Chicago outdoors: Crane haiku, late sandhill cranes, an evening buck, Christmas Bird Count

Notes come from around Chicago outdoors and beyond.

BUCK OF THE WEEK: UNPLUGGED

Eddie Pasiewicz, of Beach Park, photographed the evening buck at the top at the South Section of Illinois Beach State Park.

BOTW Unplugged, the celebration of live big bucks around Chicago outdoors, runs as apt in the special two-page outdoors section in the Sun-Times Sports Saturday. To make submissions, email BowmanOutside@gmail.com or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).

WILD TIMES

HUNTER SAFETY

Jan. 29-30: Diamond, (815) 907-7345

YOUTH HUNTING

Dec. 31: Deadline to register for 2022 Central Illinois Youth Goose Hunt on Jan. 17, (217) 785-8060

SHOWTIME

There’s been some updates. Click here for the complete list of shows, classes and swap meets for the coming months.

ILLINOIS SEASONS

Tuesday, Dec. 21: Duck season and scaup seasons, north zone, end

DALE’S MAILBAG

“At about 1:45 pm today, December 13, 2021, as I took some kitchen scraps to my compost bin, I heard, then saw 21 sandhill cranes flying south directly overhead. . . . Interestingly, my old pamphlet, ”Chicagoland Birds: Where and When to Find Them,” published by the Field Museum in 1958 and revised in 1972, gives November 30th as the last date for seeing sandhills. Global warming a hoax?” Marianne Hahn

A: Another example, including the aside, of why Hahn, a retired microbiologist and co-founder of Friends of the Kankakee, is one of the favorite people I’ve met in my job.

BIG NUMBER

122nd: Christmas Bird Count, which began Tuesday, Dec. 14, and runs through Jan. 5. Details are at audubon.org/conservation/science/christmas-bird-count.

LAST WORD

“A single crane stands
in the muddy corn stubble
—it begins to snow.”

John Vukmirovich, in “frogpond,” the winter issue of the journal of the Haiku Society of America, p. 59, off a trip we took to watch cranes a couple years ago