The Magic Stump
COLES COUNTY, ILLINOIS
39°37'36.95"N 88°14'23.10"W
One of my favorite things to do on frigid winter mornings is drive out to agricultural fields and look for roadside birds, particularly raptors and passerines like Horned Larks, Lapland Longspurs, and Snow Buntings. Perhaps no place in Illinois symbolizes winter birding like the Magic Stump, an old Osage orange tree that has garnered local renown for being the winter roosting site of two highly uncommon Prairie Falcons.
It’s not just the stump and the falcons that
