The Best of Words on Birds: Celebrating Birds, Birding, and Birders in Chicagoland and Beyond, by Jeff Reiter
Eckhartz Press, 2025
218 pages, paperback
The Best of Words on Birds: Celebrating Birds, Birding, and Birders in Chicagoland and Beyond by Jeff Reiter is an anthology of newspaper columns for suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald that the author has been writing since Jan. 2004. Jeff Reiter lives in Glen Ellyn, a suburb west of Chicago, and he covers a wide range of birding experiences familiar to the more experienced birder but particularly useful for those in the earliest stages of this potentially lifelong passion. The writing is light and laden with references to popular culture, thus enhancing its accessibility to novices.
From a natural history perspective, the Chicago region is usually deemed to include nineteen counties: nine in Illinois, six in Indiana, three in Wisconsin, and one in Michigan. This area offers a great deal to those with an interest in birds and other aspects of natural history. There is the southern end of Lake Michigan, the only Great Lake on a north south axis that funnels birds southward and acts as a barrier to migrants when the westerly winds cause them to accumulate on the lakefront. Add to that the hundreds of thousands of protected acres owned and managed by federal, state, county, and municipal agencies, and even a few private holdings open to the public. And as Reiter gleefully points out, even one’s backyard can lure unexpected treasures.
Reiter spends much of his time sampling these local sites, with an emphasis on easily encountered charismatic bird species, although he does chase local rarities on occasion. One chapter is devoted to five “feathered flamethrowers” and “avian hotties”: the Scarlet Tanager, American Goldfinch, Baltimore Oriole, Indigo Bunting, and Blackburnian Warbler. Among those five, only the warbler is a passage migrant, a bird you are not likely to see unless you search for it. Red-winged Blackbirds grab his attention, in part because of their perceived aggressiveness. Reiter describes how his business card features a Red-wing in the air; he recalls that he snapped a photo as the bird was poised for attack…and that he then scrambled to safety! Reiter’s discussion of Common Nighthawks resonates with me, as I remember back in the early 1960s, before I was a birder, watching the species circling around during the dusks of late summer and being perplexed as to what they might be. Reiter “loves telling new birders about” this species for this very reason: Unlike many other birds, nighthawks are easy to see even if you don’t have a clue as to their identity.
A lot of attention is paid to the backyard. Reiter has installed numerous feeders and birdbaths that draw an interesting array of species. He tolerates the peanut feeders, despite their attractiveness to House Sparrows and European Starlings, because they draw species he enjoys such as Red-breasted Nuthatches and various woodpeckers. Hummingbirds are coveted, so a feeder for them is also present. American Goldfinches monopolize the thistle feeders, but Pine Siskins and even unexpected Common Redpolls have made appearances.
Northern Cardinals are one of the most desired birds, and Reiter especially celebrates the colorful species. House Wrens occupied the small bird house designed for them, but then one year the species failed to show-up. Fortunately, for the author, they were replaced by Carolina Wrens, a bird whose range is expanding northward. Perhaps the backyard yielded its greatest moment on the morning of May 15, 2020, when migrants streaming through the sky decided to occupy the Reiter property. By day’s end, Reiter had counted 47 species, including two new species to the yard he had been monitoring for 23 years.
Touching on yet another aspect of birding, Reiter writes about his forays farther from home. A trip to the Indiana Dunes Birding Festival netted him “the warbler of my dreams,” a Worm-eating Warbler. A farther excursion aimed for southern Wisconsin and Horicon Marsh, the nation’s largest freshwater cattail marsh. The author’s group observed Black Terns, American White Pelicans, Yellow-headed Blackbirds, and other regulars, in addition to an unexpected White-faced Ibis. And the 2009 Midwest Birding Festival was held in Ohio, where Reiter saw his second-ever Kirtland’s Warbler.
The book ends with profiles of various birders—including giants like Roger Tory Peterson and John James Audubon—and the importance of conservation. Even the most abundant of species can be rendered extinct over a few decades if care is not exercised. Reiter touches on that, as well as on the efforts to engage young people who will carry out the effort into the future.
Many of us are seemingly born with an interest in animals, but we can often also point to an outing or a bird that first led us down this marvelous path. Reiter considers his first encounter with a Hooded Warbler, observing the striking bird and then going through the process of identifying it, as “a sighting experience that launched [him] into this wonderfully addictive hobby.” But of greater importance were his parents, not birders themselves but aware of avian presence. They maintained feeders, kept a Peterson guide handy, and engaged in bird-oriented activities like listening for woodcocks while volunteering at an environmental learning center near their home in Canton, Ohio.
Books like this one might well inspire someone to take that first step into the world of birding and natural history, a move fulfilling for the person and potentially valuable for the larger world of which they are a part.
Joel Greenberg has been birding since 1966 and has written several books on natural history, including A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction (Bloomsbury Publishing) and the forthcoming, To Life: Jews Exploring Nature (Rutgers University Press).
