Migratory birds have been flying over DeKalb. Now, there’s a way to monitor their movements throughout the season.
Wings over the Windy City is a migratory bird monitoring project. They mainly use sound receivers to record the chirps that birds make at night — when it's safer — to communicate as they fly.
Sensors are set up across the region, including on the Willis Tower in Chicago. The DeKalb Public Library is the westernmost site with a sound recorder. They’re also equipped with an infrared camera.
The monitoring team uses sophisticated techniques to identify the species and numbers of birds on a given night. The data is logged in a publicly available dashboard, which shows DeKalb with some of the highest migration numbers in the region.
Emily Faulkner is the Director of DeKalb Public Library. Faulkner points out that DeKalb must be a special place for migratory birds.
“The other areas," Faulkner said, "the highest numbers they've seen in in the other areas they're recording is about 100,000 birds. In DeKalb, they've seen 120 [thousand]. So, we really are an area that a lot of birds are migrating over, and even more so than places to the east of us.”
The data is logged in a publicly available dashboard. It shows that DeKalb has some of the highest migration numbers in the region.
Faulkner describes a special encounter in this more rural region.
“There's something called an Upland Sandpiper, which is a cute little shore bird," she said. "And [researchers] said it's hardly ever seen by birders in the area, but I guess it's regularly migrating. And they said that we've had 22 of them cross over eight different days, just go over our library, but they're not migrating over anybody else.”
The library is hosting a presentation about the project on November 21st at the library from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.