees and brush and then walked to a place about 20 yards from the strip and sat down to watch. Presently he flew up from the base of a tall tree. I figured he had just fed the female on the nest, and since I didn't have a very clear idea of where he had been down in the brush around the tree, I waited. After about 15 minutes he was back. I saw him emerge from the brush a few yards from the trees. I walked over and started to search...I saw a flash of movement in the brush. It was the female leaving the nest. Just under the crown of leaves of a buckthorn sprout, I saw a few brown dead leaves. I remembered that the field guides said that blue-winged warblers use dead leaves as a foundation for their nests. I parted the crown of live leaves, and there was the nest. Three tiny eggs no more than three-fourths of an inch long were inside. I took a good look at them and then got the hell out so the birds could get back to their parental duties. I danced down the trail back to my car.
Excerpted with permission from The University of Chicago Press from Hunting for Frogs on Elston and Other Tales from Field and Street, by Jerry Sullivan, 2004.
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