The peregrine falcon soared on an air current, a dark brown glider against an azure sky.
It suddenly dropped like a bomb, making straight for a cluster of mourning doves like a missile.
The doves scattered in a cooing cloud of gray feathers and the falcon missed lunch.
The falcon-dove drama played out at the Sauer-Prairie Kame Forest Preserve in Sugar Grove where a prairie and wetland restoration project has birders abuzz.
'It's really hot this year with sandpipers and Wilson's phalaropes,' said Kane County Audubon member Bob Andrini of St. Charles. 'A lot of birders are coming from outside the county because of the sightings.
Audubon member Jon Duerr, also of St. Charles, who will lead a birding tour there Sunday morning. Duerr said he saw the peregrine falcon dive-bombing shorebirds over the weekend.
While the bird of prey is definitely a celebrity, the bigger stars this weekend are two pairs of Wilson's phalaropes. The small shore bird has a long thin beak and black stripe on its head. It disappeared from northern Illinois and Indiana after -prairie wetlands were drained for farming.
'This is kind of a breakthrough,' Duerr said. 'Another dramatic thing is a bird of the prairie called a Dickcissel that's nested throughout the area. It's like a miniature meadow lark.'
Project manager for the area's wetland restoration is in the hands of Kenneth Anderson, Jr., who works for the Kane County Department of Environmental Management. He is in the second year of a six-year project, supervising the re-creation of the shallow ponds and wetlands that were common in the area 100 years ago.
Wetlands cleanse the water -- Anderson called them the earth's kidneys -- and help control flooding as well as provide habitat.
Anderson, 44, now lives in Elburn, but grew up not far from the wetlands he now tends.
Anderson leads the way through chest-high Canadian rye grass dotted with the spires of Indian grass, yellow goldenrod and the black seed eyes of long gone coneflowers to get to the wetlands he labored to create.
Wet plants, such as arrowheads, bullrushes, blue flag grass and smartweed edge the areas of ponds he created.
'This is a weed in your yard -- a smartweed,' Anderson said, indicating a medium height plant with bunches of tiny pink and white seeds. 'The ducks love this,' he says.
A tall grass with dark purple fluffy seadheads bobbed in the late summer breeze.
'This is barnyard grass and the ducks love that, too.'
The area teams with wildlife: Teal-winged ducks, frogs, muskrats, white egret and a great blue heron, three hawks -- probably red-tails -- circle slowly, enormous dragonflies and damsel flies crisscross while bumblebees and honey bees compete with butterflies for the nectar of the season's last flowers.
Power lines bisect the acreage, somewhere between an anachronism and an eyesore, but Anderson takes them in stride.
'Power lines are a fact of life,' Anderson said.
In any case, the birds -- mourning doves and hawks alike -- have adapted. They sit on them as prairie perches.
If you go:
Who: Kane County Audubon
What: Bird walk
When: 8 a.m. Sundaysept.14
Where: Sauer Family Prairie Kame Forest Preserve, 44W705 Lasher Road, Sugar Grove. (Meet at the Peck Farm Park parking lot, 38W199 Kaneville Road, Geneva to carpool)
Cost: Free, open to the public
Why: To see shorebirds, peregrine falcon, other birds preparing to migrate
More Info:
* Kane County Audubon online at www.kanecountyaudubon.org or by calling Jon Duerr at 630-584-5891
* Sauer Family Prairie Kame Forest Preserve at www.kaneforest.com/fp/sauer_kame.asp
info:
The kame at Sauer-Prairie is the 30-foot mound of gravel that collected in a depression when a glacier retreated 14,000 years ago.
'The kame was born as water and gravel fell through a hole formed a cone-shaped pile beneath the glacier,' according to information posted at the site.
'This dry gravel hill prairie one of the rarest types of prairie left in Illinois.'
Plants living on the mound may well be more than 100 years old. Because of harsh growing conditions, they grew very slowly.