Though we racked up double-digit lifers in Colorado, that trip is a distant birding memory. The birding back home has been incredibly exciting. More is at play than just adding a life bird or getting that beautiful photo. Instead, there’s been some serious citizen-science going on.
Let me get to the point. I believe that the Blue Grosbeak is expanding its range in Minnesota and growing in numbers, so I have been doing some investigating to back up my theory. I can remember when I first became a birder how I badly wanted to see a Blue Grosbeak. Imagine my surprise then, when I learned that they are a rare, regular species in the very southwestern corner of Minnesota. Specifically, Blue Mounds State Park in Rock County is the place to see them. That’s where we got our lifer last year.
Range map of the Blue Grosbeak from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/blue_grosbeak/id
But then I saw them further to the northeast at Cottonwood in each of the last two years when they were discovered by Garrett Wee. I started to get curious about this species growing in numbers when Garrett reported them two years in a row. Additionally he found a nest this year. The site fidelity was intriguing.
Randy Frederickson furthered my curiosity when he said he was hoping to someday find a Blue Grosbeak in Kandiyohi County. I could hardly believe that he would think it was possible, but then he told me how he and Joel Schmidt found a family of Blue Grosbeaks in Renville County just six miles south of the Renville-Kandiyohi county line in 2012. So last week I decided to head to this location in Renville County which was the Olivia compost site. I wanted to see if the Blue Grosbeaks were still around a couple years later. If they were, I wanted to document them for eBird. Some birders have been documenting their Blue Grosbeak sightings, and it is apparent that the Blue Grosbeak has gone beyond its normal Minnesota home of Rock County, the very southwestern corner of the state.
The red dot is where we live. Blue Grosbeaks have traditionally been found in just the very southwestern corner of Minnesota which is much less territory than what this sightings map indicates
I did not find any Blue Grosbeaks at the compost site where Randy and Joel found them two years prior. Not wanting to waste a trip, I had scouted satellite imagery of the area ahead of time looking for any gravel pits or waste areas as Blue Grosbeaks prefer this type of habitat. In our sea of green, these areas are habitat islands. Unlike the arid southwest, this type of desert-wash habitat is rare here and makes for easy places to look for the Blue Grosbeak. If they are in the area, they are going to be in one of these pockets of habitat.
I checked out the gravel pit pictured above just a mile from where the Blue Grosbeaks were seen in 2012. Almost immediately upon arriving I heard a singing male Blue Grosbeak. I was absolutely thrilled, even more so when I finally got to lay eyes on it.
Blue Grosbeak at NE corner of gravel pit on west side of 300th St. just south of 840th Ave.
I was pretty pleased with the find and reported the bird to the listserv, MOU-net, so other birders could see it. But after I was at home and studying satellite images again, I realized I didn’t fully explore the area. It turns out that the pit I stopped at is part of about a four-mile tract of old gravel pits. I went back two days later intent to check out more of the area. When I got to the site of the Grosbeak pictured above, I ran into Ron Erpelding and Herb Dingmann who had just seen the bird and were listening to a second bird nearly a mile away from the first one! Now I was really excited to get my search underway. I took every north-south road that intersected this tract of gravel deposits. And on each road I found a singing male Blue Grosbeak! With Ron and Herb’s bird, that made for five male Blue Grosbeaks. It was unbelievable yet believable because of the habitat I was exploring.
Locations of where I found Blue Grosbeak males; the bottom-right marker is the bird found by Ron Erpelding and Herb Dingmann
Blue Grosbeak at the Danube Brush Site just north of Danube on Co. Rd. 1
Blue Grosbeak on 280th St. south of 840th Ave. where 280th intersects the gravel pits.
Blue Grosbeak sub-adult male on 270th St. in the trees just south of 840th Ave.
Several birders have made their way to Renville County to find some of these Blue Grosbeaks. What has been phenomenal is that they are turning up more Blue Grosbeaks at these sites and in other counties while en route! One was found in Chippewa County by Ron and Herb that same day, and a family of three was found by Ken Larson to the west in Lac qui Parle County. With this volume of Blue Grosbeaks so far from Rock County, it seems that this species is definitely making its home further north and east than where it is “supposed” to be. Any bit of suitable habitat in the southern half of the state should be investigated by Minnesota birders. I have been studying satellite imagery for any hint of gravel or waste areas in area that is dominated by agricultural fields. I’m particularly interested in finding one here in Kandiyohi County. We are hopeful that one will make the jump six miles north if one hasn’t already.
The green line is the Kandiyohi County and Renville County Line – Blue Grosbeaks are only six miles away!
The only problem, though, is that we have no gravel pits to speak of in the southern half of our county. The best and closest habitat, a very large area of several gravel pits, is about 30 miles northeast of all these Grosbeaks.
We have already been getting a lot of the necessary permissions to enter these lands to begin our search. Hopefully we can turn one up.
It has been very exciting to not only see Blue Grosbeaks, but to be a witness to a potential range expansion. Evan asked me the other day, “What’s the big deal about the Blue Grosbeak anyway, is it because it has that red wing-patch or something?” Yeah, something like that.
Coming up: cool by-product birds from the Blue Grosbeak searches.
Are you sick of Swainson’s Hawk photos yet? Too bad! It’s probably the coolest hawk I know, and there’s even more coming in a future post!
We also saw a couple of Brown Thrashers, and I even spied a Loggerhead Shrike in a bush as we flew past. I was too frustrated with the stop-and-go travel to make many voluntary stops for pictures, though.
This was quite the thrill seeing this cool bird. Every new western species I find is a double bonus – it is one more for the life list and one less vagrant to chase in Minnesota. I missed out on a Clark’s in Minnesota just before I really got serious about birding.
The yard-birding was fantastic here. I smiled as I heard and saw more Spotted Towhees than I could count, many of them cheerfully hopping just a few feet from me. Broad-tailed Hummingbirds were heard more often than seen as their metallic buzzing would alert you to their presence.
Its throat is really not black. To show you what I mean, here is another shot of that same Broad-tailed pictured above. It looks black here, but you can see above how red it really is when the sun hits it.
I did get an empid that I felt was a pretty solid ID with that yellow tinge and tear-drop eye-ring. This one is a Cordilleran Flycatcher. Life bird.
Then there was a life bird that was not hard to ID and whose name is not soon forgotten by birders or non-birders alike – the Bushtit! And the bushes, or Pinyon Pines rather, were hopping with these tiny Bushtits.
Aunt Carol kept giggling over the name when she asked what birds I saw. She even said she wanted to see some Bushtits for herself. At this point I’d like to take an aside to say that I’m glad Evan is learning all the “dirty” bird names now before he hits upper elementary. Names like Bushtits, Blue-footed Boobies, Brown Boobies, and some others are just bird names to him, no different than Northern Cardinal or Pine Siskin. Some day the dam will break, and he will soon be giggling too. But for now it’s just science to him. I’d like to take a second aside to say that I’ve never seen such Boobies, just Dickcissels. Sad, no?
Moving on from this spot I kept up hope that we would see the tanagers on the way out. One bird I stopped to check out was interesting for me to see here in Colorado even though I’ve seen hundreds in northern Minnesota, a female Evening Grosbeak.
Evan’s cousin Andrew showed him the ropes for catching these cool lizards, and Evan caught this one all on his own. As someone who had cages full of lizards as a kid, I wanted to keep this one in the worst way. Even Melissa said it was cute. If Evan had asked, I couldn’t say no. But he didn’t ask, so there was no moral dilemma of the lizard variety.
From reading the eBird reports I was expecting to find Western Scrub Jays. It took me awhile, but I found a couple of this life bird.
Finally. After an eight-year hiatus, the great American road-trip was reborn in our family. There’s something liberating about heading out on the open road putting hundreds of miles under our seats, crossing numerous state lines and seeing new sights. Our kids are to the age where they are now able to tolerate such intense travel and enjoy it too. This summer we were headed to the mountains of Colorado to visit my aunt and uncle in their beautiful mountain home.
The expanse of the Badlands goes for miles, and I could have photographed them all day, but I was distracted by the birds. When we stopped at one of the first scenic overlooks I caught sight of a blue bird. It turned out to be our Mountain Bluebird lifer.
I could not believe how accessible death was at this place. Sure there are fun hills to climb like pictured above, but the other side is a doozy. This canyon was well over 100 feet down.
It was fun to look at the bottom of this barren piece of earth and see a family of Say’s Phoebes, another good western bird.
What a good little stop this was – three quick lifers and a fun place to stretch the legs after a long drive. But we had more Badlands to see and hopefully more birds too, so we continued on our drive through the park. We spied Western Kingbirds wherever there were trees on which they could perch. Such a fun bird.
After securing a tidy haul of life birds and enjoying the scenery, it was time to make our way to the Black Hills of South Dakota to meet up with the presidents at Keystone. The most notable bird seen along the way was a Red-headed Woodpecker – always a treat to find.
This particular warbler has class, choosing the nicest, tallest White Pine right by those government buildings to call his home.
I spent a lot of time with this warbler observing and photographing it. When there is no pressure to find a life bird, I really enjoy spending time watching and photographing a particular species that I enjoy. It was fun to watch this guy as he sang his heart out constantly, shaking his whole body with each song. I really like their trilling song which is a higher, sweeter version of a Chipping Sparrow’s song.
A good sighting like that made a beautiful day even more beautiful.
Not bad birding around the parents’ farm. I also sneaked away one morning on a quick solo mission to hike the Vermilion Gorge trail by Crane Lake on a tip from local birder, Dee Kuder, to look for Pine Warblers. Pine Warbler is a hole in my warbler life list, and I always forget about this drab warbler during migration and when I’m up north. It’s like that quiet kid in the classroom – always there but greatly overshadowed by the more gaudy and boisterous warbler children. Today was the day to look for the Pine. Evan declined my offer to go on this hike.
