ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 7 



Bird Geography in the Cook County Forest Preserves 



A first entrance into Cook County over any one of the great 

 railways from the south, cannot fail to give the impression of 

 crossing a wide, level and uninteresting plain, at many places 

 sadly in need of drainage. For miles one passes through a vast 

 manufacturing district, ugly and monotonous, with an occa- 

 sional cat tail or buttonbush swamp indicating the former wet 

 and marshy character of much of the Chicago plain. Glimpses 

 of Lake Michigan on the right relieve the tiresome monotony, 

 but on the left Calumet Lake and its low shores fail to impress 

 the traveler with any possibility of a different physiography. 



As the objective of all the railroads is Chicago, unless the 

 visitor goes beyond the city limits he may not be enlightened 

 as to the wonderfully diversified topography of this great county 

 with its 992 square miles of area. He might even live and die 

 a resident of the city without realizing that the Chicago plain 

 is but the entrance to one of the most interesting regions in the 



MUD LAKE IN THE PORTAGE TRACT 

 Photo by O. M. Schantz 



State of Illinois, containing within the confines of Cook County 

 beautiful timbered lands and beautiful farms, well watered by 

 two famous streams, the Chicago and Desplaines rivers, and 

 their tributaries. He might never know that on the face of 

 Cook County is legibly visible a unique physiographic history, 

 telling of the successive stages that marked the development 

 of the level plain on which much of the west and south sides of 

 Chicago have been built. 



