For the past 15 years, Rick Mosher has been the lead singer in the New Duncan Imperials, a hard-driving rock-and-roll band that he and two college friends formed after several of their more heartfelt efforts had stumbled along without much success.

"We started NDI as a joke," says the soft-spoken, wry 41-year-old. "We were so sincere, trying so hard and getting nowhere, that we just sort of snapped and made up this band that was going to be totally goofball. And of course it took off because we weren't trying and we didn't care at all. We dressed in loud, silly clothes, straw hats, and within a year we were one of the bigger local bands in the city — sold out the Metro a couple of times, played with top national bands, started touring, making money."

Yet even during the high rock-and-roll ride, Mosher held on to the spirit that he remembered lighting up as a young boy when he'd wandered into the fields around his Freeport, Illinois, home. He had a passion to collect bugs. So at around 30 years old, having given up the insect harvest for almost 20 years, he found himself drawn to the hunt again — this time on the road with the band, dressed like an idiot.

"We would be in, say, Missoula, Montana, and I'd get back from the show at about three o'clock in the morning — still dressed in my loud sport coat, green pants, golf shoes, straw hat — get my jar, and start prowling around the lights of the motel looking for moths — and maybe find a whole wall of them I'd never seen before. It was completely thrilling."

He paused in the small study of his North Side home with its 48-drawer cabinet full of nearly 4,000 beautifully mounted and catalogued insects, remembering those after-gig expeditions. "Every moment out there I saw how silly I looked. But I enjoy that. If you're self-conscious, you're not going to be a good insect person."

Mosher has bugs in his blood. His great grandfather was a pioneer in the study of wasps, and his grandfather was an insect illustrator for the Smithsonian.

"When I was seven, my grandfather sent me a collection of insects he'd been drawing," he recalls. "They were on black pins in a cigar box, all labeled. I still remember the smell of the preservatives when I opened that box with all these perfect amazing beetles and butterflies. And from that moment I was hooked."

 He collected bees and moths and butterflies until he was about 12 — "Around the time I started to play guitar to be cool," he says. Later, after three years at Northern Illinois University, he dropped out of school and came to Chicago to play rock-and-roll. He later returned to school in Chicago for a masters in Human Development, and married his wife, Alison.

These days, with two young boys and a teaching job at the Near North Montessori school, he makes his collecting trips when he can. One of his glass-topped drawers is from a single night not too long ago in the Shawnee National Forest. It contains nearly 50 different moths — his particular fascination. When he talks about the night he caught them, there is a relish in his voice that evokes the deep pleasure he takes from gathering this diversity of winged beauty.

"Shawnee is full of densely wooded forest with swampy, boggy areas," he says, remembering the warm spring day he rented a generator to run a light, then drove alone to the national forest south of Carbondale. "I followed a tiny road to a spot away from light pollution, away from other campers. It was kind of Blair Witch Project scary, actually: deep woods, no light. It was silent, you could smell the forest."

In late afternoon, Mosher strung a rope between two trees, and hung a sheet and a mercury vapor lamp from it. "The best moment, a weird moment of clarity, is when you have everything set up and you take a breath and look around as the shadows fall and the sun starts to go down," he says. "Then you turn on the light and they start coming." He looked at the drawer full of insects: large white moths, small ones wearing tree-bark camouflage, 15 or 20 different species meticulously arranged in frozen flight on pins, an inch above their identifying labels.

Closer to home, Mosher says he has been surprised by the rich variety of urban bugs. "I had always assumed you had to be out in the country or at least not in the city to find real diversity in the insect population, but I was wrong. Last summer I went to the North Park Village Nature Center at Pulaski and Peterson. It's an amazing site with oaks, savanna, and a pond, surrounded by traffic, obscenely bright lights, shouting people. But somehow it's this calm wilderness-like place where I found a really impressive diversity of moth life. It's like another planet."

Even deeper in the city, Mosher was surprised at the number of insects that survive amidst the tall downtown buildings. "I was allowed to sample the bugs in the garden on the City Hall roof," he said. "I found about 100 individuals and maybe 20 species — which isn't great diversity — but the fact that anything is up there is amazing."

As for the suggestion that his collecting harms the insect world, he says, "Insects can handle individuals taken out of the population because they reproduce so fast. But if their resources aren't there, they'll die out, which is one of the reasons habitat preservation is important." Mosher carefully observes the "many overlapping regulations" created to ensure the health of insect populations.

When I asked him which was most deeply satisfying — a full screaming house at the Metro or a solitary night in the forest being mothman, he smiled. "That's a great question," he said. "Both are a pinnacle of experience, a moment when you step back and say this is so great.' But if I could have only one, it would be a night in the Florida forest with my light set up and the night just starting. I'd hate to have to choose, because there's a balance there between solitude and the crowd. But you know, when I'm in concert I feel like someone else. But when I'm alone out there waiting for moths, I feel like myself."

Birder Detective: Luis Munoz
"I didn't really get into birding til I was shot on Labor Day 1992," said Luis Munoz as he stood with binoculars and a spotting scope on the shore of Montrose Harbor not far from the Magic Hedge, one of Chicago's famed birdwatching spots.

Munoz is a solidly built 43-year-old Chicago cop whose light-hearted and personable manner somehow don't reflect that he has spent the past 18 years first as a patrolman, then a gang crimes officer, and now a homicide detective assigned to unsolved murders out of the Harrison and Kedzie station.

"My partner and I were investigating an aggravated battery around Western and Madison," he says of the day he took a bullet. "We had a lead on a witness and we were pulling up next to the building where he was supposed to be staying. Then I was jolted backwards by a gunshot. Hit me right above the elbow, I started spurting blood, and I put pressure on it. We almost killed the car trying to get out of there," he recalls. "Then my training kicked in, and I started counting my breaths trying to calm myself. We got to the county hospital and it turned out I was very lucky. The bullet missed the nerves, so all I had was a broken arm. Anyway," he says, as if he had been lucky to avoid more than nerve damage, "I took it as a warning that I wasn't taking advantage of my life. So I went to Yellowstone, began videotaping birds, and it just blew me away. From then on, I started to get passionate about it."

Munoz and I met around dawn on his day off in a wind-whipped freezing rain, while he used his binoculars now and then to look at the few gulls who were soaring and diving through the dismal gray over the harbor. It was here, early in his birding passion, that he fell in with the family of birders who meet each other at favorite spots to share what they know.

"I started hanging out with John Purcell at Montrose. He's a really good birder and he became like my birding father," Munoz recalls. "Then, I was out looking at gulls, and I met Bob Hughes, one of the best birders I've ever seen, an ace. He pointed out a Mew gull, a really rare West Coast gull, and we've been great buddies since then."

Munoz was just back from vacation in Puerto Rico where his father raises mourning doves, ring turtle doves, and a few canaries. He birds while he's there and goes scuba diving and whitewater rafting when he gets the chance.

"It takes me a few days to come back from being out in nature when I get home," he says. "It's the way I leave the job behind. I quit drinking — which a lot of cops do to relax — when I got shot because I knew it would kill me. It's a really tough job, which is why I'm not married and don't have pets. Sometimes you spend 36 hours at a stretch working a case, so you just don't have time for family."

Not surprisingly, Munoz' passion for birds sometimes rides in the squad car with him and his partner. "Last January, we were leaving Cook County Jail," he says, beginning to laugh in the middle of the comic setup, "and I see two adult geese with three chicks. I go Whoa!' and my partner slams on the brakes because he thinks something's going on, and I say baby geese.' And he looks at me like What?' And I say, I know you don't realize this, but you're not supposed to have baby geese in January. Make sure you see what I'm seeing because they're not going to believe me.' And last summer, near the police gas station," Munoz continues, in a state of focus, "we saw two red-tailed hawks. And since I was going to Arizona for ten days, I asked my partner to check to see if they were breeding. He did, and, lo and behold, he saw chicks. So he's getting into it a bit, although he mostly likes raptors."

In the spring, Munoz haunts southern Cook County near Palos Hills. "There are two ospreys who've been down there for about five years," he says, "and they just laid two eggs. And you get a wonderful bunch of birds down there — warblers, kingfishers, sparrows, tanagers, thrushes, and thrashers."

By that time my hands were numb and it was clear that only a few very hungry gulls and a couple of ducks were to show this morning. We decided to give up the harbor for someplace warmer and drier. I think Munoz could have stayed longer.

"This is where I relax, big time," he said, folding his tripod. "Out here, I've never seen anything bad happen. Nobody lies to you, nobody sticks you up, nobody shoots at you, nobody gets murdered. I love it."

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.