Lake County Audubon Society

by Matt Hayner, LCAS board member

While the Empidonax Flycatchers (Acadian, Alder, Least, Willow, and Yellow-bellied Flycatchers) of Northern Illinois may be visually indistinct and difficult to characterize by sight alone, our summer-resident Eastern Kingbirds possess one of the most distinctive markings amongst North American birds: the white terminal band on their tails. However, it turns out this is not the only high-contrast characteristic of the species.

Eastern Kingbirds are known scientifically as Tyrannus Tyrannus (family, species), and the redundancy of the name is indicative of the birds’ behavior. From Cornell’s birdsoftheworld.org:

by Matt Hayner, LCAS board member

We’re now past the steep part of the spring migration in Lake County: April and May were filled with the visual delights of charismatic warblers, diverse water birds, and iridescent hummingbirds. However, perhaps underappreciated is the auditory richness of bird calls and songs that also fill the air during (and after) a migration.

Kenn Kaufman, field editor for Audubon magazine, says, “Birds, like other creatures, must be able to recognize their own kind, at least during breeding season. While some other animals may identify potential mates by smell or other chemical cues, birds generally rely on sight and sound.” For people, learning to listen to birds and

While annual cicadas are commonly heard singing in Lake County every year, there is a population of periodical cicadas that only emerges here every 17 years. This massive emergence is expected in May and June of this year (the last periodical emergence occurred in 2007). Millions of cicadas will tunnel out of the soil, crawl up trees, sing, mate, lay eggs, hatch into nymphs, and complete their life cycle returning to the soil under trees where they live on tree sap until their next emergence in 17 years. The periodical cicada population in northern Illinois is known as Brood XIII.