Miller Meadow Bird Walk & Deer Grove Herping

Cook County, IL

Saturday 30 May 2020 69 °F

Today I led the annual Oak Park Bird Walk in Miller Meadow Forest Preserve for a wonderful group of eight birders. We saw a good number of birds including many WARBLING VIREOS:

TREE SWALLOWS have, as usual, taken over the “Kestrel” nest box.

Surprisingly, there were still a few migrant warblers around including BLACKPOLL:

And a super-obliging BLACK-THROATED BLUE who sang for us — amazing, especially this late in the season!

One interesting sighting was an escaped pet cockatiel called a BUDGERIGAR (not technically countable).

The highlight of the walk was probably hearing & seeing either 5 or 6 YELLOW-BILLED CUCKOOS, a known breeder here, but today the place was CRAWLING with them!

Check out that tail!

Next stop: Deer Grove Forest Preserve in search of breeding birds and Tiger & Spotted Salamanders. I quickly found a beautiful singing male SCARLET TANAGER:

And right alongside the entrance road, incredibly, was a family of SANDHILL CRANES! Soooo cool!

This shows how close they were:

The baby truly looks like a fuzzy dinosaur!

And of probably eighty logs flipped, I found two Blue-spotted Salamanders. Not my target species, but still super cool to see. Another cool amphibian around was the Leopard Frog.

And on the way out, I was treated to my favorite warbler, a (hopefully breeding) pair of HOODED, which will be my bird-of-the-day. Runner-up to all the Yellow-billed Cuckoos at Miller Meadow.