A Lost Little Bird on a Great Big Lake

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter, is set in southeastern Dakota Territory in what is now De Smet, South Dakota, during the severe winter of 1880-1881. In the chapter “After the Storm,” Pa Ingalls walked into their cabin after a terrible October blizzard that lasted days.

“I got something to show you,” Pa said. He took his hand carefully out of his pocket. “Look here, girls, look at what I found hidden in a haystack.”

Slowly he opened his hand. In the hollow of his mitten sat a little bird. He put it gently in Mary’s hands.

“Why, it’s standing straight up!” Mary exclaimed, touching it lightly with her finger-tips. 

They had never seen a bird like it. It was small, but it looked exactly like the picture of the great auk in Pa’s big green book, “The Wonders of the Animal World.” 

It had the same white breast and black back and wings, the same short legs placed far back, and the same large, webbed feet. It stood straight up on its short legs, like a tiny man with black coat and trousers and white shirt front, and its little black wings were like arms. 

“What is it, Pa? Oh, what is it?” Carried cried in delight and she held Grace’s eager hands. “Mustn’t touch, Grace.”

“I never saw anything like it,” said Pa. “It must have tired out in the storm winds and dropped down and struck against the haystack. It had crawled into the hay for shelter.”

“It’s a great auk,” Laura declared. “Only it’s a little one.”

“It’s full-grown, it isn’t a nestling,” said Ma. “Look at its feathers.”

“Yes, it’s full-grown, whatever it is,” Pa agreed.

The little bird stood up straight on Mary’s soft palm and looked at them all with its bright black eyes. 

“It’s never seen a human before,” said Pa. 

“How do you know, Pa?” Mary asked. 

“Because it isn’t afraid of us,” Pa said. 

“Oh, can we keep it, Pa? Can’t we, Ma?” Carrie begged.

“Well, that depends,” Pa said. 

Mary’s finger-tips touched the little bird all over, while Laura told her how white its smooth breast was and how very black its back and tail and little wings. Then they let Grace carefully touch it. The little auk sat still and looked at them. 

They set it on the floor and it walked a little way. Then it pushed its webbed feet tiptoe against the boards and flapped its wings. 

“It can’t get going,” said Pa. “It’s a water-bird. It must start from the water where it can use those webbed feet to get up speed.”

Finally they put it in a box in the corner. It stood there looking up at them, with its round, bright black eyes and they wondered what it ate. 

That chapter ends with the family looking at jackrabbits feeding hungrily on their hay and Pa deciding not to shoot them for rabbit stew, but to let them be. They'd all come through that storm together.

In the next chapter, “Indian Summer,” we learn more:

The little auk would not eat. It did not utter a sound, but Carrie and Laura thought that it looked up at them desperately. It would die without food, but it did not seem to know how to eat anything that they offered it. 

At dinnertime Pa said that the ice was melting on Silver Lake; he thought that the strange little bird could take care of itself on the open water. So after dinner Laura and Mary put on their coats and hoods and they went with Pa to set the little auk free. 

Silver Lake was ruffling pale blue and silver under the warm, pale sky. Ice was round its edges and flat gray cakes of ice floated on the ripples. Pa took the little auk from his pocket. In its smooth black coat and neat white shirt-front of tiny feathers, it stood up on his palm. It saw the land and the sky and the water, and eagerly it rose up on its toes and stretched out its little wings. 

But it could not go, it could not fly. Its wings were too small to lift it. 

“It does not belong on land,” said Pa. “It’s a water-bird.”

He squatted down by the thin white ice at the lake’s edge and reaching far out he tipped the little bird from his hand into the blue water. For the briefest instant, there it was, and then it wasn’t there. Out among the ice cakes it went streaking, a black speck. 

“It gets up speed, with his webbed feet,” said Pa, “to lift it from the…There it goes!”

Laura barely had time to see it, rising tiny in the great blue-sparkling sky. Then, in all that glittering of sunlight, it was gone. Her eyes were too dazzled to see it any more. But Pa stood looking, still seeing it going toward the South.

They never knew what became of that strange little bird that came in the dark with the storm from the far North and went southward in the sunshine. They never saw nor heard of another bird like it. They never found out what kind of bird it was. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description, including the important details that the bird was tiny enough to fit in Pa’s pocket and that it had a black back and wings and white front, makes me wonder if the bird could have been a Dovekie, which ranges from the Arctic through the north Atlantic coast. South Dakota has no records of Dovekies, but Wisconsin has two records, one shot by two boys hunting along Lake Michigan in 1908, and one found dead under some Tomah power lines in 1949. That one had only a small piece of quartz in its stomach. Single Dovekie specimens have also been taken from Wabana Lake near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in November 1962 and Lake of the Woods in November 1931. 

The other, probably more likely, possibility is that it was an Ancient Murrelet. South Dakota has one record, from November 1993, of a poor bird discovered in Ipswich, in the north-central part of the state, after a snow storm that had originated in the North Pacific. The bird died soon after it was found. Dan Tallman, who prepared the carcass for a museum specimen at the U.S. National Museum, wrote in his blog, “I have never encountered a more emaciated bird.” Wisconsin has at least five records of Ancient Murrelet, and Minnesota seven. 

Anyway, thoughts of Laura Ingalls Wilder immediately came to mind when I read a text message this morning that Steve Kolbe had found an Ancient Murrelet at Stoney Point up the shore between Duluth and Two Harbors. I instantly loaded up my car with my camera, binoculars, face mask, and coat, and the moment I could break away, I headed up to see it. The poor thing is almost certainly doomed—oceanic birds simply don’t have much chance of surviving long in fresh water, with food entirely different from what they have experience catching and eating. But such a cosmically rare bird so close to home seemed worth chasing. A tragic truth about birders is that we really do relish seeing rare birds. I try to temper that lust for the list, especially when it involves either wasting a lot of fossil fuels or looking for a bird who is clearly suffering, but hope is the thing with feathers, and this bird was still diving and popping up.

I made it to Stoney Point a little more than an hour after Steve Kolbe first reported it. A dozen cars were parked where I’d sort of expected from the text message to find it, but I didn’t see any birders and there were two or three houses on the far side, so I figured someone might be having a gathering and kept driving. Kim Eckert was at the next collection of cars and told me that Bill Penning, down on the rocky shore, had his scope on it so I scurried down. I was wearing the shoes I wear when working at my desk treadmill—I hadn’t thought to change into something more suitable—but I got through just fine. The bird was a barely visible speck in the distance through my binoculars, when I finally got a glimpse, but that was after Bill lowered his scope for me to get a pretty good look. My camera was worthless at that distance, but those cars I’d passed apparently did belong to birders, so I headed there next, where I got my photos. 

On my way to see it at the first spot, I told a young couple walking their dog about it, mentioning the Laura Ingalls Wilder connection, and they thought that was fascinating. I passed them again after I’d seen it, and they were thrilled for me.

Birding is of course always about birds—the ones we see and hear, and the ones we yearn to see and hear. But it’s about more than that, too. The birding community can be competitive and contentious but it’s a genuine community, and I’ve missed the camaraderie of birders during this horrible pandemic. It was lovely to chat for a minute in person with my treasured friend Greg Garmer, and I got to say hi to several more friends, all of us drawn to one little spot on a great big lake to get a brief glimpse at a lost little creature. 

This sighting gave me even more than that tick on my list and the opportunity to connect with friends. It also gave me a sense of connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder herself, the woman whose books so enriched my childhood and were so enjoyable to read aloud to my own children. So I’m feeling a great deal of gratitude today, even as I’m hoping against hope that that little bird figures out how to get enough food out of Lake Superior to fuel up for a long journey home. Godspeed, little one.

Reverend Bachman's Doomed Baby Pileated Woodpeckers

 

This year, the American Birding Association named the Pileated Woodpecker their Bird of the Year. I’ve been going through old For the Birds transcripts and blog posts looking back at all the things I’ve written about Pileateds over the years. In January 1997, just months before I had my own personal encounter raising a baby Pileated Woodpecker, I read what a Lutheran minister named John Bachman wrote to his friend John James Audubon, who published it in his Birds of America. 

Bachman took an entire six-egg clutch from a Pileated Woodpecker nest to see if the birds would start a new clutch. When they renested, this time producing five eggs, he waited until the young were occasionally peeping out of the hole. He wrote: 

I carried them home, to judge of their habits in confinement, and attempted to raise them. 

I found it exceedingly difficult to entice them to open their bill in order to feed them. They were sullen and cross, nay, three died in a few days; but the others, having been fed on grasshoppers forcibly introduced into their mouths, were raised. In a short time they began picking up the grasshoppers thrown into their cage, and were fully fed with cornmeal, which they preferred eating dry. 

Their whole employment consisted in attempting to escape from their prison, regularly demolishing one every two days, although made of pine boards of tolerable thickness. I at last had one constructed with oak boards at the back and sides, and rails of the same in front. This was too much for them, and their only comfort was in passing and holding their bills through the hard bars. 

In the morning after receiving water, which they drank freely, they invariably upset the cup or saucer, and although this was large and flattish, they regularly turned it quite over. After this they attacked the trough which contained their food, and soon broke it to pieces, and when perchance I happened to approach them with my hand, they made passes at it with their powerful bills with great force. 

I kept them in this manner until winter. They were at all times uncleanly and unsociable birds. On opening the door of my study one morning, one of them dashed off by me, alighted on an apple-tree near the house, climbed some distance, and kept watching me from one side and then the other, as if to ask what my intentions were. I walked into my study—the other was hammering at my books. 

They had broken one of the bars of the cage, and must have been at liberty for some hours, judging by the mischief they had done. Tired of my pets, I opened the door, and this last one hearing the voice of his brother, flew towards him and alighted on the same tree. They remained about half an hour, as if consulting each other, after which, taking to their wings together, they flew off in a southern direction, and with much more ease than could have been expected from birds so long kept in captivity. The ground was covered with snow, and I never more saw them. No birds of this species ever bred since in the hole spoken of in this instance.

I'm very glad that those parent Pileateds steered clear of that elm tree after that. I raised one baby Pileated Woodpecker during my years as a rehabber. Gepetto was most assuredly never once “sullen and cross,” nor did he do any damage to my house—I gave him plenty of things to play with, and he was incredibly gentle when he was sitting on my shoulder or arm, or on any of my children. 

I learned a lot about Pileated Woodpeckers from my experience, all of it making me love Pileated Woodpeckers even more than I already did. I stayed with Gepetto for two weeks when he was learning to be independent, so I was reasonably assured that he could find his own natural food and knew how to elude danger. 

Gepetto was very gentle, but his claws were pretty sharp clinging to a thin t-shirt. 

I wonder how long Bachman's two survivors lasted after they escaped. I sure hope he treated his parishioners with more kindness and understanding than he did those poor baby birds. Audubon named two species for him, Bachman's Sparrow and the extinct Bachman's Warbler. Audubon himself never saw a Bachman's Warbler—Bachman shot and gave the specimens to Audubon, who named the species in Bachman's honor in 1833. Bachman was a slave-owner who used Scripture to justify that abomination. I'd love to see the American Ornithological Society change the names of these birds to something reflecting the birds themselves, not to honor the white supremacist who shot them.

Birds (and One Birder) in the News

 

We’re in the midst of a major irruption of finches into southern and central states where these northern birds seldom venture in very large numbers. Up here, huge numbers of finches may visit our feeders in January and February without harming the birds—it’s usually not until March and especially April, when we have more frequent thaws, that contaminated food becomes a problem and birds start contracting salmonella, botulism, and other diseases.  

Finches have no concept whatsoever of social distancing. Many feed on the ground directly below feeders, picking up food items dropped from above. If one of those birds above is infected, food it mouthed may be eaten by one of those ground-feeders. And when seed sits on the ground for days or weeks, germs flourish, especially when temperatures rise above freezing. So people in Central and Southern states who had been reporting thrilling numbers of siskins earlier are now reporting dead and dying siskins. Raking up seeds below feeders is always important during thaws, and it’s especially critical when large numbers of birds are feeding together. When a sick bird turns up at a feeder, cleanup is already too late—at that point, closing down the feeding station entirely to keep birds from concentrating is the only choice to protect the birds.  

In happier news from last summer that I just found out about, scientists at Swansea University in the UK attached data sensors to the wings of Andean Condors (related to the California Condor pictured above) to keep track of every single flap. They discovered that condors flap only about 1 percent of their flight time, and almost all of that during takeoffs and landings. Once aloft, a condor can travel over a hundred miles without flapping once.   

New research on bird brains and problem solving has been pretty exciting. Birds lack a neocortex—the area of the mammalian brain where working memory, planning, and problem solving happen. And so for centuries, human scientists, who happen to be mammals with large brains and even larger egos, dismissed the possibility that birds could possibly have excellent memories and the ability to plan and solve problems. Many of them even believed that chickadees, jays, and other birds that cache away food in fall and winter only found that food again via both hiding way more than they needed and sheer luck, though that was disproved many years ago now. But now researchers have found a previously unknown arrangement of microcircuits in the avian brain that may be analogous to the mammalian neocortex. And in a separate study, other researchers have linked this same region to conscious thought. Suddenly it’s big news to people who seemed to be working in a hall of mirrors that birds could possibly be self-aware.  

My absolutely favorite news item today is that my friend, the writer, poet, and wildlife ecologist Drew Lanham is the 2020 recipient of the Center for Biological Diversity’s annual E.O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation. Drew is a distinguished professor and master teacher of wildlife ecology at Clemson, where he’s taught courses in woodland ecology, conservation biology, forest biodiversity, wildlife policy, and conservation ornithology and nature writing for 25 years. He’s also the poet laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina. 

Drew was kind enough to record for me his own reading of four poems from his splendid book Sparrow Envy. That program aired in April 2016. In 2020, he wrote a lovely poem, “Life in Hand,” which will appear in the revised and expanded edition of Sparrow Envy this year. Drew and I had a conversation about that which aired on For the Birds in July. Anyway, I’m proud as proud could be to call Drew, the newest recipient of the E.O. Wilson Award my treasured friend. His receiving this well-deserved award is the best kind of news. And good news is something I need right now. 

For Our Real Life Listening Pleasure

Even the statues at Disney World look at the birds. 

In January 2003, my son Joe started working at Walt Disney World, and we started going to Florida every year or so. I of course had to start a Disney World bird list. I’d take photos of exotic birds in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, but on my official list, I counted only the wild birds I saw on the grounds.  

That winter or one soon after, while we were standing in the long queue to the Dinosaur ride, I was trying to identify a couple of warblers singing away when I suddenly realized they weren’t real warblers at all—just the sound of them coming from a couple of well-hidden speakers. I was shocked and distressed, even knowing this was Disney World, not the real world.  

Around that time, birders were complaining about the ridiculous bird songs a TV network was using as background for golf tournaments—apparently the subtle suggestion that real birds would be singing away during a tournament helped golf fans feel complacent regarding the horrifyingly heavy applications of water, fertilizer, and pesticide on golf courses. When I did a program specifically about that back then, I heard from a radio listener who was most seriously displeased with me. She told me golf was her only form of relaxation from her high-powered job, and I had no right to dampen her joy. But her joy is hardly my concern. I don’t advocate for people with high-powered jobs. I advocate for birds, pure and simple.  

Aren't real life birds better than fake?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we humans enjoy hearing bird songs because lately I’ve been playing recordings of bird songs for my baby grandson. He’s not quite five months old, so he’s far from being verbal, but he definitely seems to enjoy hearing them. I’ve been wondering if bird songs so out of context—I recorded them right here in our backyard, but during May and June, not December or January—could end up confusing him, but decided he can figure out about bird song contexts when he’s a bit older.  

Walter chewing on his binoculars while listening to bird recordings. 

It seems intuitively obvious that people benefit from hearing bird song, and last month researchers from California Polytechnic State University published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B analyzing just how much natural sounds affect people’s sense of well-being. 

The study was conducted in the City of Boulder, Colorado’s Open Space and Mountain Parks. The researchers placed 10 hidden, evenly spaced speakers on two sections of trails, and played recorded songs from 11 species of birds including American robins, house finches, and black-capped chickadees from July 15 to September 4, 2017. The speakers were placed in realistic microhabitats for each species in order to be authentic. For example, the speaker broadcasting the song of the spotted towhee was placed near the ground in shrubs where the bird is most often found. 

The researchers alternated playing the birdsong for a few hours a day for a week, and then turned off the speakers for a week at a time. They interviewed hikers after they passed through the sections with the speakers, and found that the “phantom chorus” of birds singing increased hiker’s sense of well-being, at least in those protected natural areas. 

I wish they’d also asked the hikers if they were birders, to see if there was a difference between birders and non-birders here. I know if I were hearing those sounds, I’d be searching for the actual birds, and would find it frustrating if they were nowhere to be found. And because I’d be searching, I might locate the hidden speakers, and would feel even more betrayed and upset than I did at Disney World, where I expect everything to be fake. 

The comments following one news report of the study were pretty much about what a great idea it would be to pipe in bird songs in urban and park areas of cities and suburbs. That filled me with sorrow. To me, the logical conclusion was that we need to make the urban environment healthier so more birds thrive there—not to foster complacency by providing a fake auditory sense of what is natural. I want my little grandson to be able to find as many real-life birds when he grows up as I've been able to enjoy myself.

Even Disney World has real life birds, like this Gray Catbird.

The 2021 American Birding Association Bird of the Year

The year 2020 was horrible on many fronts, but the bird chosen by the American Birding Association as their Bird of the Year, the Cedar Waxwing, gave the year a touch of genuine loveliness. 

I hung my Bird-of-the-Year poster where it could be easily seen when I was giving Zoom presentations. Now, with the new year, I’ll be swapping it out for the new ABA Bird of the Year as soon as I get the new poster.  

On New Year’s Eve in a Zoom presentation, Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association announced the ABA Bird of the Year 2021, the "pill-e-a-ted" woodpecker. One of the ABA Board members corrected Jeff, pointing out it was the "pie-le-a-ted" woodpecker, and Jeff said people would be spending the next six months arguing on social media about how to pronounce it. Most dictionaries give both pronunciations. The first pronunciation given is the one I use, pie-le-a-ted, but both are equally correct. Use either as you wish—just don’t call it a pleated woodpecker except in fabric stores near the ruffled grouse.

I’ve had both a male and a female pileated fairly regularly since late fall, so I thought it would be enormously cool to spot one as my first bird of the year. As soon as I got up on New Year’s Day, just before sunrise, I started scrutinizing my backyard hoping a Pileated would fly in, but no luck whatsoever—my first bird was in the same family but at the opposite end of the size spectrum, a Downy Woodpecker. 

I didn’t see a Pileated all day, or the next day. Russ and I birded in the Bog on the third, and didn’t see one there or at home, and I still missed out on the fourth and fifth. I started wondering if maybe my birds had flown to ABA Headquarters in Delaware to pick up their award firsthand. Where else could they be?

So I did the calculations. According to a 2017 paper in Nature, the Pileated Woodpecker’s flight speed is 9.55 m/s, or about 21 mph. Assuming that is an accurate average speed, and assuming it were possible for a Pileated Woodpecker to fly for an average of 10 hours a day, it could cover almost exactly 210 miles a day, making a one-way trip between Duluth and ABA Headquarters in Delaware City in a full 6 days of travel. Of course, this is winter, when days in Duluth are only 8 ¾ hours long and those of Delaware City 9 ½ hours long, and of course the birds would have to stop many times en route for food. But even if they could cover that much ground that quickly, my birds couldn’t have made it to Delaware city by New Year’s Eve, because I’d seen them on December 29. And as it turns out, they couldn’t have flown home starting on New Year’s Day at that speed, because the male finally turned up in my yard on January 6 around noon. Either my Pileated Woodpeckers hopped a jet to pick up their award or they don't take the Bird of the Year distinction too personally. My male was just at my suet feeder, but I took photos and videos anyway because it was my first sighting of the ABA Bird of the Year for 2021. 

Naturally, I thought that would be the coolest bird I’d see on January 6, but an hour or so later, a murder of 40 crows in my backyard announced another contender. 

The night before, a Great Horned Owl had been hooting across the street—the pitch seemed high enough to be a female. I’ve occasionally heard a pair around here, but not in 2021, so it was new for the year. Now the crows were screaming bloody murder, and I figured I could get a peek at the Great Horned Owl. But no—when I went to the back of the yard and combed through all the branches of the spruce the crows were focused on, there it was, a Barred Owl!  

In the 40 years we’ve lived here, I’ve only seen a Barred Owl from my own yard once before, back in January 1993, when one of my children’s friends came over to tell me there was one on the roof two doors down. To add it to my yard list, either the bird or I have to be on my property, and in this case the only way I could get an angle on it was to stand on my cyclone fence, leaning over at a jaunty angle as I hung onto a tree branch for dear life. This time, all I had to do was walk through my snowy backyard to the back fence and look through the spruce and there it was.  

My year list will grow extremely slowly this year, what with the pandemic, but even though I've seen only 24 species so far, I'm very pleased with each of them, and thrilled that I finally got to see the 2021 ABA Bird of the Year. 

Trip to the Bog

On January 3, Russ and I drove out to the Sax-Zim Bog for a lovely day of birding. I like to go to the bog sometime during the first few days of January. Last year my daughter and son-in-law were visiting for Christmas, and Russ and I decided we’d head to the bog on January 4th or 5th after they left for New York, but that day, January 3, I had my heart attack, grounding me for a bit. As much as I enjoy keeping a year list, I’m not emotionally tied to the idea of amassing a huge year list the moment a new year starts, so I was pretty patient during my convalescence. But there was no way on earth I was willing to sit at home when a Barn Owl was reported in the bog late on January 11, 2020. 

Twelve species of owls have ever been recorded in Minnesota—in 2011, I wrote a book about them for the University of Minnesota Press titled, naturally, Twelve Owls. Before 2020, I’d been lucky enough to have seen 11 of them, each one at least once in St. Louis County. But Barn Owls are incredibly rare in southern Minnesota and even more improbable up here in the northern part of the state.  

For decades after we moved here in 1981, I had a recurring dream about seeing a Barn Owl in the county. I knew that was a pipe dream, probably inspired because Duluth’s Kim Eckert had led me to my lifer in Chicago in 1978 before I knew who he was. After I met him when we moved here, my brain must have been playing around with that memory. 

There had only been two records of Barn Owl in St. Louis County ever before. The first was in Duluth in February 1960 when I was an 8-year-old in Chicago. Three years after we moved here, a dead one was picked up in Hermantown right near Duluth, but no one had seen or reported that one while it was alive. So a Barn Owl was definitely not in the cards. 

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see and even photograph the one last year on January 12 during my very first getaway after the heart attack. 

Tragically, we really are too far north for Barn Owls to survive—that one died later that very day. But while it was alive, it made me one of very few people who have seen all 12 owls in Minnesota, and even more thrilling, all 12 of them in St. Louis County. It’s not much of a claim to fame, and it's a tragic one at that, but it’s something. That poor doomed owl was the best bird I saw in all of 2020, and the bird that brought my St. Louis County list to precisely 300.  

This time around, there was no way could Russ and I could possibly have seen anything that exceptional. Indeed, we didn’t see a single owl all day. I just wanted to visit a few places and poke around, taking photos. 

We picked a beautiful day—dense hoar frost covered the trees much of the day, and though the temps started out in the teens, there was no wind. I took plenty of shots of scenery and a few requisite pictures of red squirrels. 

In terms of birds, I saw only 19 species, none of them rare, but had a superb time. 

The feeding station in the far northwest corner of the Sax-Zim Bog map, known far and wide as Mary Lou’s Feeders, has for years been the only spot with fairly reliable Evening Grosbeaks, so Russ and I headed there first. Sure enough, we had dozens and I took bazillions of photos. 

Oddly enough, she had even more House Sparrows, a species I seldom see at the bog, so I took lots of pictures of them, too. 

Then we headed to the feeding station on McDavitt Road, where there were dozens more Evening Grosbeaks! They were a sight for sore eyes. 

Then on to the Admiral Road feeding station. I watched for a Boreal Chickadee but didn’t manage to pick any out. But I did see lots of the usual suspects—Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, Canada Jays, Black-capped Chickadees, Red-breasted Nuthatches, and some redpolls and Pine Grosbeaks.  

The Welcome Center had the busiest feeders, with a lot of Evening Grosbeaks along with Pine Grosbeaks and more Canada Jays. I spent most of my time feasting on their beauty and soaking in their lovely calls. Next time I go there, I’ll bring my sound recorder to set up somewhere for a few hours.  

We ended the day at the Winterberry Bog, walking the brand-new boardwalk memorializing a treasured friend of mine, Bob Russell, who died in 2019. 

I was thrilled that the boardwalk named for him is so beautiful. We lucked into a Black-backed Woodpecker there (no pix), but did not see the ermine that’s been hanging around at the start of the boardwalk. I’ve yet to see an ermine in my whole life. That’s what keeps us birders going. Tomorrow is another day, and you never know what it will bring. 

Russ and I saw this Boreal Owl at the Bog last year on Superb Owl Sunday (February 21).
Who knows what we'll see this year?