me AUDUBON BULLE TIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 
2001 NORTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO 14, ILLINOIS 
Number 65 March, 1948 
Bird Sanctuary or Garbage Dump? 
By Mrs. JANET HULL ZIMMERMANN 
WHEN IT BECAME KNOWN in the spring of 1946 that the City of Chicago 
proposed to buy from the Illinois Brick Company the right to dump garbage 
in the Touhy Avenue clay pit and eventually level it off for a park, nearby 
property owners and nature lovers throughout the city were alarmed. 
The Touhy Avenue clay pit is now a wildlife paradise. It was taken 
over by nature when the Brick Co. abandoned operations here in 1930. They 
left an enormous hole, 77 acres in extent, and about 18 feet deep, bounded 
by Touhy Avenue on the north, McCormick Boulevard and the Drainage 
Canal on the west, Sacramento Avenue on the east, and Pratt Boulevard 
on the south. 
Left undisturbed, nature went to work to heal the scars. The west side 
filled with water frrom springs. At the southwest corner it is now 30 to 40 
feet deep. In the shallow marshy areas grew cattails and a variety of reeds 
and grasses. Willows, poplars and cottonwood trees sprang up in the dry 
sections. On islands and strips of dry land appeared low trees and shrubs. 
The east side, along Sagramento, is bordered by a honeysuckle hedge. When 
the Berry Bait Company leased the right to stock the waters with fish the 
setting was complete. Here was a perfect bird sanctuary and the birds lost 
no time in making use of it. Here they could rest and feed undisturbed on 
their long spring and autumn migrations. Here the resident species, hard 
pressed as they are nowadays by the destruction of their breeding areas, 
found a place to nest and raise their young. An ugly hole in the ground 
had quietly, almost imperceptibly, become a place of rare beauty. 
On summer evenings one may sit on the rim and watch the graceful 
black and common terns plunge like arrows after fish. Kingfishers dash 
in pursuit of minnows, uttering their harsh rattle, and toward nightfall the 
big black-crowned night herons drift in from their heronry near Morton 
Grove. Swallows of every kind—bank, barn, tree and rough-winged, and 
purple martins—compete with the nighthawks and chimney swifts for flying 
insects. Down in the pit the dainty little sandpipers run along the edge 
of the water, teetering on their thin legs and calling their plaintive peet- 
weet. The secretive rails and bitterns slip stealthily through the reeds, to 
be found only by a quick eye. On the open waters you may see Bonaparte’s 
and herring gulls, coots, mallards and pied-billed grebes with their coveys 
of fluffy young paddling along single file in the mother’s wake. Red-winged 
blackbirds in great numbers, swamp sparrows, and marsh wrens nest in the 
cattails. Around the rim of the pit are nesting song sparrows, goldfinches, 
yellow warblers, killdeers on the prairies to the south, and many others. 
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