Help make the Belted Kingfisher the official mascot of the University of Illinois

In the late 1990s, I circulated a petition trying to get the Black-capped Chickadee named Minnesota’s Emergency Auxiliary Backup State Bird, to serve during the six months of every year when loons have flown the coop and are not fulfilling their obligations. I got a few thousand signatures, my DFL precinct caucus voted in favor of it, and if I recall correctly, my congressional district convention approved it too, but that’s as far as it went. It was a lot of work on a fun campaign. I failed, but at least we still have a state bird, absent half the year though it may be.

School mascots are like state birds—not all that important in the overall scheme of the universe, but at their best, they provide a unifying symbol of community spirit and shared identity. My adult children have forgotten a lot of details about their elementary school but still remember the Lakeside Lion because of the funky design and colors on school supplies and sweatshirts.  

Elementary school mascots have less impact on us beyond childhood than high school and college mascots do—I can’t remember what my elementary school’s mascot was, but I do remember the West Leyden Knight. When I started college at the University of Illinois in 1969, the mascot was “Chief Illiniwek.,” which even in my ignorance at the time seemed offensive. In 2008, the university finally got rid of that shameful stereotype, and in 2011, a campus survey of 11,440 U. of I. students revealed that 85 percent supported the decision. But in the 14 years since, the university hasn’t replaced the mascot with anything else.  

To fill that vacuum, in 2019, a fun, determined, and talented astrophysics student, Spencer Hulsey, spearheaded a campaign to name as mascot a splendid blue and orange bird.  

The Belted Kingfisher has a lot going for it besides bearing the school colors. The powerful, heavy beak and shaggy crest give it the proportions of an athlete, especially one wearing a funky helmet; and kingfishers exemplify skill, concentration, and focus as well as power, making them an excellent choice for a school that excels in academics and sports both. And unlike many mascots and a certain state bird I could mention, the Belted Kingfisher lives right there in Champaign-Urbana year-round. Its loud rattle would make a perfect battle cry for any sporting event and is mechanical enough that some enterprising individual is bound to make a cool noise-making toy mimicking the sound that could create a craze like the vuvuzela did in the 2012 Olympics only, with luck, less damaging to our eardrums. Spencer and her friends suggested a giant Kingfisher Kazoo. What could be more fun?  

UIUC student Keegan Thoranin drew this kingfisher 

One little-known fact about the Belted Kingfisher makes it especially appropriate as a football team mascot—it’s one of the few birds that form huddles. Nestling kingfishers stay in a tight huddle, wings snugly wrapped around one another even as they shuffle about in their dark nesting burrows. 

That huddling can also be construed as a group hug that could endear the birds to the most sports-averse students as well as football fans. And that is exactly what a mascot should do: appeal to the many diverse interests and passions of a university community.

Spencer Hulsey created a lot of engaging illustrations to promote the kingfisher and gave me permission to post them on my blog. 

In 2020, she presented her case to the University of Illinois Senate who passed the resolution 105 to 4, but the endorsement legislation is still sitting on the Chancellor's desk. Now her group is focused on building community support so the chancellor can see they mean business. She said that ultimately, their work “proved to him that the campus and faculty are ready for a new mascot, and we expect he will vote to adopt a new mascot before Spring 2024. The kingfisher is the only contender at the moment, but the floor could be opened to other suggestions.” The Kingfisher website includes information about how we can join the Letter Campaign to most effectively support making this splendid and fun bird U. of I.’s official mascot. 

The Black-capped Chickadee deserves a Guinness World Record!

It’s hard to keep track of the world’s superlatives, but Guinness World Records is the global authority on all things record-breaking, with offices in the U.K., United States, China, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates and official adjudicators who verify records all over the world. On the Guinness website, the stated purpose of their record keeping is “to make the world a more interesting, fun and positive place,” their vision “to inspire a sense of wonder,” and their mission “to document the incredible.” The Guinness World Record website also bears what seems like an excellent motto, “Officially amazing.”

Some individual birds and some bird species have genuinely earned that distinction. Wisdom the Laysan Albatross is officially the “Oldest Wild Bird.” Some other species of albatrosses and other birds that haven’t been as heavily studied via decades-long banding operations probably include individuals that are older than Wisdom, and some Laysan Albatrosses on other islands, and perhaps even some of Wisdom’s neighbors on Midway Island, may be older, too—Chandler Robbins banded only a fraction of the albatrosses on Midway when he was there. What makes Guinness so valuable is that they require verifiable documentation, and only one bird banded in 1956 or earlier is still being documented as recently as this past winter. When she was banded, Wisdom was a nesting adult, meaning she was at least 5 years old—she could well have been a little or a lot older than 70 this past winter.  

Photo of Emperor Penguin family from Wikipedia, contributed by Snowmanradio.

That need for verified documentation is why the Emperor Penguin’s record for “lowest temperature endured by a bird” isn’t based on the most extreme temperatures in Antarctica during the bird's nesting season but, rather, on a study at a breeding colony in Antarctica in June 2008, when the air temperature dipped below -4º F and the sky and ice temperatures sunk below -49º F. The record says, “It’s widely acknowledged that emperor penguins have to occasionally endure air temperatures as low as -40º F and beyond, as well as wind gusts that can reach in excess of 90 miles per hour.” 

That documentation does seem perfectly legitimate as the "lowest temperatures endured by nesting birds," but sets the bar rather low as far as the “lowest temperature endured by a bird.” In one cruel study, Common Redpolls survived down to -65º F and Hoary Redpolls down to an astonishing -88º F, but that was in a laboratory, not the wild, and wasn't entered in Guinness.  

As far as birds in the wild go, right here in Duluth, on 2 January 1885, the temperature dipped to -41º F, and I can't imagine that chickadees didn't survive that. During the 41 winters we’ve lived here, the lowest temperature of the season has dipped to -30º F or colder eleven times, and we've consistently had chickadees at our feeders (as well as plenty of other birds) during all those cold snaps. (During those same 41 winters, the season’s coldest temperature here has been warmer than -20º only six times.) 

Temperatures can be significantly colder in the Iron Range. Minnesota’s all-time cold-temperature record was set in Tower on 2 February 1996 with an official thermometer reading of -60º F, and it may have been even colder in Embarrass that same morning—we’ll never know for sure because their official thermometer broke in the extreme cold. The temperature in Duluth that morning was -39º F, and my feeders were filled with chickadees as well as nuthatches, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, and other birds, but I wasn’t taking photos back then so have no proof. I recall a news story about a guy who slept out in Tower that night so he could claim to have survived Minnesota’s coldest night ever. He emerged, triumphant, at first light, to news cameras and microphones. I’m sure I heard chickadees calling and even singing in the background of the news coverage, but my vague recollection won’t cut it as far as Guinness World Records go.  

I’m sure plenty of songbirds, from redpolls to ravens, in the wilds of Alaska, Canada, Norway, Siberia, and other northern places have survived significantly colder temps than are listed in the Emperor Penguin entry in Guinness, but apparently no one has submitted documentation proving this. 

And so far, no one has submitted to Guinness documentation of Black-capped Chickadees present in Tower that record-breaking morning, or on any other morning when temperatures were colder than -40º. If anyone has photographic or audio confirmation of Black-capped Chickadees in Tower, Minnesota, on 2 February 1996, I’d be more than happy to help you submit the record. If nothing else, getting that into Guinness would encourage researchers in Antarctica and far northern places to step up their game. 

Meanwhile, it’s fun to realize that our third-of-an-ounce Black-capped Chickadees have survived colder temperatures than those that got 50–100-pound Emperor Penguins into Guinness World Records. Even without the record, my favorite bird is plenty cool enough for me.  

Record breakers, from turkeys to that Bar-tailed Godwit

Guinness World Records has 973 bird-related records, including the slowest flying birds, American and European Woodcocks who can fly a mere 5 miles per hour without stalling while displaying; the strongest bird of prey, the Harpy Eagle; and the bird with the highest-pitched call, the Black Jacobin, a Brazilian hummingbird whose lowest recorded sounds are above 10 kHz, making the song higher-pitched than the hearing capabilities of any bird so far tested. It’s possible the jacobin’s calls are too high for even them to hear, meaning their call could have a function unrelated to vocal communication. I love ornithological mysteries like this, though I suspect the birds can indeed hear their own calls, meaning ornithologists haven’t quite figured out how to accurately test hearing capabilities in such tiny birds.  

This week, when normal people are thinking about turkeys as a Thanksgiving meal, or because they’ve seen President Biden or their governor pardoning one, or read about or saw video accounts of a Wild Turkey attacking people in Washington, D.C., I’m thinking about turkeys holding the world record as the "bird with the strongest gizzard." Yep—that thick organ found in the little bag of innards inside a store-bought turkey is more amazing in life than in the most delicious giblet gravy or stuffing. According to the Guinness account, “One [turkey] specimen had crushed 24 walnuts in their shells within 4 hours, and had also ground surgical lancet blades into grit within 16 hours.”  

The whole reason I’ve been checking out Guinness World Records is that a splendid bird I saw in Alaska this year, the Bar-tailed Godwit, made international news in October when one individual broke the record for the longest non-stop journey of any wild bird. Some whales may make even longer non-stop journeys, but they feed along the way. The godwit's flight was the longest non-stop journey without feeding en route of any animal in the world. 

Before this past October, the bird holding the record was another Bar-tailed Godwit individual—a satellite-tagged adult male who, in 2020, flew from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping for food or rest, 7,580 miles away. That same individual broke his own record with an 8,100-mile flight on his next migration in 2021.

But this year, scientists placed a transmitter on a first-year bird still too young for them to determine the bird's sex. That bird left the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta on October 13, and 11 days later made it to Ansons Bay in Tasmania, some 8,425 miles away. Again, this was entirely without stopping or feeding. It took 11 days and 1 hour to make that amazing trip. And godwits can only fly by steadily flapping their wings—they can’t soar to minimize their energy use as eagles and hawks do. To have the strength to do this, they boost the size of their pectoral muscles and heart before the trip. And to fuel the flight, they put on enough fat to double their weight. All this requires them to shrink their other internal organs to make room for the enlarged muscles and all that fat. 

The individual birds bearing these satellite trackers are not the only ones who have made these impressive flights—godwits virtually always travel in flocks, so any birds with them accomplished the exact same feat without any fanfare at all. And interestingly, it’s very unlikely that these flights that made the Guinness Book are really the furthest any Bar-tailed Godwits have flown—they’re just the furthest we happen to know about. Satellite trackers and the technology to read them are expensive, so very, very few birds bear these trackers. Like Wisdom, the banded Laysan Albatross on Midway Island who holds the record as the oldest wild bird ever, this record is only among birds we actually know about—there may be albatrosses years or decades older than Wisdom who have never been banded, and Bar-tailed Godwits who have travelled even farther. 

Nevertheless, the information we get about tracked birds gives us a fuller and more nuanced look at their species. And regardless, even if a banded or marked individual hasn’t done anything genuinely unique, it’s special and lovely to know about a special and lovely individual. 

Godwits!!

Black-tailed (front) and Bar-tailed Godwits 
Illustration from Naumann, Natural history of the birds of central Europe, 3rd Ed. 1905 

When Russ and I arrived in Nome on June 12 this year, the very first bird I added to my life list, at the mouth of the Nome River, was a wonderful one, the Bar-tailed Godwit. There are four species of godwits in the world, and this one completed my godwit list. 

Godwits are large shorebirds with straight or slightly upswept, extremely long bills, which they use to probe deeply in sand and soft mud for aquatic worms and mollusks. In winter, they flock together where food is plentiful.  

The English word godwit was first recorded in about 1416–17. Its origin is uncertain—it may have been an imitation of the bird's call, or it may have been derived from the Old English god whit or god whita, meaning “good creature”, probably suggesting good eating. Sir Thomas Browne, writing in about 1682, noted that godwits “were accounted the daintiest dish in England.” English speaking people would have encountered both Bar-tailed and Black-tailed Godwits, though they probably didn't worry about telling them apart. Linnaeus didn't distinguish between the two. 

The Black-tailed Godwit, the national bird of the Netherlands, breeds from Iceland through Europe and areas of Central Asia, and winters in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, western Europe, and west Africa. I saw some in June 2015 when I was in Austria and Hungary but didn’t get any photos. In November 2016, I saw some wintering in Uganda and got distant photos during a boat trip. 

The Bar-tailed Godwit breeds further north, on Arctic coasts and tundra from Scandinavia east to Alaska. The Bar-tailed Godwit includes five different subspecies with different breeding and wintering ranges and migration routes. 

Maps by Onioram

When creating the first scientific names, Linnaeus placed the godwits in the same genus with several long-billed sandpipers. He considered both the Bar-tailed and Black-tailed Godwits the same species, and in 1758 gave them the scientific name Scolopax limosa; Scolopax was the Latin word for snipe and woodcocks, and limosa was Latin for “muddy.” Two years later, French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson decided that the godwits deserved their own genus, Limosa and re-named the Black-tailed Godwit Limosa limosa and the Bar-tailed Godwit Limosa lapponica.  

We’d expect to see only two godwits in the Lower 48: the Hudsonian Godwit and Marbled Godwit. The English naturalist George Edwards described and illustrated both of these species in his 1750 work, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. Edwards called the Hudsonian Godwit the “Red-breasted Godwit”...

... and the Marbled Godwit the “Great American Godwit.” 

Edwards based those illustrations and information on specimens brought to London by James Isham following a Hudson Bay expedition. Linnaeus referred to George Edwards’s work when he included both species in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae. 

Hudsonian Godwits breed in the far north near the tree line in Alaska and northwestern Canada and, as the name suggests, on the shores of Hudson Bay; they winter in South America. In good weather, they can make the south-bound journey non-stop, which explains why most of my sightings of Hudsonian Godwits in Wisconsin and Minnesota have been in spring, including my lifer, which I saw in May 1977 at Goose Pond near Madison, Wisconsin. I also saw them in Kansas in April 2015. I would have missed the Hudsonian Godwit altogether in my 2013 Big Year except that I lucked into two of them at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in Upstate New York on September 28. 

My photos are horrible, but it was a very lucky sighting—during migration, most East Coast sightings are from late July through early August, not the very end of September. 

This June, I saw two Hudsonian Godwits in breeding plumage at the Westchester Lagoon in Anchorage, Alaska. 

The Marbled Godwit, the largest of the four godwits, breeds in mid-continental North America, eastern Canada, and the Alaska Peninsula. The largest winter ranges are along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts of the US and Mexico. I saw my first Marbled Godwits in September 1978 at Goose Pond. Since then, I’ve seen them many times in many places in Minnesota, California, Texas, Colorado, and Kansas.  

So by 2014 I’d seen 75 percent of all the godwit species in the world. But the one I hadn’t yet seen, the Bar-tailed Godwit, was the one I was most fascinated by. Next time I’ll explain how this extraordinary bird made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. 

In My Prime

As of Friday, November 11, 2022, for the 20th year of my life, I’m officially in my prime, thanks to 71 being the 20th prime number. I’ll have to stop saying I’m in my prime next year about this time, but will have two more prime years this decade, assuming I make it to 73 and then 79.   

As much as people my age seem to hate anyone referring to people in their seventies as “elderly,” I can’t think of a single boomer who was so prickly about calling people this age “old” when we younger, even as late as our fifties. The Beatles’ recorded “When I’m Sixty-Four” for Sergeant Pepper when Paul McCartney was 25, the same age Paul Simon was when the song “Old Friends” appeared on Bookends with the line “How terribly strange to be seventy.” Even if we don't want to call 64 old, the Biblical “three score and ten” is the quintessential definition of old age.  

Also as of Friday, I’m not just in my prime—I’m the precise definition of what a 71-year-old looks like. My whole life, the multi-billion-dollar cosmetics and fashion industries have been hell-bent on making everyone feel dissatisfied with our own faces and bodies. I’m pretty good at ignoring the constant barrage of ads for beauty products—they don’t feel personal except for one ad for Botox looking down at me above my dentist’s chair. It’s bad enough knowing the dentist and hygienist judge my toothbrushing and flossing habits—are they also using their magnifying lenses to study my wrinkles? That is the kind of thought I try to banish by thinking about birds.  

Maybe it’s because I focus my eyes and optics on birds rather than the mirror that I don’t mind being whatever age I happen to be. I’m still in good health, but even when I’ve faced surgeries, two heart attacks, and cancer, paying attention to nature has had real medicinal value. 

In April 1978, I had abdominal surgery back when they made incisions bigger than they do now. The doctors and nurses told me to go slow with walking and stay off uneven surfaces, and that lifting would be especially bad. I don’t remember the precise weight limit—just that my 7x50 Bushnell binoculars exceeded it. But hokey smokes—it was April—spring migration! The morning after I got home, Russ took me to my favorite birding spot. When I heard Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, I forgot all about my incision as I charged up a small hill to see them, and the pain magically stayed at bay. My recovery took way less time than doctors predicted, thanks to birding.  

On January 12, 2020, days after my second heart attack, a Barn Owl turned up at the Sax-Zim Bog. I was thrilled—the experience definitely speeded up my recovery—but the poor owl, so far north of its range, died a few hours after Russ and I left. I’d wanted to use this poor bird as a sign of resilience and hope, but instead, it reminded me that we’re all muddling through life as well as we can for as long as we can. All of our days are numbered. 

That lovely owl also reminded me that no one on this planet—avian or human—is obligated to serve as a symbol of anything for anyone, nor to be burdened with lugging around some dead person's spirit. When I die, my kids will probably think of me when they see chickadees. But those chickadees will not, in any way, shape, or form, be embodiments of me. Chickadees have been bringing me comfort and joy just about every single day that I've been home or anywhere else in their range since I saw my first on March 2, 1975. Seeing these lovely sprites who have brought me so much joy for almost 5 decades should be good enough for anyone. 

The medicinal value of birding is not unique to me—during my father-in-law’s final months in the late stages of cancer, he was up and at his chair by the living room window every morning at first light to see the birds arriving at his feeder. Over the years, a great many other people have told me how birds brightened the final weeks and days, and sometimes hours and minutes, of loved ones.   

The therapeutic value of birding isn’t just anecdotal. New research from King’s College London found that seeing or hearing birds is associated with an improvement in mental wellbeing that can last up to eight hours, including for people diagnosed with depression. Johanna Gibbons, co-author of the study, said that the dawn chorus is “A multi-sensory experience that seems to enrich everyday life, whatever our mood or whereabouts.” She continues, “This exciting research underpins just how much the sight and sound of birdsong lifts the spirits. It captures intriguing evidence that a biodiverse environment is restorative in terms of mental wellbeing. That the sensual stimulation of birdsong, part of those daily ‘doses’ of nature, is precious and time-lasting.”   

The value of birding isn’t limited to mental health. Ontario writer Robert C. Bell contracted a debilitating case of Lyme disease in 2013 when he was in his late 50s. He had to take early retirement from a job he loved in the mining industry and thought his life was pretty much over. But he got so engrossed in birds at his feeders that he started going outdoors to see more birds, got more serious about birding, and took up bird photography. He says, simply, “Birding saved me… It’s given me a real spark and purpose in life.” Bell just wrote a book about his experience, Out of the Lyme Light and into the Sunlight: Birding as Therapy for the Chronically Ill, which will be out this month by Hancock House—I have it on pre-order from the publisher.  

None of us can turn back the clock except in a Standard Time vs. Daylight Savings Time sense, and even the U.S. Senate knows how stupid that is. As with every living thing, each of us is given a finite set of years, months, and days, and no beauty or fashion products or injections of botulism toxin can change it. Why squander valuable moments of my finite life fretting about my reflection in a mirror when I can reflect on and enjoy real beauty? Life doesn't have many guarantees, but birds, from everyday chickadees and jays to much harder-to-see species, are guaranteed to bring beauty and fascination to our lives if only we open our hearts to let them in.  

Phainopepla: A Bird As Unique As Its Name

Ever since the Phainopepla turned up outside Duluth last week, I've been thinking of when I first discovered this lovely bird. In 1982, when our baby Joey was 6 months old, Russ had a meeting in Las Vegas and we made it into a family vacation. This was the very first time I’d ever been in the Southwest, and I saw Phainopeplas first at Sunset Park in Las Vegas, and then in several places in southeastern Arizona.   

Russ’s parents had gone to Arizona a year or two before we did that first time, and Russ’s dad was utterly taken with Phainopeplas. They often sit on conspicuous perches, and so are a characteristic desert bird that non-birders are likely to notice. But I think Russ’s dad especially liked their name. I remember him holding baby Joey and saying, “Did you see a Phain-o-PEP-la?”  It’s a fun word that even my 2-year-old grandson Walter likes to say.   

The unusual but cool-sounding word comes from the bird’s scientific name, Phainopepla nitens. In Greek, phainos means “shining,” and peplos means “robe.” In Latin, nitens also means “shining,” emphasizing that lovely quality of the adult male plumage.  

The Phainopepla belongs to the silky-flycatcher family, which was once part of the waxwing family. Like waxwings, phainopeplas sally out to catch insects from conspicuous perches and then return where they started out or alight on another conspicuous perch.   

Also like waxwings, Phainopeplas eat a lot of fruit. Phainopeplas are specialists on desert mistletoe, with a uniquely adapted stomach to extract as much nutrition from their berries as possible. The seeds and pulp hold almost all the nutrition, but the much less digestible skin makes those nutrients hard to access for animals that swallow berries whole. To get enough food value, Phainopeplas must eat a lot of mistletoe berries—as many as 1,100 in a single day. They devour enough to stuff their crop (a pouch in the esophagus) to capacity, and then retreat to a perch to quietly digest the feast.   

The Phainopepla’s muscular stomach chamber, or gizzard, is very tiny, processing one berry at a time by contracting to squeeze the seed and semi-liquid pulp directly into the small intestine as the berry’s sturdy outer skin remains in the gizzard. One by one, the berries run through the gizzard like this, the digestible pulp and seeds extracted and running through the intestines as the skins accumulate in the gizzard in a compact mass. When that mass builds to about 10 or 20 packed skins, the gizzard ejects it into the small intestine in a bolus separate from the pulp and seeds. As far as I can find, the Phainopepla is the only known bird able to shuck the outer coatings of berries like this. Between swallowing the berry and it coming out the other end takes only about 12 minutes, making the system as fast as it is efficient.   

Phainopeplas arrive on their breeding grounds in the United States between February and April. The birds in Arizona and California, the most well-studied populations, breed in two distinct habitats at two different times of the year. Between February and April, they breed in the Arizona's Sonoran Desert and California's Colorado Desert. In May, as summer heat intensifies and desert berry supplies dwindle, the birds appear in oak and sycamore canyons, where they breed through July.   

Nesting Phainopeplas behave quite differently in the two habitats. In the desert, mated pairs are extremely territorial, probably because desert mistletoe parasitizes the same trees over and over, producing a stable, long-lasting supply of berries close to where each pair nests. But in the oak and sycamore woodlands where they breed in summer, Phainopeplas nest in loose colonies of from 3–15 pairs, feeding on such fruits as redberry and elderberry, which grow away from their shaded nest sites. In this habitat, foraging Phainopeplas lose less from sharing the fruits than they benefit from more eyes searching out new fruiting plants and noticing and helping one another to mob nest predators.  

So far, researchers haven’t figured out whether the desert-nesting Phainopeplas in Arizona and California are the same individuals that nest in woodlands later the same years, or if these nesting styles represent two different breeding populations. Either way it's unique, befitting a bird with such a unique and fun-to-say name.

Phainopepla: Which Way Did She Go?

On Saturday, October 29, word went out that a Phainopepla had turned up near the parking area of the McQuade Boat Landing just up the shore from Duluth. I was in the first crowd of people to see this first state record after Molly Misfeldt and Michael Sack reported it.   

The bird stuck around all weekend and all day Monday, and was still there on Tuesday, November 1. I didn’t need to babysit until mid-afternoon, so I went back a couple of times to get better photos and a sound recording, along with bragging rights about seeing this extraordinary bird in Minnesota in two calendar months. There were still birders watching it when I left, but it wasn’t seen again after that day. I felt bad for out-of-town birders who wanted to see it on Wednesday, but I was also relieved, hopeful that the bird left on its own power, not in the grips of a Sharp-shinned Hawk. I thought about the Saturday morning cartoons when I was a little girl, with a clueless sheriff trying to catch some speedy prankster like Wile E. Coyote and asking in a cartoonish voice, “Which way did he go?” There is at least some hope that the Phainopepla headed toward the Roadrunner's habitat in the Southwest, but we’ll never know for sure.   

Scientists simply do not know what makes some individual birds wander well out of their normal range, but vagrancy happens fairly frequently in a few species. The Fork-tailed Flycatcher that turned up at Stony Point this spring was even further out of its range than the Phainopepla. Fork-tailed Flycatchers that wander into the United States tend to be from the South American population that migrates fairly long distances, while Phainopeplas migrate much shorter distances, yet that Fork-tail was Minnesota’s fourth state record, the second to be reported in St. Louis County, and they appear at least somewhere in the United States just about every year. Some ornithologists speculate that the migratory compass of vagrant Fork-tailed Flycatchers somehow got reversed. But there are only a handful of records ever of Phainopeplas anywhere out of the Southwest and California. How did one end up in Duluth?      

Jaegers and Sabine’s Gulls do not belong on Lake Superior, but every fall there are several sightings of Parasitic Jaegers, a handful of Pomarine Jaegers, once in a while a Long-tailed Jaeger, and usually one or two Sabine’s Gulls, seen right here in Duluth and Superior. The individuals are vagrants, but of species in which some individuals always wander. The Ivory Gull that showed up in Canal Park in Duluth in 2016 was the 12th state record; this past January Minnesota birders found the state’s 13th record.   

If no one understands what makes some individual wander, we have even less understanding of whether any of them ever get back to where they belong. Vagrants that linger a while may be in trouble—the Ivory Gull that appeared in Duluth on January 1, 2016, stuck around Canal Park for over three weeks but ended up dying on January 24; oddly enough, during the time that one was in Duluth, a different individual was found dead in Superior.  But lingering isn’t always fatal. One banded female Rufous Hummingbird wintered in northern Massachusetts at least six years in a row.   

Most exceptional vagrants appear out of the blue and disappear within days, or even hours or minutes. The Fork-tailed Flycatcher on Stoney Point September 17 this year was seen only a few times within a couple of hours before it disappeared for good. The only other Fork-tail ever seen in St. Louis County, in Duluth on September 6, 1991, was seen by only one person, Peder Svingen, and only for a few minutes. But the very next spring, one appeared in Grand Marais on May 3 and stuck around for 11 days. The only predictable thing about vagrant birds is their unpredictability.   

I haven’t heard of any out-of-range Phainopeplas in the United States in the six days since the McQuade Harbor bird disappeared, and even if one turned up, we’d have no way of knowing for certain that it was “our” bird. Uncertainty and mystery are part of the magic of these sightings, and since our Phainopepla disappeared while the weather was still pleasant, there’s at least some hope that she’s been working her way back to familiar terrain in her natural range. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, but my mind keeps going back to those Saturday morning cartoon sheriffs asking, “Which way did she go?”  

The New Kid on the Block

For the past year, I’ve been doing my best to keep track of one particular Pileated Woodpecker that I call BB, or Banded Boy. Frank Nicoletti banded him as an immature at Hawk Ridge last year.   

From the start, BB seemed like an old pro at using a bird feeder and is very laid back in my yard—last November he tolerated a whole lot of birders coming over to see a Rufous Hummingbird, and he doesn’t bolt from the feeder when my neighbor is mowing the lawn or when people and dogs walk by just past the fence, 15 or 20 feet away. And BB ignores me when I open a window and stick my long camera lens out. He kept coming frequently through this past April. Then he seemed to hook up with a female.  

BB and his lady love stopped coming soon after I photographed them together, and I had very few Pileated sightings in my yard all summer. BB reappeared on September 3. Since then, I’ve also been seeing at least two female Pileateds, somewhat regularly. Oddly enough, they feed not only at the suet feeders but visited my window seed feeder for a couple of weeks.   

On Sunday, October 30, I was watching BB in the suet feeder when suddenly a second male Pileated appeared on the cross-pole supporting the suet feeder, his face just a couple feet from BB’s. BB ignored him for a minute or two, but when the new guy started pecking on a wire nearer the suet feeder, BB flew up at him, and then flew away.   

That left the new kid on the block with the feeder all to himself. I always thought that suet feeders must be a little intuitive for woodpeckers, and it’s not like this new guy hadn’t watched BB on the feeder for at least a little while, but he simply could not figure it out. 

First he sat on the supporting pole and leaned down to take tiny bits of suet. That didn’t give him much food, so he jumped on top of the feeder but it was too slippery, so he grabbed on to the pole with one foot and straddled, sticking his tongue into the little holes holding the supporting wires, not getting much food at all. He did not sit vertically on the feeder the way woodpeckers normally do, and finally gave up and flew away.  

That was on Sunday. Since then, we haven’t seen him, but meanwhile BB has been coming several times a day, possibly making sure the new kid on the block isn’t trying to take over BB's favorite feeding station.  

It surprised me that the unbanded male didn’t know how to get food from a suet feeder, and made me curious about how Pileateds normally figure feeders out. Back in 2004, a male Pileated visited my small window suet feeder repeatedly for a few months. 

But otherwise Pileateds just did not come to feeders in my yard or my mother-in-law’s in rural Port Wing, Wisconsin. I saw them at feeders here and there in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ithaca, New York when I worked at Cornell, 

But I haven’t figured out whether those individuals had figured out feeders on their own, watched other Pileateds or other species of woodpeckers, or learned from their parents. I’ve had several different individuals coming to my feeder consistently for the past several years, so however each individual figured it out, it’s become pretty normal here. But as the new kid on the block shows, how you get food out of a suet feeder doesn’t appear to be intuitive, at least not to every Pileated. I’d love to ask BB how he figured it out. He’s pretty tolerant of me, but I suspect he will not give me a straight answer.