Turf Birds

Here's a find from a few days ago:

This is an American Golden Plover (Pluvialis dominica). He's migrating through, on his way from the tundra of northern Canada to the pampas of Argentina. As a plover, he would be considered a shorebird, and we did in fact find him on a shore (a lakeshore, but...):

This was at Illinois Beach State Park, here in Lake County. Around here, these birds aren't easy to find. Most of the large plovers that move down the lake turn out to be these guys:

These are Black-bellied Plovers (Pluvialis squatarola). They breed in the same Arctic tundra, but many of them spend the winter along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts instead.

As I said, Golden Plovers are hard to find here in Lake County. But elsewhere in Illinois... A significant portion of the world's population of this species migrates through central Illinois, where a good day scouring sod farms (with a scope, preferably) can yield several hundred of them. Sod farms, of course, can hardly be considered shorelines, but some "shorebirds" actually prefer them. Here's another example:

This is a Buff-breasted Sandpiper (Calidris subruficollis), another sod farm specialist, and another species more easily found in the Midwest than just about anywhere else.

This preference made sense, when this area was full of prairies, prairie fires, and bison. Now that the bison are gone, most of our prairies are tiny little patches, and prairie fires are carefully managed, they seem to be dependent upon our desire for short, green grass. But sod farms are, after all, businesses, and they have no choice but to respond to the economic environment. These days, many of our local sod farms have been slowly converting to corn, as demand for sod goes down. What this means for Golden Plovers and Buff-breasted Sandpipers, we don't really know. But it does illustrate an intriguing way in which economics can impact the natural world we live in.