Nature Book Guide Travels: Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge and Flight Paths

Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration, Rebecca Heisman, Harper, 2023, 288 pages; at Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge in Illinois.

With this series, Nature Book Guide Travels, we’re featuring some of our recent journeys to places noted in the Nature Book Guide or by members of our NBG community:

This spring we traveled to Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge and the Nature Conservancy’s Emiquon Preserve in Illinois to participate in the Wetlands in Focus Photo Blitz. It was an Earth Month challenge by the Protect Illinois Waters Coalition to champion our wetlands. (We thank Prairie Rivers Network for introducing us to the challenge.) Here’s what the day looked like:

Though we saw pelicans and swans, sparrows, killdeer, and red admiral butterflies, and heard so many frogs and birds in the wetland brush, our photos captured only the bright sun, the breeze, and the early spring growth along the river’s edge. Still, we had a tremendous time as this is one of the sites included in the WONDERFUL book by Rebecca Heisman—Flight Paths—one of our inspiring companions during migration season. Heisman’s book is an engaging history of scientific ingenuity, and we loved it. Since our homebase is nearby, we were inspired to see Emiquon after reading Heisman’s passages about it.

Passages from Flight Paths from Emiquon:

“Once, the floodplain of the Illinois River….would have been lined with natural wetlands fed by spring floods. Now penned in by levees, today these wetlands are filled with exotic mute swans and invasive phragmites reeds, but they still provide crucial habitat for migrating birds.”

‘On a humid September day in 2021, the sunlight tinged yellow by smoke from distant California wildfires, I joined my friend Auriel Fournier as she checked her rail traps in the Nature Conservancy’s Emiquon Preserve….Fornier is the director of the Illinois Natural History Survey’s Forbes Biological Station, the “research station on the Illinois River” from which that first radio-tagged duck in the 1960s came. At Forbes, Fournier also oversees research projects on the area’s ducks and geese and even reptiles and amphibians, but rails—small, secretive wetland bird distantly related to cranes—are her real passion. She’s been studying them since she was a PhD student….’

“As we moved toward each trap, pushing the tall wetland vegetation aside as we approached the wire cage and the speaker blaring recorded rail calls to lure birds in, we looked eagerly to see if this one might have an occupant.”

Spoiler alert: they succeeded in banding a rail during Fornier’s visit in a dark wetland through chest-high grasses after sunset, through waves of mosquitoes.

‘“There! There!” Suddenly a small bird burst from the plants, highlighted in the glow of the spotlights, five people clutching nets sprinting full tilt after it. In moments it was safely mobilized and Fournier climbed down from the ATV to retrieve it.’

”The bird was a sora, a black and gray species of rail with a yellow bill and black face that can be found in marshes throughout most of North America. Fournier and one of her technicians spread their tools on the back of the ATV. As I watched, they banded the bird, did some checks to make sure the Morus transmitter was functioning properly, and then attached it via a tiny harness that looped around the sora’s legs and held the transmitter snug against the center of its back. After a quick pause for photos, the bird, now with an antenna extending past its tail, was released, and we all beat a quick path to our vehicles to escape the mosquitos.”

Flight Paths is full of vibrantly told stories about scientists and researchers who tinker and experiment with new ways to capture data on migrating birds. We love this book, and were excited to include it in our Autumn 2023 issue of Nature Book Guide:

“Wildly engaging, always surprising, and meticulously researched, Rebecca Heisman’s Flight Paths is filled with stories of innovation in the pursuit of understanding bird migration. Heisman—who has written for the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Wilson Ornithological Society, and the American Ornithological Society—captures the joy and wonder of bird science as she takes readers behind the scenes where volunteers, amateur ornithologists, and research scientists are applying new technologies.”

Reading Flight Paths will widen your understanding of bird migration, and make you cheer for the scientists striving to learn more.
Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration, Rebecca Heisman, Harper, 2023, 288 pages.