Crex Meadows

The last couple of days have been really nice. With temps in the 70s and 80s it has begun to feel like summer. Too bad I could not get today off, one of our crew had to go to Baltimore this week so the rest of us had to stick around, or I might have made my first run of the year up to Crex Meadows. Crex is a Wildlife Management Area located on the Minnesota and Wisconsin border on the Wisconsin side. It is one of the places where I like to spend a lot of time at during the warmer months but since it takes about an hour and a half to get there I usually only go on weekends or when I have a day off. My last trip to Crex was last October, 10-25 to be exact. It was one of those nice Indian summer days that we had right before it got cold. It was a pretty good day for birding also. This was the first northern shrike that I saw last fall.

A population of sandhill cranes lives in Crex through out the summer. On a few occasions we have even been lucky enough to see a sandhill pair out with its new colt, that is what baby sandhills are called.

In the fall the sandhill poulation grows as birds from all around the area converge on Crex and use it as a staging area for the fall migration. Soon after these pictures where taken these sandhills were on their way to some where warm like the New Mexico, south Texas or Florida.

Another visitor to the refuge during the fall are rough legged hawks. These birds nest up on the northern tundra of Alaska and Canada. Most spend their winter down in the lower 48 states. This one may have spent the winter at Crex or he might have just been stopping off to look for some lunch on his way further south.

One of the most common raptors found at Crex is the bald eagle. The abundance of water on the refuge and fish that are found in the water provide for numerous nesting pair in and around the park. During the winter these eagles will head south in search of open water and may end up a couple of hours south at Reeds Landing in southern Minnesota.

Sax Zim Winter Birding Fest Jay and Shrike

One of these birds is not like the other, one of these birds just doesn't belong. Remember this song from Sesame Street? Usually there were 4 different objects and you had to pick the one that did not fit. In this case I have two different birds that are similar is size, shape and color. If you only got a quick glance it would be very easy for an average birder, like myself, to mistake one for the other. But these two birds are very different.
This first bird is a gray jay. They are members of the Corvidae family which includes the crows and jays. They live in boreal forests where they typically stay year round. They are able to avoid migration by storing food (berries, insects, rodents, carrion) in hidden caches. They use their sticky saliva to glue this stored food in bark crevices, typically in black or white spruce or lodgepole or jack pine. This bird and its mate, gray jays live in pairs, were spotted feeding on some carrion which had been attached to one of the trees on Admiral Road.
This second bird is a northern shrike. The northern shrike breeds in the far north, up on the tundra or taiga. It migrates south to Canada and the northern US during the winter. Like the gray jay the northern shrike also has been known to store extra food for future use but unlike the gray jay the northern shrike is a predator. The northern shrike feeds on small songbirds, mammals and insects. It stores its extra food by impaling the prey on tree branches, spines, or barbed wire fences.

This year has been a good year for spotting northern shrikes. There seem to be a lot more in our area then usual. I saw 5 northern shrikes during the 3 days that I was up north for the festival. We spotted this shrike up on the Hedbom Logging Road. We were looking for woodpeckers but instead found this shrike who seemed to continue to move closer to where we were standing on the road. Maybe he just wanted to get a better view of the crazy birders.

Red Wing Christmas Bird Count

Last Saturday I participated in the Red Wing area Christmas Bird Count. This was my third CBC, the first two were the prior weekend in Duluth and Two Harbors. This was kind of different situation because this count circle had not been done since 1973, so we did not have any recent data and were not sure what to expect. Unfortunately the weather was not great for birding and even worse for taking pictures.

I had spoken with our group leader, Jim Ryan the night before and we decided that the three of us, Jim Gay was the other member of our group, would meet near my house and then car pool down in my truck. So we met at around 6:00 am and headed south to Red Wing to meet with the rest of the count group. The roads on the trip down were a bit slick but not to bad. The fog was another story. There was several occasions when we would be driving with fairly good visibility and then hit a wall of fog and I would need to slow down to about 10 mph because I could barely see the road in front of the truck hood. Despite the fun driving conditions we made it down to the rendezvous location on time and with out incident. At the rendezvous location we found out from Laura Coble, the Red Wing CBC coordinator, that several people had to cancel because many of the roads to the west of Red Wing were iced up and they could not get through safely. Since several areas in the count circle were left with out anyone to count in them we decided that we could cover a second area. So around 7:30 am or so we took of and headed to our first area.

Our first zone was south west of Red Wing and west of Frontenac. It consisted mainly of farm fields with a few roads running through, so we spent most of our time in the truck driving around. With a lot of farms and fields we spotted a lot of juncos, chickadees, tree sparrows, starlings, pheasants, and pigeons. We also spotted a few more interesting birds.

Red-tailed hawk

Rough-legged hawk

Northern shrike

We even got a bald eagle to pose for us in the lite snow

It snowed for quite a bit in the morning, the very wet snow flakes made it difficult to shoot, so my camera stayed packed most of the time until the snow stopped but I could not pass on these shots.

We completed our first zone around noon and then met back with the group at the afternoon rendezvous. By this time all the snow had stopped and the fog had lifted. It was still very overcast but the temps were fairly warm as we headed out to our second area.

The second zone covered the Frontenac area. It consisted of the small residential areas of Frontenac and as well as the state park. We started off touring through the residential areas, stopping to take a closer look at any of the active feeders. Near the feeders we saw juncos, cardinals, chickadees, gold finch and house finch.

We also saw American tree sparrows

blue jays

and pine siskin at some of the feeders.

Near one of the cemeteries we were excited to find a couple of brown creepers. They were the only 2 creepers that were found on the count.

In the Frontenac State Park we spotted another rough-legged hawk, a flock of nearly 100 robins over by the Villa Maria, and a couple bald eagles near the river. We even hiked out to sand point but we did not find much other then a hairy woodpecker.

When we finished the second area we headed back to Red Wing to meet for the compilation. I still had some holiday stuff to take care of plus we were all pretty beat so we did not stay long. According to an e-mail from Laura Coble the final numbers were 46 species found by 17 birders. The record for this count from 1905 to 1973 was 49 so considering the conditions I think that we did well. The more interesting sightings included:

2 Tufted Titmice (at two separate feeders; one of the feeders normally has 2)
2 Brown Creepers
8 Gray Partridges
14 Rough-legged Hawks
49 Pine Siskins
10 Snow Buntings
1 Belted Kingfisher
4 Ruffed Grouse
96 American Robins
60 Red-winged Blackbirds

Most of my birding has been alone or with my wife, so going out with other birders has been kind of a new experience for me. It has been fun and I am learning a lot. Hopefully I will get a chance to go out birding with Jim and/or Jim again in the future.

Two Harbors Christmas Bird Count

After the Duluth CBC on Saturday the 15th I stayed over night in Duluth so that I could help out in Two Harbors on the 16th. My group for the Two Harbors CBC was a bit smaller then the 5 that we had for Duluth, with just Mike Hendrickson and myself. Mike is a very good birder, much better then I am, and he runs a great blog called Colder By The Lake Birding. He also does some bird guiding and is currently organizing the first ever Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival so I got lucky getting grouped with some one with loads of experience.

We met in Two Harbors at around 7:15 and headed out around 7:30. The morning was cold and overcast. It was even snowing a little bit so I left my camera in the car, no use lugging it around when you can't do any shooting. We started by checking the harbors which were pretty quiet. There where a few common goldeneye, some hearing gulls and a common merganser. Then we checked the woods around Lighthouse Point for woodpeckers but we only found a single hairy woodpecker.

Next we went to look for the Inca dove that had been hanging out in Two Harbors for a couple months. Instead of finding the dove we just found the crazy home owner who's yard the dove had been living in. He told us that the dove had not been seen since December 5th, which is about the time that it got really cold. It is assumed that the dove either left or perished.

After we finally were able to extricate ourselves from a rambling incoherent conversation with the home owner we began to check the residential area of our zone. We found a lot of common birds, crows, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, northern cardinals, pigeons, European starlings, herring gulls and common goldeneye.

We did have a few more exciting spots like a bald eagle and rough-legged hawk that both flew over head. We also did spot a northern shrike. I did not have my camera at the time so I had to ran back to the car so that I could get some pix.Shrikes kind of remind me of the little kid on the block who is always trying to be one of the big kids. They are a songbird who acts a lot like a raptor, hunting small rodents and birds. Unfortunately they don't have all of the tools that a raptor does, namely the powerful talons. But they don't need no stinkin' talons. Instead of making the kill with their talons, like raptors do, shrikes use their hooked beaks to knock out their prey or break their necks. They will also often impale their prey on thorns or barb wire to hold it while they eats since they do not have strong talons.
Later on we returned back to Lighthouse point but things were still quiet. There were a lot of deer wondering around the woods.There was also a very noisy red squirrel.
But there was nothing new as far as birds go. Since we had already covered the territory and things were pretty quiet we decided that we were done. Mike went home to Duluth and I hung around Two Harbors shooting some winter scenery until 2:30 when I turned in our numbers to Jim Lind to be tallied.
Even though both the Duluth and Two Harbors CBC were kind of quiet I did have a lot of fun. I am already scheduled for another CBC this week and am planning on participating in a couple more on the last weekend in December.