Searching for Shorebirds with Kane County Audubon

Eight young birders and their parents joined me, Steve Bayer, and guest leader Tim Balassie for some shorebirding in Kane and Dupage Counties on August 19th. We started at Dunteman Turf Farms in Kaneville, where we found plenty of Killdeer but no other shorebirds. We moved on to Nelson Lake, which fortunately held a much higher diversity of shorebirds, including Short-billed Dowitcher and Semipalmated Plover. Ben Sanders carefully counted Common Gallinules, finding 24 individuals, presumably indicating a successful breeding season for them here. At one point a juvenile Peregrine flushed all the shorebirds. It caught something–we weren’t sure what–then sat in a dead tree and ate its prey. Our final stop was the red barn in Fermilab. We walked past A.E. Sea to the Sea-of-Evanescence, where there is some decent shorebird habitat. We found another Semipalmated Plover, several Solitary Sandpipers, and a Northern Shoveler.

Thanks to Tim Balassie and Oliver Burrus for co-leading and to Simon Tolzmann for eBirding.