A male harlequin duck on the Chicago River would be a rare and beautiful sight. It has a curl of light feathers streaking over its forehead and swirling down its neck, cheeks that are a striking blue, and an animated manner that earned it the scientific name Histrionicus histrionicus, from the Latin for “melodramatic.”
She caught the hum of a fisherman’s boat before I did and, with a surprising burst of speed, paddled to a rock and rode out the boat’s wake. I never saw her fly, and her wings didn’t look strong. If I didn’t know better, I’d have guessed she’d head north in the spring by swimming.
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A few days later Joe Lill, a music professor at nearby North Park College and a member of the Chicago Audubon Society’s board, walked over with me to see the exotic little bird again. Harlequins winter in New England and New York, and they occasionally stray into the Great Lakes. But they’re quite unusual inland. If you have a serious telescope, a hardy constitution, and the patience, you can track one down somewhere on Lake Michigan most winters. But no one in the tight circle of Chicago birders remembers a river sighting, so Lill has been charting the hen’s stay, and plans to visit the dam every day till she leaves.
“I think ducks like open points on the river,” Lill explained as we stood beside the dam. “You see them here and at Diversey and North Avenue–places where the river opens wide. Whether it’s more like their prairie lakes in Canada, where they breed, or because they can see predators, I don’t know.”
It’s not uncommon for immature birds to move into new habitat, tracking down their relatives only on the summer breeding grounds. “She’ll probably pair up next year,” Lill said.
Soon a young woman in a full-length coat and fur-lined hood strolled up. She said she wasn’t a serious birder, though she’d consulted a field guide and identified the duck. She walked by every few days just to see if the harlequin was still diving into the spume. “The way it dives, it reminds me of seeing loons at camp when I was a kid, up by Lake Superior,” she said. “We used to chase them. There was a whole family of them on the lake. We’d try to get close in canoes, but they’d dive and come up farther away.”
