2014’s Last Big Gift

By all rights I should have written a post commemorating the incredible birding year of 2014 by doing a Top Ten birds post or something similar. It sounds corny, but this year has been unimaginable and would be deserving of such cliche.  Evan and I ended with 72 and 96 life birds respectively.  Highlights included tallying eight new species of ducks and seeing 30 individual owls of 8 different species.  Additionally I found three official county records and a host of other rare birds for the county, not to mention the many rare birds we’ve seen found by others.  2014 was a year of gifts, and in a fitting fashion, there was one last gift that would usurp any year-end reflective post.

We recently made our usual Christmastime trek to the northwoods to spend some time with Melissa’s family.  My family is already in Arizona for the season.  As is the custom, we pass through the Sax-Zim Bog on the way home. After our Great Gray Owl success over Thanksgiving and after having my Facebook feed littered with GGOW pictures all December, I figured seeing the owls again was a lock. Nope. We were there the wrong time of day (mid-morning), and the sun was out. With the gloomy weather the past month the owls could be found actively hunting all day long.  Apparently they are now less photogenic and are being found late in the afternoon and early in the morning.

My hopes for the trip were not over though as I decided to take the next morning to head down to Duluth to look for a Townsend’s Solitaire and a Northern Hawk Owl.  I struck out on both but still held up hopes for good stuff when coming back north through the Bog. Again, the GGOWs were playing hide-and-seek, where they were doing a lot more hiding than seeking.  I had some other goals for the Bog, which included seeing/photographing the resident Boreal Chickadees as well as getting a lifer Black-backed Woodpecker that had been pretty regular.  Well, the chickadees were a no-show, and I missed the woodpecker by 5 min. This was turning out to be a bleak trip up north as far as birds go.

Gray Jay

The next day, though, I received a birding gift that surpassed anything I was searching for. It was perfect – so much so that I hadn’t even thought to put it on my Christmas list.  That morning while returning from taking care of my dogs who were staying at my parents’ house, I stumbled upon a lone, male Spruce Grouse pecking grit off the side of the road along a black spruce bog.  I was ecstatic.  The last time I saw one was about 15 years ago, long before I was a birder, and it was only the third one I’d ever seen.

Spruce Grouse

Spruce Grouse

Surprisingly the SPGR was somewhat wary of me despite their nickname of “Fool Hen.” It flew from spruce bough to spruce bough allowing me some good looks and photographs before disappearing into the dense spruce bog.  I was hoping to have it stick around for Evan’s sake since he was just a few miles away.

Spruce Grouse

They are incredibly beautiful birds and quite the prize bird in Minnesota.  It was quite a thrill to see the intricate and bold patterns of this grouse species.  It very well may be one of my favorite sightings of 2014 even though it was not a life bird.

Later that day we headed to Melissa’s Grandma’s house for some coffee and a game of Farkle and some birds.  The drive over was eventful as a half dozen escaped horses were all over the road.  We stopped at the farm house to let the owner know and were delighted to see he was home and that he had an Ermine running around his yard, all decked out in it’s sporting white winter coat.  We didn’t just stop for horses and weasels, though. There were, of course, Pine Grosbeaks.

Pine Grosbeak

Though this PIGR appears legless and taxidermied with a stick poking into its mannequin body, I can assure you it is real and my best photo yet of this species.

The birds and treats at Grandma’s did not disappoint as Grandma puts out a spread nary a grandkid or Evening Grosbeak can resist.  Though this species was once very common in the northland, its population has declined dramatically and has become quite  the prize bird, visiting only select feeders.  Grandma Evelyn’s is just such a place.  Many breaks were taken from the intense Farkle game to look at these beauties.

Evening Grosbeak

Evening Grosbeak

I love the color variation of all sides of this bird.  It was a special treat to be able to photograph them on a perfectly sunny day.

Evening Grosbeak

Evening GrosbeakWith cravings for goodies and grosbeaks satisfied, it was hard to complain about getting whooped by Grandma in Farkle.  We left with full bellies and content hearts, satisfied yet already yearning for the next visit.  It was a great day in the northwoods with its birds and people!

Iron Range Birding Scraps

In any project there is inevitably scrap material left over.  Some pieces of lumber, fabric, etc. are just too good to discard, or more likely, the memories of long-gone, thrifty grandparents guilt us in to keeping these items.  So we pile our garages and closets full of such things until they can be re-purposed, which never, ever happens. Except for today. The trip up north yielded two solid projects with the Great Gray Owl adventure and the Golden-crowned Sparrow chase, but there were plenty of good birding scraps that I couldn’t waste.  In fact, they might even be worthy of being displayed on my 4th-grade science fair tri-fold that was stowed away in Grandma’s garage for decades.

Not every bird scrap here will have a photo.  That’s just how it goes sometimes.  Good bird sightings are good bird sightings period.  So let’s kick off this post with the birds that were not photographed.

Black-billed Magpie

Black-billed Magpie is a great northern Minnesota bird, and the Sax-Zim Bog is the furthest-east that it is known to breed.  Lately they have been popping up all over the Iron Range in the open agricultural areas.  I found four a couple months ago just a few miles from my parents’ house. This trip I saw one fly across my in-laws’ gravel road.  This was my best non-Great Gray Owl/non-Golden-crowned Sparrow sighting of the trip. I have traveled that road for almost 20 years and have never seen one there before.

Rough-legged Hawk

This is flat-out one of the best hawks.  Many migrate through Minnesota during late fall, and since we’ve been birders I have seen them every time we visit up north this time of year.  I am now starting to associate Thanksgiving with this bird instead of the turkey.  Anyhow, just moments before that Black-billed Magpie, I got my best-ever look at a gorgeous light-morph perched on a power pole by the road.  We were on our way to a family gathering so I didn’t have time to stop and photograph it.  I did drive real slow when I went by, and that hawk and I locked eyes while it pivoted its head watching me when I went past, just like an owl would do.  Super-cool.

Pine Grosbeaks

This bird was seemingly everywhere on the trip.  I bet I saw over two dozen in various places.  My sightings occurred exclusively as birds getting grit from the middle of roads.  Anytime I stopped to get a photograph, they would split. Though I have seen gobs of these things on feeders long before I was a birder, this bird has eluded my camera since I got into birding.  There was that one crummy cell-phone pic a couple years ago.  I guess this one is a step-up.  FYI – rolling down the windows of a toasty vehicle and then immediately taking pictures in the cold does not work; the heat waves from the car create interference in the picture.  Instead, keep the windows down a bit as you roll along or turn down the heat.

Pine Grosbeak

Northern Shrikes

What birder doesn’t love a shrike of any stripe?  Fall is the time when the Northerns replace the Loggerheads.  Unlike the rare Loggerhead, the Northern Shrike is not terribly uncommon anywhere in the state during the winter.  I found two when I drove through the Sax-Zim Bog on my way home from Duluth.

Northern Shrike

Northern Shrike

Ruffed Grouse – aka “grouse” to Minnesotans at large, aka “partridge” to Iron Rangers

We went to Melissa’s Grandma’s house on Turkey Day.  This is always a fascinating place to do some birding while eating Grandma Evelyn’s delicious food and sipping some coffee.  Pine Grosbeaks, Evening Grosbeaks, a Great Gray Owl next door.  You know, the usual stuff.  Knowing this, I walked up to the house with my camera in hand, eager to see what goodies were on Evelyn’s feeders.  A large bird at the top of a birch tree immediately caught my attention.

Ruffed Grouse

It was a grouse! Grouse in northern Minnesota are practically as common as chickens in a barnyard, but it was fun to see one so tame and without a care in the world other than stuffing his crop with all the birch catkins he could eat.  Apparently he knew he wasn’t the bird of choice on this day and was safe from those who craved poultry. In fact, I walked all around the tree right underneath him while he busily ate the catkins.

Ruffed Grouse

Ruffed Grouse

This was a real treat to be able to photograph this bird so close.  The Ruffed Grouse has been a favorite bird of mine ever since I was a 13-year-old kid and had one flush across a wooded path right in front of me, and then it strutted on a log.  One thing I particularly enjoyed about this grouse at Evelyn’s house was its long, red-phase tail.  The long tail indicates that this is a male.  Ruffed Grouse tails come in a gray phase or a red phase with a lot of variation in between.  Most of the birds I see are gray phase. Here is a sample of this variation from Gordon Gullion’s The Ruffed Grouse. Gullion states that there are up to 30 color variations in the tails and provides loads of statistics on the rarity of the different types.  The best tail feather I ever found as a kid was a gray-phase tail with an orange sub-terminal band instead of the traditional black.

Ruffed GrouseFun fact from Gullion’s book: It is well-known that Ruffed Grouse completely burrow into powdery snow to keep warm on cold winter days.  However, what is not well known is that the Great Gray Owl is the only known predator that can hear the grouse in their burrows and pluck them out of the snow!  How cool is that?! Here I thought Great Grays just ate small rodents.  As Gullion says, it’s fortunate for Ruffed Grouse that Great Gray Owls are not very numerous in northern Minnesota.  If I ever witnessed such predation, I might have to hang up my binoculars and camera because it just wouldn’t get any better than that.  Fortunately, Evelyn’s grouse doesn’t have to worry about such things yet with low snow totals.  But he sure looks plump for the pickin’.

Ruffed Grouse