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Outdoors column: Sun halo over beach coincides with rare bird sighting

While searching for a rare and beautiful harlequin duck at Illinois Beach State Park on a recent cold day, I looked to the sky to see a halo surrounding the sun.

The bright globe was completely encircled by a round gray shadow. A closer look revealed a thin line of reddish-brown encircling the halo. It was eerie, beautiful and mysterious.

Perhaps the halo served as a sign that the rare bird was there. We did indeed see it after a few hours of patiently waiting. Oftentimes, harlequin ducks seen around northern Illinois over the winter and into spring aren’t wearing their full gorgeous breeding plumage. But this one was.

Its deep blue body was decorated with white stripes and chestnut on the sides. Its head sported a white crescent by the eye with more chestnut on the face. Harlequin ducks are rare along the Lake Michigan coastline in northern Illinois, and seeing a full-breeding plumaged male is even less common.

Seeing a sun halo and a harlequin duck on the same day along Lake Michigan in northern Illinois was, to me, an even more unusual natural experience.

Sun halos on their own are not that rare, however. Meteorologists say a halo can occur anywhere on the planet during winter or summer around the sun as well as around the moon.

Certain conditions are required. Delicate, wispy cirrus clouds must be present high in the sky. They typically are 20,000 feet or more above the Earth’s surface and are composed of millions of microscopic ice crystals, which refract or bend the light coming from the sun.

The tiny crystals need to be positioned in just the right place for our eyes to see the halo. What’s fascinating is that each person who looks at a sun halo is seeing it differently from another person standing nearby.

It’s another one of nature’s mysteries, for example, the fact that no two snowflakes are alike.

A much rarer optical occurrence is a sun dog, twin pillars of light that show up on both sides of the sun. Ice crystals high in the atmosphere bend the light to create the sun dogs, but these require more conditions, including the sun being at a certain angle, the ice crystals being at a certain shape and the temperatures being extremely cold.

A sun dog was seen in northern Illinois in December 2022, when the temperature, with the wind chill factor, dipped to negative-30 degrees. The term sun dog may have come from a Greek mythological story that says when Zeus walked his dogs in the sky, mortals below saw two false suns, one on either side of the real sun.

Sun halos and sun dogs can be enjoyed as beautiful optical phenomena, but they also offer a clue to the coming weather. Their presence signals that moisture is in the air, and that a rain or snowstorm may occur a day or two after they’ve been seen. Sun halos, it seems, are better able to predict weather than the woolly bear caterpillar.

The saying, “red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning,” does hold some merit as well. Meteorologists say if you see the red sky in the east in the morning, it’s a sign of a low-pressure system heading toward you, bringing precipitation with it. If you see a red sky at sunset, it means a high-pressure system, one without moisture, is heading your way.

I sometimes look into the sky at night for red in the west, which could mean the next day will be a good one for getting outdoors. That hasn’t always shown to be the case.

But the day after the sun halo shone down on Lake Michigan as winter melded into spring, it did indeed rain. Both the halo and the rain remind me that nature has much to tell us, and to look in the sky more often.

Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor and photographer for the Chicago Tribune and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment. Send story ideas and thoughts to sheryldevorewriter@gmail.com.