Sunday, March 16, 2014

Ice on Lake Michigan proving fatal to waterfowl

Field Museum research assistant Josh Engel has spent a couple days this week along the lakefront performing the grim task of collecting dead waterfowl. They haven’t been difficult to find. Engel and his Field Museum colleagues collected 30 of the birds that had died close to shore, most of them red-breasted merganser and white-winged scoter ducks. Some were floating and others were sealed in ice; all of them were emaciated. “It’s sort of hard to go out and see — you can practically see them dying,” said Engel, who is also an ornithologist. Tens of thousands of diving ducks and other waterfowl spend their winters in the southwest part of Lake Michigan each year, said Douglas Stotz, conservation ecologist and ornithologist at the Field Museum. Most years, they fly from places like Canada and Alaska and spend their time here diving for mollusks and fish without major problems. But then came Chicago’s frigid winter, which as recently as last weekend had blanketed about 93 percent of Lake Michigan in ice...more

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