Ninety-five years ago today, a promising young birder notice several “different” birds in a flock of White-throated Sparrows in Jackson Park on Chicago’s lakefront. Closer inspection revealed that at least two of the outlanders were Harris’s Sparrows, a species considered rare then, and still scarce today, anywhere in Illinois.
A nice find indeed for the seventeen-year-old birder. But he is better known nowadays for his connection to the Kirtland’s warbler, the Wilson’s phalarope, and one of the most notoriously vicious crimes in American history.
