Out on Whitefish Point

I was in Michigan to speak at Whitefish Point Bird Observatory's annual Spring Fling at the end of April. These are hardy people, with a different way of defining "spring" than we have down here in subtropical Ohio. They go by the calendar, not by the weather, and if the calendar says it's spring, well then it is. They go out.

I love nautical disaster art. I find myself wondering what it might be like to look at a beautiful work of art, having lived through a disaster. Hey, it wasn't teal blue out there. It was PITCH BLACK and you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. But that's a really nice painting.


Whitefish Point is famous as the place where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, taking 29 souls with it. This billboard is for my friend Grady, who loves shipwrecks most of all. Well, at least he did when I saw him last. He may have moved on to trainwrecks by now.



Among birders, Whitefish Point is famous for being a fabulous migrant trap, welcoming tired birds who've winged across Superior in the fall, and stacking up apprehensive birds (especially raptors) who don't much feel like facing the crossing in spring. Either way, it works real well for birdwatchers. I spent a fun afternoon watching hawks on the WPBO platform. A goshawk made my day!



Sandhill cranes breed sparingly here. I was lucky to spot a couple of pairs, prospecting for nest sites.

But it's the pines along the shore that hold the big treasure for birders.



I had to keep reminding myself that I was not on a beach in Cape Cod, so similar was the vegetation.


There's something disorienting about not having the tang of salt and fish in your nostrils when you're walking on dune vegetation.

Looking out at Superior, I got a graphic demonstration of how shifting lake ice can plow up gravel and make landforms. It was like seeing a glacier in miniature. Here, a tiny moraine.
When glaciers plowed along the land, they picked up ridges of gravel and sand. At their terminus, they piled up these deposits as they melted. The same thing's happening here, on a miniature scale, and seasonally.



The beach rocks were so beautiful that I dared not start to look for a favorite. Even so, my
pockets were heavy when I left. The more closely I looked, the more beautiful the stones became. I couldn't get over the mix of blue, pink, flecked granite, and terra cotta. Phoo. Imagine having that in your landscaping, or your aquarium! Pebble lust.

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My friend, festival organizer Bob Pettit, told me of seeing people staggering out with bagsful of the lovely water-worn stones, even though they're not supposed to.




You get the feeling that people have been here for a very long time, and in the cool temperatures and acid conditions, their traces linger. Here's a Model A fender, the same kind I used to sit on as a child, clinging to the headlight strut, as my friend Billy Jones drove us around the neighborhood in the evening. I wondered if there might be an entire Model A in that hummock under the birches.

I was soon to find out that the dune forest hid even greater riches.

On Beyond Warblers

On my way to the Duluth/Superior airport for the flight home from Wisconsin, I finally got into some grasslands. Burbling bobolinks and western meadowlarks, Savannah sparrows, and these little cuties: clay-colored sparrows. It's a little blurry, but see that gray hindneck? Kind of like a bleached-out chipping sparrow. They like evergreens in grassy savannah. I got out of the car at several places and just breathed, and let the songs wash over me. It all made me thirst for North Dakota's Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival, held in Carrington June 7-10, where we'll be speaking, field-tripping, and playing music for the fifth consecutive year. I missed it last year due to severe burnout; Bill soldiered on alone. We're taking the kids. They can't wait. This year, they'll be going on the field trips with us, as they did in West Virginia. Oh, boy! It's nice that they're old enough to drag out of bed early, and be good troopers on long field trips.

Here on the blog, we're still in Wisconsin. I hope that by now all birders with a pulse will be heading to Chequamegon Bay's Second Annual Birding and Nature Festival next May. Tuck your pants into your socks. I'm currently fighting a tick-borne disease (take your pick; there are at least four I could have) and I'm rooting for the doxycycline. Feeling like I've been run over by a truck, and still having to get up and go. I've had Lyme disease four times (oddly enough, while living in Lyme, Connecticut) so I'm pretty familiar with the symptoms. Had a spectacular bulls-eye bite on my ankle, and a week later couldn't lift a jug of milk without groaning in pain. I will say that this is a fairly mild case as they go, and I hope I'm catching it in time.

Enough about me. Not only warblers were migrating, and stacking up on Superior's south shore. Everything was moving: woodpeckers, hawks, sparrows, nuthatches, vireos, grosbeaks. It was a heady show.

The nasal yanks of red-breasted nuthatches sounded through the spruces everywhere I went. They'll breed here, but they, too, were waiting for a tailwind.
I was eager to see a black-backed woodpecker, which would have been a life bird, so I checked out every woodpeckeresque form and woody tap. Who's that? All the clues are there.
A resplendent female yellow-bellied sapsucker. If she were a guy, she'd have a red beard.Earlier in the day, I'd followed a slow pecking deep into the woods, visions of black-backed woodpeckers dancing in my head, to find a pileated woodpecker working on a trunk at ground level. It always pays to check. And it reminded me of my childhood, when I made a sport and science of sneaking up on any woodpecker I heard in the Virginia woodlands. Man, the looks I got at pileated woodpeckers that way! I learned the peck intensities and rates of different species, too, stuff you can't get from any field guide. Funny: we all seem to remember our childhoods as quite solitary. I can assure you that, for the most part, mine was. Youngest of five, obsessed with birds and nature, alone and quiet, and in the woods as much as possible. Not much has changed.

A red-eyed vireo found a lovely backdrop in maple seeds. I always marvel that maples set seed before most trees even have their leaves!This gorgeous adult broad-winged hawk flew low in front of my creeping car, then swept up onto a low-hanging limb. Car as blind. I poked myself out the window to make a portrait, then waited for him to move on of his own volition before advancing. I count it a little victory when a bird moves because it wishes to, not because I've forced it to. Each bird has its own comfort zone, and I try not to violate that. Wisconsin's gifts have fueled this blog for a long time. Hard to believe I was only there for two full days and parts of two more--Friday afternoon to Sunday morning. What treasures will four days in North Dakota's pothole region bring to a blogger who's finally gotten a good camera? I'll probably be blogging about the birds out there until Christmas. Brace yourselves! We're off at the screech of dawn.