Nov. 3: Chicago Spent the day writing letters; rainy, gloomy, outside. Nov. 4 Out of Chicago for Denver at 10:30 a.m. Chicago "suburbs", dismal "subdivisions", a long way west of the city proper. Then corn-fields, stalks partly standing, partly down, partly in shocks; pigs; chickens; cattle; some pastures, tracts of deciduous woods; many trees with full dead leafage still holding on, but colorless, brown. Took pencil census of birds seen from 12:15 to 1:46, Sterling, Illinois, to the crossing of the Mississippi River just short of Clinton Iowa. Results (visibility poor): Red-tailed Hawk (1, soaring); Starlings (flocks, in flight, 15, 80+, 150+); English Sparrow (25+, only around stations in towns); Killdeer (4, on muddy plowed field); Red-winged Blackbird (straggling fbody of 200+ flying from pasture adjacent to cattle yard); Crow (flocks of 145+ 75+, 60+, only as we approached the Mississippi bottoms— all in flight). Then Iowa, had been raining heavily; stream courses bank-full; much water standing in fields and pastures; country rolling; corn-and-hogs, chickens, cows.