Doug often discusses the island with the Park Dis- 

 trict, mainly in an effort to restrain their zeal with the 

 chain saw. He remembers playing on the island as a child 

 and thinking of the place as a jungle, so to his eye, even 

 the rather lush vegetation of today looks rather sparse. 



About 10 years ago, shortly after Doug Anderson 



Perhaps an eyesore to some, the 



dead cotlonwood shown here has 



recently provided a convenient 



perch for a peregrine falcon 



(Falcoperegrinus). 



species, a number of them rarities like the Brewer's spar- 

 row that visited the nearby Lake Michigan shore in May, 

 1982, providing the first sighting east of the Mississippi 

 for this southwestern species since 1872. 



The manuscript will also list the more than 40 spe- 

 cies that have been discovered breeding on or around 



began leading bird walks on the island, Harriet Rylaars- 

 dam began to join his morning gathering. She had had 

 some experience with birding in college, but the pres- 

 sures of child rearing had kept her away from it for a 

 number of years. Wooded Island brought her back into 

 it, especially after she met Paul Clyne. Clyne was then a 

 graduate student in linguistics at the University of Chi- 

 cago, and he birded Wooded Island every morning. 

 Under his influence, she began to do the same. He 

 helped sharpen her skills and showed her how to keep 

 careful records of what she saw. 



Together, they found that Townsend's warbler, and 

 Clyne left her with the nerve-wracking job of keeping an 

 eye on the bird while he ran to a phone to spread the 

 word about the sighting. 



Right now, she is helping Clyne complete a man- 

 uscript that would provide a complete bird list for Jack- 

 son Park, combining both recent sightings and historical 

 20 records, some going back to 1918. The list includes 266 



The northern goshawk (Accipiter 

 gentilis), an occasional visitor, was 

 last seen on the island during the 

 winter of 1984-85, when it spent 

 several weeks dining on rabbit. £ 



Wooded Island in the past decade. The breeding list is 

 amazing for a city park, including wood duck, hooded 

 merganser, green heron, warbling vireo, yellow warbler, 

 Canada goose, and tree swallow. The nesting species 

 make Wooded Island the only lakefront location in the 

 city where the birding is interesting year around. 



Drawing on Clyne's manuscript, Harriet can pro- 

 vide real historical perspective. Consider the Bohemian 

 waxwing seen in 1919 and not again until 1985, or the 

 Bachman's sparrow seen in 1918 and not at all since. 



A yellow rail, a slightly less elusive cousin of the 

 black rail, was recorded in October, 1980, and this past 

 spring, lo! a black rail was sighted by Bob Lewis, a Uni- 

 versity of Chicago graduate student, along the lagoon 

 just north of the island. The bird allowed Lewis to get so 

 close he could study it without binoculars, but this indi- 

 vidual was less bold than his conspecific of 1972. Despite 

 diligent search, no one else ever saw it. We may have to 

 wait 14 years for another chance. 



