Woodson Art Museum's 2020 Birds in Art Exhibit

My collection of "Birds in Art" catalogs goes back to 1989.  

One of my favorite annual traditions is driving to the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, for a day every fall to visit to see their wonderful “Birds in Art” exhibit. I first went to a few of these with a friend from Madison Audubon back in the late 70s, when Russ was working on his Ph.D. and I was teaching part time in a Catholic school, when buying the catalogs was more than we could afford. And then I had to miss almost all the exhibits in the 1980s when my kids were little—somehow I couldn’t imagine them wanting to spend 8 hours in the car round trip to spend an hour or two walking through a museum, trying to be quiet just so Mommy could see pictures of birds when I could see real birds every day. But starting in the 90s, often in conjunction with an Elderhostel on nature writing I was conducting in Tomahawk, we’d make a trip there, and after that I was hooked. Now I have every one of the Birds in Art catalogs beginning with the 1989 issue. The catalogs are so much better when I’ve seen the actual works, but the reproductions are excellent, and I enjoy pulling them out now and then, even the ones from years I missed. Because I go so often and look carefully at every catalog, I love recognizing my favorite artists from previous years. Last year, there were on display work from two different artists who’d made the cut at every single one of the exhibits. Iowa artist Maynard Reece, who has won the federal Duck Stamp competition a record of five different times between 1948 and 1971, exhibited a gorgeous painting of a pair of Red-breasted Mergansers titled “Into the Sunset.” 

It was lovely, and more impressive when I realized it had been painted that year—a rule of the competition for this juried exhibit is that the artwork submitted must have been produced that year. Reece wrote in the artist’s comments, “At ninety-nine years old, I believe painting has kept me alive as I, too, head into the sunset.” When I opened this year’s catalog, I immediately rushed to the Rs, but for the first time, there was no Maynard Reece painting. Museum director Kathy Kelsey Foley’s introduction to the catalog explained why. She wrote, “Maynard Reece reached his 100th birthday in late April; he died of natural causes in July.” What a sad loss, but what a wonderful life he had. (Here's his obituary.)

Guy Coheleach was the other artist whose work has been exhibited in every Birds in Art exhibition. He’s been one of my favorite artists since I fell in love with his adorable 1970 painting of chickadee fledglings. 

His work is usually among my favorites in the exhibit. This year he painted an Osprey flying past the majestic Yellowstone’s Lower Falls, capturing both the magnificent power of the falls and how the spray gives birds flying nearby an almost impressionistic ethereal quality. 

One of my favorite pieces this year is by an actual friend of mine—Kenn Kaufman—who painted a Snowy Egret skipping along the water’s surface.  

Kenn wrote in the artist’s comments that he’d based the painting on an experience he’d had watching an egret foraging on the California coast, “almost running across the surface, giving the momentary illusion that it could walk on water. Every time it ran, it left behind a line of circular ripples, like skipping a flat stone.” Snowy Egrets are the subject of a lot of art, showing off an artist’s mastery of shading to make pure white birds appear alive and 3-dimensional, but this one captured their movement in a unique way. 

This year, the Woodson Art Museum named Timothy David Mayhew of New Mexico their Master Wildlife Artist. His work has been among the selections almost every year since 2010, and I’ve come to recognize his soft, shadowy, almost impressionistic style. When I see Little Blue Herons actively hunting in Florida, usually when the sun is high, they seem so sharply defined and active—the piece he contributed this year, reproduced on the cover of the catalog, captured his subject’s focus and concentration, which will give me something to focus and concentrate on next time I see this splendid bird. 

There is usually at least one Blue Jay depicted in the exhibit, and this being National Blue Jay Awareness Month, I was prepared to write in detail about it, but tragically, no work selected for this year’s Birds in Art exhibit had a Blue Jay. I guess I’ll just have to look for Nature’s Perfect Bird in my own backyard this year. 

Right now, there is a baby hospitalized with COVID-19 in my county, so what with my baby grandson living with us, and what with Russ and I being high risk because of age and my two heart attacks, I’m not going to be able to attend this year’s exhibit. The museum is following strict guidelines for protecting their visitors. The Birds in Art exhibition will remain on display through November 29, and is definitely worth visiting. If you cannot go in person, the catalog, available through the museum website, is truly the next best thing. Stay safe and well. 

Awe Walks and National Blue Jay Awareness Month

 The New York Times this week reported on a new study, from the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California San Francisco and other institutions, about the value of taking what the researchers call an “awe walk” for physical and mental health. The study subjects, all people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, were physically healthy, and baseline studies of their mental health showed they were psychologically well-adjusted with little anxiety or depression.  

These subjects were divided into two groups. Both were asked to start taking a weekly 15-minute walk outdoors, in parks or urban settings, and to take a few selfies to document the locales, but otherwise to avoid using their phones during the walks. Half weren’t given any other guidance. The other half were told to try to walk somewhere new, paying attention to details along their walks, and to look at everything with fresh, childlike eyes.  The walkers in both groups uploaded their selfies to a lab website and completed a daily online assessment of their current mood and, if they had walked that day, how they had felt during their strolls. 

After eight weeks, the scientists compared the groups’ responses and photos. The group they called “awe walkers” seemed to have developed skills at discovering and amplifying the pleasure and, yes, awe, in what they saw. One volunteer reported focusing on “the beautiful fall colors and the absence of them among the evergreen forest.” A control walker, in contrast, said she spent much of a recent walk fretting about an upcoming vacation and “all the things I had to do before we leave.” Overall, the awe walkers felt happier, less upset and more socially connected. People in the control group reported some improvements in mood, but their gains were slighter.  

One odd difference was in the groups’ selfies. Over the course of the eight weeks, the scenery took up an increasingly large proportion of each photo taken by the “awe walkers.” In other words, their “self” grew smaller and the world larger. Nothing similar occurred in the photos from the control group.  

I have virtually no photos of me or companions walking. I always have focused on the scenery, birds, and other animals. This photo, taken in 1976, was the only kind of photo Russ and I took when we were walking.  

I’ve got a long history as an “awe walker.” I walked 4 blocks to my elementary school, a mile and a half to my high school, and everywhere on campus when I was at the University of Illinois and Michigan State University, and relished that time alone, walking outdoors. Decades before there were selfies, I spent my walking time focused outside myself, filled with awe at the shapes of cumulus clouds, the changing fall colors, sparkles on fresh snow, the different shades of green in early spring, the rich green and beautiful scents after a summer rain.   

At Michigan State University, I took my first course in environmental education from the inspiring Bob Hinkle. Suddenly I was required to learn the names of trees and plants, found out that the generic squirrels in my own Chicago backyard were actually two different species, eastern gray and eastern fox squirrels...

...and discovered that the ducks swimming on the Red Cedar River on campus were not two different species, one with shiny iridescent green heads and the other mottled brown. No—they were all Mallards, the bright ones males.   

Memorizing all this for tests could have been daunting and stressful, but instead, it filled me with awe as I paid attention to the same campus ducks I’d been seeing for a couple of years with fresh eyes. This was right when I started birding. 

My life seems divided into two parts: Before Birding and After Birding. Seeing a Black-capped Chickadee on March 2, 1975 seems the precise moment when everything changed. After that, I could walk on the Michigan State campus or in my hometown, in the exact same places that I’d walked a hundred or even a thousand times before, and it was all entirely new. Sure, I’d always been noticing lovely things, but suddenly there were so many more lovely things: Chimney Swifts flying overhead, juncos darting up from the gravel along the edge of the street where I grew up, White-throated Sparrows singing their amazing Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody from the shrubbery, and those wonderful little chickadees all over the place. How had I never noticed any of this before?   

I went out birding a lot that first spring, ending the season with 40 species on my lifelist. Now I’ve seen over 2100. That’s a very short lifelist by serious world birder standards, but it’s something I’d never have been able to conceive of in 1975. I am often jolted with the realization of how very lucky and blessed and rich I am to have experienced so many birds.  

Of course, every time you add a lifer, that’s one more bird you’ve already seen, by definition making it no longer “new” the next time you see it. Except that newness really is in the eyes of the beholder. I’d actually seen a Blue Jay long before I added that species to my lifelist on March 23, 1975. When I was about seven, so around 1957, my family spent a week in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. One morning I heard squawking in a tree, looked up, and there it was—a gorgeous, unmistakable Blue Jay, which I recognized from my Little Golden Activity Book: Bird Stamps. Like the cardinals I already knew so well from my own neighborhood, the Blue Jay was on the cover of that book, and the memory of the one I saw in real life was instantly and firmly impressed in my brain.   

My lifer was equally thrilling, calling to mind that first Blue Jay, and this one was just as close but now seen through binoculars, making it even more gorgeous. Now, 45 years later, I’m very often struck anew by their beauty, intelligence, and spunkiness—I wonder if I’ve ever looked at a Blue Jay without smiling.   

This month, October 2020, started with a full moon, and there will be another full moon on Halloween. When there are two full moons within the same calendar month, the second is called a “blue moon,” and once every blue moon I declare that month National Blue Jay Awareness Month. And most appropriately, this month is at the tail end of an extraordinary Blue Jay migration season here in Duluth. Over 50,000 have been counted flying past Hawk Ridge, just above my neighborhood, since September 1. From my yard I’ve photographed as many as 19 in my tray feeder at one time.   

Because I’ve been stuck at home since March, this happens to be the year I’ve taken more photographs of Blue Jays than ever before, and caught some cool behaviors and plumages I’d never before captured in photos. I won’t be devoting every October program to Blue Jays—I’ve talked about them plenty already this year—but will be sharing some genuinely awesome things about them now and then this month.   

Recapturing awe in our daily lives can be difficult during a pandemic. But paying closer attention to even the most everyday birds as Blue Jays can help us get through hard times. As the study about “awe walks” confirms, noticing the beautiful within our everyday lives takes us out of ourselves for a moment and lightens our spirits, something we all need right about now. Stay safe and well, dear reader.  

Jo Simon's Question about Geese

I’m spending much of my time indoors staring at my adorable grandbaby, but have been seeing lots of geese here in Duluth. By lunchtime on September 30, counters at Hawk Ridge had already counted over 4,100 this season. 

The time-honored question so evocative when geese are flying overhead is Rachel Field’s. What exactly is that something that told the wild geese it was time to fly? WXPR listener Jo Simons, who managed to get a nice video, with sound, of Canada Geese migrating overhead, wondered about the even more obvious question—“What the heck are they honking so loud about???” 

Those goose flocks are usually made up of genetically related birds. Birds hatched in a given year stay with their parents through migration and their first winter. Two- and three-year-olds and even older birds also often gravitate to their parents during migration and on their wintering grounds, meeting up with this year’s batch of siblings. Because the parents also have siblings and parents, the flocks, which grow larger and larger as birds progress southward, include lots of cousins and second-cousins-once-removed and on and on. Siblings from previous years meet up for the first time with their 100% genetic siblings from this year if their parents both survived. If one of their parents has died, they’ll meet their half-siblings from this year plus many family members of their new step-parent. Geese that haven’t met up with their own family members can be welcomed into these flocks, too, so there's a lot of mixing. 

Drawing family trees for geese would be very complex. The oldest known wild Canada Geese were shot by hunters, while presumably still quite healthy, when they were over 30 years of age. Most Canada Geese start forming pair bonds when they’re 2 years old, and start nesting when about 4, which means a 30-year-old goose has probably produced over 25 batches of young. 

Not all those batches survive, of course, but still, a goose family tree drawing would have to show at least an order of magnitude more branches descending from each individual than your run-of-the-mill human family tree. 

We usually notice migrating geese winging over by their calls first, so Jo’s question really is an obvious one, but I don’t know of any poem that addresses it. What the heck are they honking so loud about??? Rachel Field heard “winter in their cry,” and that may be part of the goose discussion, but the truth is, only the geese know for sure. We mere humans, incapable of communicating with even the most articulate carbon-based lifeforms with whom we share this planet, can only speculate. Are they discussing the weather? Catching up on the latest gossip? They’re probably not griping about the presidential debate—WIFI is hard to access in many wetlands and, so far at least, geese are not known to carry cell phones, so even though habitat protection, climate change, and other issues affect them deeply, geese were mercifully spared that travesty. 

Sometimes their honks make me think of my mother-in-law. When she was living with us, I’d drive her from Duluth to Port Wing for her bi-weekly card club and she’d blurt out observations about every little thing she saw out the car window. “When are they going to finish up with the road construction here? Dad and I went to that Choo Choo Bar and Grill with Uncle Butchie once. Look at all the deer in that field! Haven’t they torn down that decrepit barn yet? Look—that’s where Dad and I spotted the bear with three cubs once! Florence’s garden sure looks pretty this year. Hey—are those Sandhill Cranes? Who left that trash on the Lutheran Church lawn? 

Like my mother-in-law, geese may be commenting in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way on the familiar and unfamiliar sights they’re noticing. Or parent geese may be pointing out important landmarks to their young to help them navigate on future trips—with so many families in each flock, that alone would produce a lot of honking. 

The leaders of flocks tend to be older birds who know the way, taking turns as the lead bird grows weary. But with so much mixing, many of the birds in a flock may have learned different routes from their own parents before pairing with the mate who met up with his or her parents this time. So at every juncture, some birds may be back-seat driving—or, in this case, back-of-the-flock navigating. Minnesota-nice geese might be passive-aggressively saying, “Uh, we might consider banking left here?” while geese who spent time in New York or Chicago might be blurting out obscenities while insisting that it’s quicker to follow I-35 than the St. Louis River. 

Who knows? We spend millions every year trying to figure out whether there might be intelligent life forms on other planets or in other solar systems or galaxies, assuming that if we found them, we would be able to communicate with them, when we don't have a clue what the wild geese right here on earth are honking about.  

Ovenbird Songs

 

When I was a little girl, my family went to Chicago forest preserves a lot for picnics with aunts and uncles and cousins, and I’d often break away from the hubbub to take a walk by myself in the woods. There was plenty of bird song in spring and early summer, which I loved to listen to, but I didn’t know how to listen—how to pick out the individual voices to appreciate how each component contributes to the symphony—any more than I knew how to listen to orchestral or even 50s band music and pick out individual instruments.  

Back then, the only birds I recognized by song were the cardinal and House Sparrow, and if I didn’t see them or hear them in a spot where I knew cardinals or sparrows would be, I couldn’t be certain that it wasn’t some other bird singing that exact same song. College enlightened me on both scores—music appreciation classes taught me to differentiate musical instruments and to pick out different musical themes that could be going on simultaneously. And ornithology, in combination with my constant birding, taught me how to listen for each avian instrument and the nuances that would help me differentiate individuals and work out the context for different vocalizations. 

In the same way that seeing instruments and watching them played by orchestra members helped me learn them, watching birds singing made it easier for me to learn their songs. We heard one bird singing teacher, teacher, TEACHER! during my first week of field ornithology, but it wasn’t until the second week, when we finally saw the Ovenbird singing away, that the song solidified in my brain. It’s a song I must have heard over and over as a child in those Chicago forest preserves, but hearing it in class, I didn’t recognize it at all. It’s conspicuous enough that Robert Frost’s poem, “The Oven Bird,” is entirely about the song. The poem begins: 

There is a singer everyone has heard, /Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, /Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

It may have been a little presumptuous of Robert Frost to say “everyone” has heard this singer, but anyone who has ever walked in the woods in New England, the Appalachians, the Midwest, mid-Atlantic states, or forests of central and eastern Canada from May through July has definitely been in earshot, whether or not they were listening. And many people notice that loud, ringing song without knowing who’s singing it.  

I’ve lost a lot of my high-frequency hearing, but have no trouble hearing Ovenbirds, who sing at a nice, low frequency. The “teacher teacher” mnemonic works because the song sounds like a repeated word of two syllables, but each of those words is actually composed of 3 to 5 separate notes which our mere human ears can’t resolve. Ovenbirds hear every nuance and can recognize one another’s unique, individual songs. After working out territorial boundaries, Ovenbirds are fine with their neighbors singing in their proper territories, but they chase off Ovenbirds singing a different tune as one who doesn’t belong there. And neighbors often sing together, one starting up and a neighbor or two joining in a split second later. This may contribute to the ventriloquial quality of the Ovenbird song, which makes it harder for a predator to locate them by sound.  

In addition to the song, ornithologists have described 13 different calls produced by Ovenbirds during the breeding season, 7 by males and 6 by females. Their research suggests that at least 11 of these vocalizations involve communication between the sexes. This array of calls may take the place of some visual signals given by more boldly colored or sexually dimorphic species. 

The Ovenbird is a lot more than just its wonderful song, but that’s a topic for another blogpost. 

For the Mammals

Watching birds makes most of us more attuned to nature in general, so a mammal report once in a while isn’t out of keeping on a birding blog. Ever since my daughter and son-in-law and their dog Muxy fled New York to move in with us with us in April, we’ve been having a banner year as far as mammals go. Katie has always loved squirrels, and I can’t remember ever having so many healthy squirrels visiting our yard. Usually we see several babies in spring but only one or two, if we’re lucky, in fall. But this year we saw lots of babies in spring and right now there are at least four brand new babies visiting my feeders. 

I don't have a photo with all four. 

Squirrels haven’t been the most prolific mammals in the yard—we’ve had more baby cottontail rabbits in this one summer than I’d seen in my entire life before this. I got bazillions of photos, especially of one little guy I call “Baby Big Ears,” who has weird flaps enlarging both ears in an adorable way. 

I guess it makes sense that the year I get a brand-new baby grandson, who is also a mammal, would be the very year I get a bumper crop of baby squirrels and bunnies. 

I took this photo in March, and saw the adults or heard crows swearing at them most days
through April. Now I'm not seeing them, but neighbors still are. 

We also have a pair of foxes somewhere in the neighborhood. I presume they had kits this year, though I haven’t talked to anyone who’s seen any. I myself haven’t seen the adults since spring, but neighbors keep telling me about their sightings.  

For a while this spring, a small group of white-tailed deer were jumping over our chain link fence to feed in the yard. That ended as babies started being born—they’d be too little for such a high jump—but my neighbor Jeanne called a few times to let me know about photo ops when twin fawns were in her yard. She’s also told me when the buck is around. Last week, he was in our backyard munching on cherry tree leaves, but hightailed it out of here when a car pulled up before I was set up for good photos.  

I see chipmunks every day. I presume someone in the neighborhood has been feeding them—I never even tried to feed a chipmunk until last week, when one started jumping onto my shoe and once even climbing up my pants leg begging for peanuts. Now it will sit on my shoe to open the peanut.

That one’s pretty funny—he first stuffs his cheeks with birdseed, and then comes up for a peanut. He opens the peanut, stuffs the kernels into his cheeks, and even when they seem filled beyond capacity, he asks for another peanut, and another. If he can’t squeeze any more kernels into his cheeks, he simply carries off the last whole peanut in his mouth. He must have a huge cache of winter provisions. Before he started doing that whole process on my foot, I got a video of it. 

In 2003, for the first time in the 22 years we’d lived here at that point, a red squirrel was hanging out somewhere near me and I got to see it a lot, mainly eating sunflower seeds at my feeder until it disappeared in early winter. Now I’ve been seeing one for a couple of weeks. I first saw it on September 8 or 9th though it ran up the tree and I couldn’t relocate it. For a short time I was actually afraid I’d misidentified a young gray squirrel, but then I not only saw it but got a nice photo on September 10. 

Then I didn’t see it for a few days and figured my corner really isn’t appropriate habitat. But the little guy is now coming daily, taking cones from a spruce tree next to the house and carrying them off to its winter cache somewhere in the back of our yard or one of the yards behind us. So far it hasn’t shown any interest at all in either my bird feeders or my bird baths. I’m thrilled that this little guy might be sticking around even though the species is notorious for eating bird eggs and nestlings. At least that won’t be an issue until spring. 

I have trail cams set up to keep track of activity at my bird baths. If not for them, I’d not even be aware that a flying squirrel, a few deer mice, and a skunk had been in my yard. One mammal who’s visited twice since spring hasn’t shown up on the cams, and no one has seen it, but when I wake up to find our sturdy chain-link gate knocked down and the heavy-duty pipes holding up my feeders all bent out of shape and the feeders broken, it’s pretty easy to figure out that a bear was here. That happened twice in August but not since. 

This is from 2018, but looked pretty much the same this year. 

Finally, we’ve had quite a few bats flying about this summer. I only saw them when I’d be sitting out on the back porch on pleasant evenings listening to birds singing vespers. I can’t hear the ultrasonic sounds bats make, but somehow listening to a robin at twilight while a bat flutters by is a perfect way to end a June day. 

Last night, September 27, when I took my dog out at 11 pm and made sure my cams were positioned correctly, I heard a saw-whet owl calling. I was thrilled, even though this species only survives by preying on the tiny mammals I’ve been celebrating. Irony is just another way of ending a perfect September day.  

Backyard Surveillance

This year, I got three trail cams (my first two were Campark T80s and my third a Campark T86) that I set up by my two bird baths and in an area next to our raspberry bed where lots of White-throated Sparrows have been gathering and feeding. The cams don't have a zoom feature, so I have to set them up fairly close to where the birds will be, but they have a pretty darned good ability to focus from near to far. I move one of the bird bath cams to my 1’ x 3’ platform feeder at night. My original intent for that was in the hopes of seeing a flying squirrel, a critter we haven’t seen in our yard since the late 80s or early 90s. Instead, a little deer mouse or jumping mouse comes into that feeder every night. Because I'm not certain of the species, I'm calling it my "dear mouse."   

He or she disappeared for two nights after one of my other cams caught a neighborhood cat roaming the yard. Cats simply do not belong loose outside. In Duluth, it’s not only a horrible practice with regard to wildlife, the health of the cat itself, and the danger that cats allowed outdoors can transmit toxoplasmosis to children and the elderly via sandboxes and garden beds that cats use as little boxes—it’s also illegal. Fortunately, after a couple night’s scare, my little mouse was back in my feeder. If I do manage to catch that cat, I will be bringing it to the pound.  

By day, I’ve gotten fun videos and photos of a good assortment of birds, from flickers to thrushes and warblers. By night, it’s alerted me to mammals besides that prowling cat, including a few deer mice, a skunk...

and wonder of wonders, a flying squirrel, not at my feeder but at a ground-level birdbath.  

 

This year’s Blue Jay migration has been extraordinary. As of September 22, 48,056 Blue Jays had been tallied—a full 30 percent of all the birds counted at the Hawk Ridge main overlook this year! I get Grandma duty every morning. The Blue Jays are big and flashy enough, when there are so many, that 5-week-old Walter has already been noticing them, but on September 20, the little guy fell asleep in his bassinet for a while when my platform feeder was crowded with Blue Jays, so I grabbed a few photos out the window. And my photos show 19 in my platform feeder at one time, or 6.3 Blue Jays per square foot!  

We’ve had an ongoing rat problem in the neighborhood for the past few years, but the rats seemed to have disappeared this summer, and my cams hadn’t shown evidence of a single one, at least not until the night of September 20-21. 

So now, at the peak of sparrow migration, before a single Harris’s or adult White-crowned Sparrow has shown up in my yard, I’m going to have to completely end my ground-feeding, empty at least one bird bath every night, and be extremely careful about spillage from my other feeders for the year. 

I don’t know if I’m more upset about the rat or the cat. I sorely wish that the cat would dispatch the rat whose body would somehow poison the cat, but that’s not how nature works. Domestic cats are singularly poor at preying on rats despite the ridiculous claims those feral cat groups make with regard to trap-neuter-release programs. Outdoor cats mostly kill birds and tinier rodents, and in the Duluth area, that means chipmunks and the native mice that provide a prey base for our owls and hawks, and a great deal of entertainment for me, trying to figure out how my one little mouse makes it past my squirrel baffle to get into that feeder.  

So my backyard surveillance program has uncovered two real problems. But I feel much much better just looking at the video of my flying squirrel. He or she was only there a single night, so I know my bird bath isn’t essential to the little guy’s existence, but I’m sure glad it came down to earth to give me a happy thrill for one night.