The Black-crowned Night-Heron’s Unlikely Refuge

Growing up in the steel mill corridor near Chicago, artist Lauren Levato Coyne was surrounded by waterbirds. They lived in the marshes and swamps, even as crisscrossing highways and railroads increasingly encroached upon their habitat. Levato Coyne drew on that landscape—“all the birds, the sounds, the smells”—while creating this portrait of the Black-crowned Night-Heron.

Although endangered in Illinois, largely due to habitat loss, the bird has found an unlikely refuge in Lincoln Park at the edge of Lake Michigan. It’s here that Levato Coyne first became acquainted with the red-eyed waders, hearing their dinosaur-like squawks and rattles above her head while walking through the park. “There’s a lot of marshland in Lincoln Park, and it butts up right against Lincoln Park Zoo,” Levato Coyne says. “There’s a perfect confluence of factors to give rise to a Black-crowned Night-Heron rookery.” A colony that formed in the park in 2010 has grown to 600 birds today, one of the largest in the state, offering a precious glimmer of hope for a locally threatened species.

That tension between hope and peril is evident in Levato Coyne’s acrylic and paper collage. Inspired by a photo of a wetland on the cover of a 1996 Audubon issue, she started with water lilies. She painted these in a loose, organic, impressionistic manner—bright greens and blues with splashes of red, orange, and yellow. Over that watery and rich wetland, Levato Coyne collaged a cityscape painted with hard lines and fine detail, a sharp contrast to the wild and reckless splotches used for the background. The bird itself and the Hancock building (a landmark recognizable to any Chicagoan) are painted on a single piece of paper—inseparable—while the other buildings are gathered beneath the heron, almost like a nest. The city, it seems, is an integral part of the ecosystem.

Behind the buildings are three bright orbs, which Levato Coyne repurposed from cast-off elements from another work, and which happen to be in the colors of a traffic signal: red, yellow, green. In fact, she says, the almost violent strokes of gray and yellow paint behind the bird that form an X behind its head are an impressionistic representation of roads with their dotted yellow lines. “All of that behind would be destruction,” Levato Coyne says, holding up the collage and gesturing at the broad strokes of gray standing in for environmental loss.

That menacing element communicates the real threat to the Black-crowned Night-Heron: habitat fragmentation and destruction. Levato Coyne says she wanted her portrait to tell the hopeful story of the Black-crowned Night-Heron carving out a niche for itself in a hostile world, but to also show that this balance is still precarious. “The coexisting could go either way,” Levato Coyne adds. “We could coexist—or we could not.”

This piece originally ran in the Summer 2024 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.