Woodwind Bird Medic: Robbie Hunsinger
I met Robbie Hunsinger for lunch in a North Side restaurant just before she was to take up her volunteer rounds looking for dead and injured birds in the Loop. Because she is an accomplished classical oboist, I asked her if I was remembering correctly that the oboe was the voice of the duck in Peter and the Wolf. She laughed — it's a musical laugh and she laughs it often, as if she can't help making music even when she's not playing an instrument. "Yes, it's the duck," she said, "although we oboe players try to live that down."

Hunsinger's introduction to the oboe came at eight years old in her Atlanta grammar school. "Atlanta was a great place full of wonderful oboe players and teachers, many of whom went on to work with major symphony orchestras," she says. "I had a great teacher who actually played the oboe, which was rare, and he gave us very advanced pieces when we were very young. As a teacher myself now, I'm not sure how he dared."

Hunsinger, whose curly brown hair and open face complement a sunny personality, eventually went on to the Manhattan School of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, then to Chicago, where she played with the Civic Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony. "That was very exciting," she says of her symphony dates. "There were four or five years when they were short an oboe player, and they asked me now and then to substitute. I was never a member, but I loved it every time I got to sit in. My biggest concert was the Bach Christmas Oratorio — just thrilling."

The duck voice in Peter and the Wolf wasn't Hunsinger's first bird connection. "My mother," she says, "was and still is an avid birder in Atlanta, so I always had an interest." About five or six years ago, as Hunsinger began exploring experimental music, she says she started hearing the birds in a way she hadn't before. "I became really fascinated by the calls: goose calls, yellow-headed blackbirds, thrushes — I love the whole gamut. And when I started birding again, it really opened up my music."

A smaller group in which she plays oboe has a CD collection of improvisational pieces that runs a wide range from peaceful meditation to wonderful musical bickering. Some of them contain varied birdlike notes and rhythms, and even a couple of moments that sound like moody duck talk.

Hunsinger also plays stand-up bass with her partner Kelly Kessler's band, The Wichita Shut-ins, an authentic country-western hootenanny with words, music, and voice up out of some piney woods somewhere. When we talked, they were just back from Austin, Texas, where they'd played the well-known "South by Southwest" festival.

About a year ago, Hunsinger met Ken Wysocki, founder of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitor and Rescue Project, a volunteer group that prowls the early morning Loop during the spring and fall migrations, looking for and counting birds that have become disoriented and fallen victim to the hazards of the downtown canyons.

"I really liked the program, and I wanted to help the birds," she says. "But I'm kind of squeamish, and I'm not a morning person, so I was hoping I could become involved in some indirect way. I called Ken and asked him how many people were involved in the project. He said one,' meaning himself, so I said OK, here's my number,' and it turned out to be amazing."

On the three to five days a week they go out during heaviest migration, the group meets at five a.m. to check several of the plazas near skyscrapers in the Loop where they count dead and fallen birds. "There was a problem at the Art Institute of Chicago, for instance, until the school drained the fountain. The birds would fly into the huge glass wall there and fall into the water," Hunsinger says. The Art Institute has since collaborated by draining the fountain during migration season. "The birding community has had the same kind of cooperation with most of the downtown high-rise companies who turn their lights off in the late evening, early morning hours."

"We don't know exactly what happens in this maze of tall buildings, but the birds — a lot of thrushes, warblers, ovenbirds — get pulled down into these canyons then fly into lit windows and reflective glass, or else just become exhausted from circling and settle at street level," she says. "Which is one of the reasons it's crucial to get there early because there's a huge predator problem: gulls, crows, some rats. I've seen a gull pick up a stunned bird right in front of me before I could get to it."

On their most hectic morning out, the group counted about 60 birds, 10 or 15 of which were alive. Help for the injured can mean long trips to a licensed bird rehabilitator. Only stunned or injured birds are handled, and Hunsinger has a federal permit to do so. Hunsinger remembers one morning when she drove an hour and a half to Wisconsin with an injured thrush on the seat next to her. She found Brahms on the radio to comfort the hurt bird. "I felt it was the best we could do," she said, as if the highest of the classical repertoire was probably not quite up to birdsong.

When I asked her where she thought birds fit in the musical world, she said, "I think they're the inspiration, all of them. I was with a group in the Sierras a while ago recording bird calls, and found that I liked the rougher sounds better than the pretty musical sounds. I feel like my ears have really opened, as if the birds have taught me that the traditional music I love has room for duck calls."

Craig Vetter is a freelance writer in Chicago and teaches magazine writing at Northwestern University.

Freelance photographer Eric Fogleman is a carpenter on the side.