Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary is a 15-acre bird sanctuary and nature preserve in

Lincoln Park Lincoln Park is a park along Lake Michigan on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois. Named after US President Abraham Lincoln, it is the city's largest public park and stretches for seven miles (11 km) from Grand Avenue (500 N), on the south, ...

within Uptown, Chicago. The preserve includes Prairie, Savanna, Woodland, as well as an

ADA Ada may refer to: Places Africa * Ada Foah, a town in Ghana * Ada (Ghana parliament constituency) * Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria Asia * Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, Tur ...

Path, Birding Area, and Nature Trail. With 349 recorded species, it is Illinois's hottest spot on EBird. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conservationists and birders worked together to officially designate this area a nature preserve and bird sanctuary. It opened to the public in July 2001.

Birding

Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary is often visited during spring and fall migration. Passerines, as well as many other birds, often use the sanctuary as a stopover during their biannual migration. During peak birding season, there are often reports of the central meadow holding large numbers of sparrows, notably Le Conte’s, White-Crowned, Lincoln's and

Fox Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelve sp ...

. In winter, the sanctuary is reported to have roosting owls, including Northern Saw-whet and snowy owl.

Monty and Rose

In 2019, two

piping plovers The piping plover (''Charadrius melodus'') is a small sand-colored, sparrow-sized wader, shorebird that nests and feeds along coastal sand and gravel beaches in North America. The adult has yellow-orange-red legs, a black band across the forehead ...

nested at Montrose Beach, becoming the first nesting Piping Plover pair in the city since 1948. They were named

Monty and Rose Monty (June 2017 – May 13, 2022) and Rose were a pair of piping plovers, who gained local fame in 2019 for being the first pair to successfully breed in Chicago in decades. They belonged to the critically endangered Great Lakes population of pipin ...

after their nesting spot.

History

In 1938, during the Montrose Harbor Extension,

Alfred Caldwell Alfred Caldwell (May 26, 1903 – July 3, 1998) was an American architect best known for his landscape architecture in and around Chicago, Illinois. Family and education Caldwell and his wife Virginia had a daughter, Carol Caldwell Dooley, born ...

developed plans for the planting of various flora on the Point, but these plans were never implemented. During the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

, Montrose Point was a Nike missile site, site C-03, for the United States Army from Oct 1955 – June 1965. Honeysuckle bushes were planted to obscure their base. After the army left, local birders noticed that the honeysuckle, nicknamed "the Magic Hedge," was attracting several birds, including the Chestnut-sided Warbler. Historically, Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary was a community space for gay men in Chicago. Many men in these spaces were arrested for public indecency and anti-sodomy laws. In 2016, filmmaker Frederic Moffet produced a short art documentary about the sanctuary's history in relation to Chicago's gay cruising scene. Chicago mayor

Richard M. Daley Richard Michael Daley (born April 24, 1942) is an American politician who served as the 54th mayor of Chicago, Illinois, from 1989 to 2011. Daley was elected mayor in 1989 and was reelected five times until declining to run for a seventh term ...

signed an Urban Conservation Treaty with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service that promised to provide bird-friendly areas. Chicago then invested $400,000 into native plants for the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, which opened in July 2001. Some birders were upset when Montrose Beach opened dog beaches in fall 2002, expressing concern that the dogs would scare away the birds. In 2015, the Chicago Park District produced a future renovation master plan to guide development and renovation of the area. In accordance with the plan, the sanctuary added a butterfly meadow at the west end of the site. In 2021, an ADA-accessible trail was added to the site. Relatedly, an accessible 1/3 mile long loop was added, partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

References

{{reflist Bird sanctuaries of the United States Parks in Chicago 2001 establishments in Illinois