Let’s Go Birding?

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Almost two weeks ago now, our family made the 265 mile trek to see both my wife’s family and my family who live 8 miles apart on the same gravel road in northern Minnesota.  After the flurry of having Christmas at our own house, packing up, and driving, we arrived Up North late at night on Saturday, the 22nd. The next day started out just as busy as we headed to town in the morning for church and then out to the house of some old family friends for lunch.  Finally we got back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and Evan immediately said, “Let’s go birding!”  It was nearly zero outside, but Evan, my dad, and I all donned our outdoor gear and went out for a short walk in the woods.  It wasn’t too cold, and there was less than a half a foot of snow.  It should be a good time, right?

Black-Capped Chickadee

Well, we got into the woods which were eerily absent of life – there weren’t even our favorite friendly Black-Capped Chickadees fluttering about. We had walked about the equivalent of two city blocks when the chaotic pace of traveling and the Christmas season finally caught up to my buddy and caused him to crash.  There he was, knees in the snow and crying,  “I can’t walk any more!”  We were less than a quarter mile from the house and decided to head back.  That is to say, all of us but Evan.  He was still knees in the snow, head down, and pouting with his bottom lip stuck way out (as we say in our house, ‘a bird will poop on that thing.’).  So I had to take off my birding buddy hat and replace it with my Dad hat. In these moments of moodiness, Evan wouldn’t listen or comply with my instruction to keep walking back to the house.  He was not budging from his spot in the snow.  Too heavy to pick up and carry, I had to alternate between pulling him along by gripping his coat and walking ahead and waiting.  It was the birding outing that wasn’t.  Before I could let disappointment slip in, I remembered that he was 5 and that he chose this pasttime.  It was okay if he needed a break today.  After all, he had some new presents to play with and Grandma’s cookies to eat.

Apparently the break continued for awhile. Earlier that day when we were at our friends’ house, we watched their feeders and talked birds.  Our friend, Al, gave us a tip that they had a pair of Gray Jays show up every morning for just an hour or so on the suet feeder.  I’d never seen one, and I knew Evan hadn’t either.  What a great addition it would be to his Life List!  Nearly a week after the birding debacle in the woods and after the chaos of Christmas had settled down, I asked Evan if he wanted to go see those Jays.  Nope.  I asked him a couple more times before our visit Up North was over.  Nothing doing.  Was my little birder gone?  Fortunately I don’t think so.  I think he was just worn out from all of the recent activity of seeing so much family and being away from home for a week.  I know his birding spirit wasn’t completely gone.  On our drive home, I spotted a Bald Eagle perched near the road atop a dead pine tree.  Stunning.  When I told Evan there was an eagle, he shouted, “Where?!”  Nope, he’s not gone.  He just needs a rest and a bird spark.

Maybe you can help us with that spark.  What’s your favorite bird that visits your area?  Evan loves looking up birds on his Audobon Society Bird App on his iPod, and he’s developing a better sense of geography.  Who knows, maybe our travels will land us at your door someday to see your bird.

A Birder’s Christmas

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Merry Christmas!

Like many kids this Christmas, Evan got to open lots of presents whose contents ranged from toy helicopters to the ever practical sweatshirt.  What was different for Evan compared to his peers, however, is that he also got some gifts that will help him take his birding to the next level.  The first of those, and most practical, is a set of binoculars that are his size.  In an earlier post, A Glowing Flame in the Treetops, I mentioned that Evan struggled with binoculars and could not view the exciting Blackburnian Warbler. Hopefully, we won’t have that problem any more!

The other big birding gift, which may not seem like a birding gift, was an iPod. I know, I know, many of you may wonder why a five-year-old needs an iPod. There are many reasons that we got him one (educational games, music device, etc), but one of those reasons is the Audobon Society’s Bird App. This is a very cool app that allows Evan to go through a pictorial index of birds, click on them, and then listen to their songs and call notes. It makes bird identification a whole lot easier when you can learn the auditory component. So, when he’s not listening to and singing along with Justin Bieber on his iPod, he can listen to bird songs so he’ll be prepared the next time we go out birding!

It also seems that we have another birder in training as you can see in the photo below.  The other day Marin and I were watching a group of about 10 pheasants when she exclaimed, “I want to see more pheasants!”  As she takes all her cues from her older brother and watches him like a hawk (another intended pun), I have no doubt that she’ll be birding right with us in a few years!

(P.S. Check out Evan’s updated Life List page.  Thank you, Jason Wallestad, co-founder of School Newspapers Online, for helping me set up this page.)

A Glowing Flame in the Treetops

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It’s cold outside, so there’s not a lot of birding going on with the Team.  We’re anxious for warm spring days with more hours of daylight where we can get out and add new birds to our life lists and see some of our familiar favorites again. For now, however, we can reflect on some of our adventures from last summer.

Last spring I purchased a Jayco pop-up camper so I could take my family on all kinds of camping trips.  For two teachers with young kids, there couldn’t be a better way to enjoy our summer vacation.  One of our camping trips landed us at Bear Head Lake State Park near Ely, MN.  With its pristine lakes and towering stands of white and red pines, it is no wonder that it was voted as America’s Favorite Park in a 2010 nationwide campaign sponsored by Coca-Cola.

Minnesota’s State Parks have a variety of programs and activities nearly every day.  Coincidentally, one of those programs when we were at Bear Head was a birding walk with a local birding expert.  Perfect.  So Evan and I woke up early to meet the tour guide and other birders at the visitor center for a 7 AM start.  That’s right, the early bird gets the…bird.  About twenty of us walked the paths and roads of the park just to see what we could see.  The group would stop whenever a bird was spotted or heard.  We observed a variety of birds including the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker, Red-Eyed Vireo, Mourning Warbler, Chestnut-Sided Warbler, Ruffed Grouse, and several others.  As we walked, the guide educated us on the songs and habits of many of these birds. Birding is a visual and auditory experience.  I found the guide’s information on bird songs so helpful.  If you’ve never been in the woods in northern Minnesota in the summertime, then you don’t realize just how noisy it is with bird songs!  Armed with our new knowledge, however, Evan and I learned to easily discern the songs of the different species.  He is better at it than I am.

Toward the end of our walk, our guide spotted a Blackburnian Warbler.  She was watching it with her binoculars about 30 yards in front of us.  I strained to see it through my binoculars, but I just couldn’t pick it out.  I was frustrated because this was a bird I really wanted to see.  In his Field Guide to Birds of North America, Kenn Kaufman appropriately describes this bird as a “glowing flame of the tree tops.”  Still not seeing the bird, we moved on and finished up our tour.

Photo Credit: Chris Thomas

The next day Evan and I went for a walk on the same path that our tour went on the day before.  We were after one goal – to find the Blackburnian Warbler.  We got to the same place the guide had spotted one, a gravel road running through a mixed stand of white pines and aspen trees about 50-60 feet tall.  Evan and I had been listening to the Blackburnian’s song on the Audobon Society’s Bird Field Guide App the day before.  As we walked this road, we heard the song.  Instantly our eyes were scanning all around the tops of the trees as that is where these warblers tend to dwell.  Finally we saw a bird flitting about, but I could not make a positive ID through the binoculars, especially since branches and leaves obscured our ability to see him.  Evan hasn’t figured out how to master binoculars yet, so he was just using his naked eyesight.  I lost sight of the bird, but Evan picked it out.  This bird is about 4 in. long in the top of a 60 foot tree, and he spotted it with his naked eye! It just happened to be on a bare branch.  I put the glasses up and looked.  Sure enough, this gorgeous orange-headed bird popped against the bright green leaves of the trees.  What a treat it was to see!  If only Evan could have seen it up close and shared in this excitement.  This was a classic birding experience – seeing what we set out to find. We can’t wait to go out and find other fascinating birds this coming spring.

These amazing photos were taken by Chris Thomas, someone I met through Twitter.  Chris is from the UK and has photographed over 500 bird species in the UK and US.  He has graciously allowed me to use some of his photographs for this post.  I highly recommend visiting his website of bird pics: Christ Thomas American Bird Photography.

                                       Photo Credit: Chris Thomas

 

Couch-Potato Birding…

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…also known as bird watching.  What’s the difference between bird watching and birding? Quite a bit actually.  Bird watching is a more passive activity in which feeders are set out and you wait to see who comes by for meal. Usually people bird watch from the comfort of their homes. On the other hand, birding is a much more active pasttime that involves going out into different types of habitat to locate and identify as many birds as possible, or it is simply an effort to go hunting a specific species.  It can be quite physical as you need to do a lot of hiking and moving about.  While successful bird watching requires patience and luck, birding success comes about by doing one’s homework on bird habitats, migratory patterns, and bird behaviors. Then you need to know the subtle differences in bird species to make an identification on the fly (pun intended). By actually going out to look for birds in different areas, you stand to find many more types of birds than just staying home where there is a limit on the species you’re going to see.  In a future post I will describe how this more active approach played a role in turning me on to birds.

Northern Cardinal Male

So is our Team a group of birdwatchers or birders? Both.  We all enjoy the hunt of going into the field, and we also love to watch what comes to the feeder.  Right now in the middle of winter, my wife and I lead busy lives as teachers who are raising two kids under the age of 5.  There isn’t a lot of time to go birding right now, unfortunately.  It’s also really cold in Minnesota.  So we do a lot of couch-potato birding – making sure the feeder is kept full of seeds and the suet cage is stocked with delicious animal fat, and then we sit inside the house and watch.  We’ve never fed the birds consistently in the winter before this year.  What success we have had since we started a couple months ago!  I had no idea that we would get so many cool species dropping by.  We had a lot of activity yesterday: a pair of Northern Cardinals, Blue Jays, a Red-Bellied Woodpecker, a Downy Woodpecker, Dark-Eyed Juncos, Eurasian Collared Doves, Black-Capped Chickadees, and a whole assortment of sparrows.  One note on the Red-Bellied Woodpecker: its name is a misnomer.  The only red on it is on the back of its head.  Go figure.  You can see this in the photograph beneath this one of the Downy Woodpecker.

Downy Woodpecker

Not all the pictures in this post are from yesterday; some are from earlier this fall.  We’ve also had the Pileated Woodpecker drop by (Holy cow, are they big and prehistoric-looking!), and we’ve had both the White-Breasted and Red-Breasted Nuthatches.  We even had the Hairy Woodpecker.  The Hairy and the Downy look nearly identical, except one is a couple inches longer than the other.  I missed a golden opportunity to highlight this difference with a photograph when both species were on the suet feeder at the same time.

I realize we don’t have high quality bird photos to show you, but we are amateurs who are just getting started in this hobby.  (I just found out about phone scopes  – super cool!) It is my goal to be able to photograph birds well so that we can have attractive photos for you and make our stories that much more exciting.  If you are a birder who has some advice for bird photography, help us out by giving us some advice.  For now, though, I hope you can appreciate some of the diversity we’ve had in our bird feeder activity.

 

Red-Bellied Woodpecker and Blue Jay

Pileated Woodpecker

Bird On

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Like everyone across the country, I am deeply saddened by the shootings in Connecticut. It is simply unimaginable. Sadly, many of us have gotten used to these public rampages, but this one was different. Kindergartners. Lots of them. This one hit especially close to home as my wife and I are both teachers, and Evan, the Captain of our birding team, is in Kindergarten. I cannot imagine the hell those parents are living or how those remaining teachers will pick up the pieces.

I didn’t hear the news until late in the school day, and so I walked out of school with a heavy heart. As I got near my vehicle in the parking lot, I was startled by a Bald Eagle that was flying low about 30 yards from me! Wow. They are amazing birds but even more so up close. It was an unexpected encounter, and I tried to fumble for my phone to snap a pic. But I was too slow and all thumbs, and the moment was gone before I knew it. Regardless, I found myself wanting to get home just a little bit quicker to share this news with my birding buddy. My five-year-old was at home – safe. That was treasure enough on this day. This news that I was about to bring him was just the icing on the cake. It was a reminder that life moves forward and that we need to spend our time cherishing our loved ones and doing the things that make them tick.

I finally arrived home and was gathering my things out of the car when out of my peripheral vision I noticed something flying. Looking up I saw a Trumpeter Swan flying low and alone over our cul-de-sac! What?! We just had a blizzard last weekend dumping nearly 18 in. of snow, and the temps have been below zero over night. Once again I couldn’t get my phone out fast enough. Now I really couldn’t wait to get in the house to tell Evan about my sightings. As I came into the house he was in the entryway, and I told him I had two pieces of exciting news. Before I could share my news, he replied, “Dad! Dad! Me too! I just saw a Trumpeter Swan flying!” To be able to share a moment like that on any day would be special, but on this day it was a moment to remember.

Life is fragile, but it’s beautiful and worth living. So hug your kids extra tight today and bird on.

Movie Night!

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This weekend is Evan’s Christmas program at church, and my parents are coming down to take it in. Since Evan and I will be around Grandpa Rick, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to have a birding movie night. What do birders watch on movie night? The Big Year.

Maybe you’ve never heard of it. After all, it is full of lesser-known actors such as Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson. But if you have heard of it, you know why the three of us need to watch this together. The Big Year is a story about three different birders who are trying to complete a “big year” and become Birder of the Year. In the birding world, a “big year” is where you try to sight as many bird species as you can in a single calendar year. The movie portrays this sub-culture as quite competitive as these birders race the clock traversing the country trying to get the most birds on their lists. This along with all the footage of bird species makes it a compelling movie for us to watch, but the human story is just as intriguing. Steve Martin plays a corporate executive who breaks free from that world to do his big year. Owen Wilson’s character is basically a professional birder who is trying to defend his title of Birder of the Year. Jack Black plays an office worker who is going nowhere in life but has a passion for birding. As all three embark on this quest to become Birder of the Year, their paths often intertwine and their interactions become cutthroat. By the end of the movie, however, deep friendships emerge that trump the competition. Evan may miss the lessons of the movie, but he no doubt will be thrilled to see these the beautiful landscapes and the many images of birds.

More Than Just a Name

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So, how did I come up with the name for this blog? The answer goes beyond having a catchy title, though that was important to me so that people’s curiosity might be peaked and so that it would be easily remembered when they wanted to check it out.  While that’s true, there are two main reasons how the title came about.

First, in the cover photo of the blog, Evan is literally screaming, “Great blue heron!” as he was excited to see one standing on the shores of Pelican Lake near Orr, MN.  That photo captures Evan  perfectly.  His excitement is palpable.  Long before this blog came to be, that photo was seared into my memory because it captures his love of birds so perfectly.

The second, and most interesting reason, how the title came to be has to do with a bird discovery Evan made all on his own.  Because of Evan’s interest in birds, we started faithfully feeding the birds at our house.  One species of birds that was a regular visitor was the mourning dove.  Often we’d have over a dozen bopping around the yard and feeder.  Evan spent a lot of time watching all the birds out the window.  When he wasn’t doing that, he was flipping through his Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, page by page, over and over.  

One day Evan opened his bird book and excitedly claimed that we had one of these other species of doves that was listed in his field guide.  He said it didn’t have spots like the mourning doves.  Since he is not yet a reader, he had to ask us the name of any bird he didn’t know in his book.  The bird that Evan claimed to see was the Eurasian Collared Dove.  In a reversal of “The boy who cried ‘wolf’,” I didn’t believe him at first.  I thought he was mistaken.  I had never even heard of this dove, let alone seen one. The colored range map in the book did not show Minnesota in its range.

One day when I was outside, I saw a monster-sized dove in the driveway.  It was far bigger than all the other doves ambling about.  I sneaked inside to grab the binoculars to get a closer look.  Sure enough, it was paler in color than the rest and it had the signature black bar on its neck of the Collared Dove.  It matched the book’s description perfectly of the Eurasian Collared Dove. I started looking at the range map a little more closely and noticed a dotted line that ran through Minnesota, and the description contained these words, “Native to Old Word.  Became established in Florida in the 1980s.  Now rapidly expanding range to west and north; has reached Arizona, Montana, New York; likely to colonize much of the continent.”  Huh. That dotted line I had taken for granted on first glance had meant they were becoming permanent residents of the great state of Minnesota.  Evan was right!  I couldn’t believe his attention-to-detail as a five-year-old (see for yourself in the pics below for the difference between a Mourning Dove and a Eurasian Collared Dove).  I never would have noticed this dove if it weren’t for Evan.  My confidence in his birding ability went way up.  From now on, I will trust him when he makes a birding claim.  So the title of the blog alludes to the story of the boy who cried “wolf.”  But unlike that story where trust was given blindly and then revoked, Evan started with the disadvantage of mistrust and earned my respect and trust as a birder in his own right.

Eurasian Collared Dove

 

Mourning Dove

 

 

 


Rooster!

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While Evan and I are beginning birders (those who find excitement in seeing birds ALIVE), I have long been a wing-shooter whose primary pursuits have been the ring-necked pheasant and the ruffed grouse.  The fact that I have chased game birds for two decades played a significant role in my interest in birding.  I will go into that more some other day, but in this post I’d like to share a fun hunting story that Evan and I experienced.

Every time I head out pheasant hunting Evan asks if he can go along.  I have let him accompany me on short grouse hunts at Dad’s property where he can walk on trails, and he has sat with my Dad and me in the deer stand.  However, pheasant hunting is much more difficult.  Either I am walking in waist-high prairie grass or slogging my way through a cattail slough.  Needless to say, it is hard work, and I don’t let him come with me.

This Thanksgiving we did not make the 265 mile trek Up North.  Instead, we decided to stay home, and we were invited over by friends for Thanksgiving dinner.  That meant we woke up Thursday morning with no stress of traveling or making a feast.  That fact combined with beautiful weather of sunny skies and 45 degree temps meant I was going to go out for a quick pheasant hunt before feasting on that most delicious of all birds.  Basically I just wanted to get the dogs a little exercise.  I decided this would be the perfect day to take Evan along on an easy hunt.

I took Evan to a Wildlife Management Area that had a road winding through it.  It would be easy walking for him – we could take the road and let my two yellow labs, Faith and Chance, work the cover on the sides of the road. We parked the SUV at the farthest point that motorized vehicles were permitted and stepped outside to an immediate birding experience.  A hundred yards from us was a large slough (20 acres) that hadn’t froze over yet.  Right away about 50 mallards took flight, and gracefully gliding across the water were four swans!  I am not sure of the species at this point, but I think they were trumpeters.  Three were the brilliant white color, while one was a gray juvenile.  This was a big deal – Evan has been enthralled with Trumpeter Swans ever since we read E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan last spring.  They are definitely cool birds.

Less than five minutes into our walk on the road that ran around this slough, Faith’s tail started wagging ferociously – she was on a bird.  Not long after, Chance’s tail was moving faster than a helicopter rotor.  Both dogs were hot on scent and sprinting ahead.  This meant one thing – it was a pheasant, and it was a rooster at that.  Hens do not run and will sit extremely tight whereas roosters will run loooong ahead of you and may never jump up.  In fact, a couple weeks ago, I felt a hen’s wings beat against my leg as she flushed right next to my foot.  A couple days later, I got into a mess of about 15 hens that all flushed within 10 feet of me.  Because the dogs were on the move, I literally ran to catch up so I could be within gun range of a flushing pheasant.  I didn’t have to run long, thank goodness.  As I was watching my young, inexperienced Chance working I heard the unmistakable cackle and saw the flash of brilliant color burst into the sky right in front of his nose.  It was a left-to-right shot, and I pulled the gun up and shot.  I was surprised to see it drop; I usually miss at least the first shot.  Chance pinned the still lively rooster until I could reach it.

I couldn’t believe it.  I never thought we’d see anything.  Not only did we see a pheasant, but it was a shoot-able one that was flushed by my inexperienced (dumb) dog, shot by me (on the first shot), witnessed by Evan – all in the span of a five minute hunt.  We continued walking to try to find a second rooster to fill out my limit, but it just wasn’t to be.  At one point the dogs got birdy again.  Apparently Evan is a quick learner in his dad’s hunting abilities, or he has learned the art of smack talk.  As I followed the dogs this time, Evan hollered at me, “Be sure to shoot it in one shot!”  So if you’re a fellow
birder, don’t be offended by my hunting hobby – I have a pretty minimal effect on the pheasant population!

 

Let the Bird Stories Begin!

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For some time I have considered starting a blog in which my 5-year-old and I could detail our adventures as beginning birders.  Last night I finally took the plunge and bought a domain name and have begun work on this project.  Evan and I are new to the sport of birding, and I am new to the blogging world, so this will certainly be an adventure for everyone – readers included!

So how did this all come about?

Over the last couple years whenever my wife or I spotted a pretty bird out the window, like a cardinal or an oriole, we always reacted excitedly and pointed it out to our son, Evan, who is now 5.  While our enthusiasm faded over time, his never did.  When gold finches would cover the thistle feeder day after day, they just became part of the background.  Not to Evan.  Each day he saw one was like the very first time – sheer excitement.  As loving parents we would try our best to sound sincere and say, “Wow, would you look at that!”  It was fake at worst and half-hearted at best.

It’s a good thing that grandparents can pick up their kids’ slack when it comes to sharing the joy of a child.  It also helps that one of those grandparents is a former biologist who has a special affinity toward birds.  As we visited my parents one summer, Evan got excited over the birds on my dad’s feeder.  My dad, Rick, got just as excited and before long the two of them were buried in a bird identification guide looking up everything with wings.

As a dad, I admired this special bird connection between my son and my dad, but I did not share their level of interest.  That all changed when I had an encounter one day on my dad’s property in northern MN with a bird I had never seen or heard before – the chestnut-sided warbler.  From that point on, I was hooked on birding. Now the three of us share this hobby, and it is my goal to detail our adventures in this blog.

In a future post I will explain how I chose the title of the blog, but for now, the picture in the header is of Evan screaming, “Blue Heron!” over the noise of the wind and the boat motor as we cruised across Pelican Lake last summer on grandpa’s pontoon.