North Dakota is...

Old barns, fancied up, then forgotten

The sweep of a Swainson's hawk against a white sky


A ruddy duck blowing bubbles through an impossibill

A lanky girl against endless space


Eager birders on the hunt for an obscure sparrow


A buff Cochin's tiny challenge:


Arooka
rooooo!


And a red horse, serenely peeing.
Among many, many other things. Thus end the prairie posts.

Immersed in Marshes

A shoveler glides in for a landing, bill still wet from his last dabble.

Let's face it. Here in unglaciated southeast Ohio, we're starved for marshes. There are very few marshes, almost no natural lakes, and comparatively few opportunities to watch wetland wildlife. That's not to denigrate my beloved habitat; this blog is a celebration of all it HAS. But going to North Dakota is marsh immersion, and I love it.

I bring you marsh tidbits in this post. Marsh equals nursery in pothole country. Here, a massive creche of Canada geese from several broods.
And a racing brood of little mallards, peeping for Mama.
They take to the water, where they feel more comfortable.
Their putative father? Who would know? Although I grew up on Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, with its model of mallard monogamy, it's more likely that Dad's out looking for a receptive hen than helping to tend the brood.
Overhead, snipe winnow, giving an otherworldly woo-woo-woo-woo that seems to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. They make the sound by channeling air from their beating wings into narrow, lanceolate outer tail feathers. They tip and tilt, side to side, and spread their tail as they tilt. The woo's occur at precisely the same time as the wings beat down. And the sound is produced. The bird straightens up, folds it tail in a normal flight position, and the sound ceases. In a magic moment, I was able to get everyone in the group on a winnowing snipe, predicting just when the sound would occur. And they understood, and it was beautiful.Everywhere, marsh wrens click and whir. Less frequently, the triple-click and burr of sedge wrens rings out.
To me, they sound like a song sparrow with a head cold--dry and raspy, as if they were about to cough.
I love the straddly poses marsh birds have to adopt in order to perch in waving sedges, reeds and rushes. Boy, sedge wrens are cute, especially when they're mad.On the bison trip, we coaxed a Virginia rail into view with a recording of his grunting song. A sora popped up briefly but wouldn't oblige. While it bugs me to lure birds in with recordings, it makes me very happy to be able to show perhaps 35 people a rail, who would otherwise remain a mystery, and, after we're gone, will continue to be one.
At least until next June, when it might be duped once again.

The Durable Bison

Drive across North Dakota on Highway 200, and you’ll see bison, on billboards, restaurants, and green road signs. My favorite heralds two little towns, named Buffalo and Alice. The words are stacked, reading Buffalo Alice, conjuring up a wooly-haired, gun-slinging, fringe-bedecked cowgirl.

Bison no longer flow like a black river of boulders over buttes and plains. But they are still out there, in scattered herds on private and public land. I spent two mornings with Oren Krapp, who runs 400 head of bison on a 2500 acre piece of virgin prairie outside Pingree, North Dakota. Gray-green grasses, silverbush and buckbrush, buffalo bean and buffalo grass wave in the warm wind as we roll slowly along in a wagon over Oren’s land. This land has never known a plow, and the native prairie plants are diverse and lush.

Oren Krapp kept cattle all his life until he got bison. At first he treated them like cattle, rounding them up a couple of times a year to tag and inoculate them. When it came time for slaughter, he’d round them up and truck them to a stockyard to fatten them on corn, trying for a USDA prime rating for the meat. But bison won’t eat more than they need, and they don’t fatten easily. And the handling and capture stressed them so badly that their meat didn’t taste good. So Oren simply stopped doing that. In fact, he stopped doing much at all. He doesn’t round them up anymore, and he doesn’t give them shots or treat them for illnesses, because they never get sick. Cancer, so common in beef cattle, is unknown in bison.

I asked Oren how bison compared to cattle. “In intelligence, the bison is to a beef cow like you are to that rock on the road there.” Bison know what forage to eat and what time of year it’s most nutritious. They’ll switch around so no one plant ever takes over their pasture. In winter, they paw to uncover their food, and in a dry summer they can smell water three miles away, and find it. When the snow piles up and tops Oren’s perimeter fence, his bison go wandering over neighboring land, stopping at the highway. “Nobody minds,” Oren told me. “They don’t hurt anything.” And then they come home, because this oasis of unbroken prairie has everything they need, and they know where they belong.Early on, Oren followed instructions to fence off portions of his range, and permit the bison to graze on only parts of it at one time. "I spent all my time mending fence, until I realized that the bison weren't going for it. Fences don't mean anything to them. Now I let them go wherever they want."

Last year, after an April storm dumped four feet of snow, killing 40% of his neighbor’s cattle, Oren went out to check on his bison. One bison cow was down and wouldn’t get up. He thought he’d found his first winter-killed animal. As he pressed closer, she got to her feet, revealing a tiny orange calf, which had been covered by a blanket of the softest wool on its mother’s neck. Mother and baby were fine. A bison cow won’t have her first calf until she’s five or six years old, but she’ll continue calving into her mid-twenties—twice the reproductive lifespan of beef.

We watched a group of cow bison, each one accompanied by a wooly orange calf, dewy-eyed and short-coupled. “A bison will never leave her calf the way a beef will,” he commented. “We’ve got all kinds of coyotes around here, but I don’t worry about them around bison. The coyotes know that if they tried anything with a calf, the herd would be all over them.”

Oren pointed to a distant herd of Herefords, grazing planted fescue on the plowed field just over his fence. “In a hard winter, my neighbor might lose 40% of his cattle, even when he takes them in and feeds them. I leave the bison herd out all winter and don’t lose a one.”

When Oren wishes to cull or harvest an animal, it’s dropped where it stands with a single shot, into the prairie grass where it grew up. No roundup, no trucking, no capture and confinement, no slaughterhouse trauma. There’s an elegance to his operation, a respect for the animal’s natural history and native intelligence, that has been utterly lost in the close-cropped pastures, muddy feedlots, and dark slaughterhouses that define the short lives of beef cattle. We stood on a promontory, facing into the warm wind. On the ancient seabed that stretched below, bison flowed in a black-brown river around a slough, over hill and hummock, disappearing into the distance.

In central North Dakota, a place most of us would call the middle of nowhere, there is a somewhere that retains its ancient vitality. There is an intricate cluster of animals and plants, soil, sky and people, that are as they always were, that are as they should be, that spins in an eddy of time, perfect and endlessly renewed.

Prairie Hawk-eagles

For lots of North American birdwatchers, the ferruginous hawk is a real Grail. They're not very common, because they need unbroken prairie. I remember seeking out a bit of prairie in Nebraska, looking for prairie dogs and chickens. I found the tiny dog colony, and was viewing the adorable animals through a shimmering heat haze in my scope. These little rodents are so universally persecuted that they won't allow humans within shotgun range. And as if by magic, up over the horizon popped a beautiful ferruginous hawk, as if to say, "This is what once was, and could be again, if corn and cattle weren't king."

North Dakota has a bit more breathing room than Nebraska where prairie is concerned. I saw more ferruginous hawks on this June visit than I'd seen in my whole life. One pair was set up on a powerline support, complete with fuzzy young. You'll have to take my word for it; we were a respectful distance away. The nest is the bunch of sticks to the right.
Mom wasn't thrilled to see us ogling her young.
What gorgeous birds they are, so pale. The tail is nearly white with a pinkish cast; the dark red striped thighs and legs are feathered to the toes, and make a dark vee against the white belly. Close up, the ferruginous hawk has an enormous yellow grin line along the gape that's reminiscent of a golden eagle's. Those features, and their enormous size (they're North America's largest buteo), add up to one thing in my view. This is the American hawk-eagle, the prairie hawk- eagle.
Dad Ferrug. is quite a bit more slender and gracile than his burly mate. How about those gorgeous black tips on the underwing coverts?

So. When are you coming to North Dakota?

Today, I am trimming shrubs and trees and cleaning my car on a fine hot summer's day. Not that it needed it. It is a mouse warren, a straw fest, haven for candy wrappers and Dum-Dums at one with the carpet. The floor mats are so bad I'm just hosing them down, carpet or no. I'm vacuuming and Windexing and Chet is lying under the car in the shade keeping me company. About to load the kids in it once again and take off (via plane) for a family reunion in Colorado. Bill will have been home from his Big Trip oh, about 18 hours when I leave, probably all of that spent in sleeping. He's holding down the fort this time. Wish us uncancelled flights, please, flights that actually get you where you paid to go when you want to get there. I wouldn't mind not seeing an airport for a long, long time after this, and my last trip to RI at the end of July. I think the air travel system has broken down, crushed under the price of oil, but nobody wants to admit it.

I'm sure there's enough gas and oil under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to fix it, don't you? Let's drill, how about? November, November, November, November...

The Godwit Escort Service

More things you don’t see every day…marbled godwits. What are those? They sound like some kind of bonbon (the kind I spend all day popping into my mouth while I lie on the divan, watching game shows). Godwits are enormous sandpipers, like curlews who got their bills straightened. Godwits are beautiful, especially in flight. Godwits are also easily annoyed, especially when they have chicks running about in the tall waving grass.

We never got out of the car; these godwits came to us, yelling and complaining. We were careful to crawl along at a snail’s pace lest a chick be squatting in a tire track. The godwits believed that they were distracting our vehicle from attacking their chicks, and we didn’t try to dissuade them. We just let them lead us away, with our friend Ernie driving and Ann navigating and Bill and me leaning out the windows, shooting frame after frame of these leggy furious beauties.

They flew along at window level, yelling.

They landed in front of the car and strode away with a come-hither look on their long faces.

They ran alongside our car.

They crossed and cris-crossed over us. Their cinnamon wings flashed against the verdant green, producing images so beautiful that they border on surreal.
And then we were far enough away and the godwits doubled back to reunite with their chicks, and the show was over. I wondered if they meet every car this way, and if people understand why. Perhaps you can get used to having a marbled godwit escort when you drive this road in June. I doubt I ever could.

Rarities

In North Dakota, I always see some things I've never seen before, and some things that are hard to see anywhere else. Nestled in the grass near where we saw both the displaying Sprague's pipit and the Baird's sparrow was a butterfly I was sure I'd never seen. One of the things I love about carring my camera everywhere is that I don't have to frantically scribble down obscure underwing markings and antenna knob color in my notebook. I just try to get the best picture I can and go about my merry way, keying it out when I get to a field guide. This is a Chryxus Arctic, Oeneis chryxus. I'm not sure I've ever seen an Arctic before, much less this one. Eastern birders count the American bittern among the rarest of the rare, but in North Dakota it's possible to see them both standing in the reeds by the roadside and in flight. If you look closely at these photos you can see the bittern's impossibly long green toes sticking out behind its tail. They're kind of Gollumesque birds. This one was being perforated by a red-winged blackbird as it made its way toward a slough.

Something you don't see very much in the East: a bull, walking down a country road toward a battery of birders.
He was much more interested in some heifers penned in the grove, and turned off before I had to get out my red cape and tri-cornered hat. Tracks showed that he'd been wandering up and down the road for quite some time.

Abandoned houses are increasingly rare where we live, thanks to people's propensity for simply knocking or burning them down. I love abandoned houses, love to poke around in them and look for signs of the lives they once sheltered. Bill of the Birds is very spooky but he ventured a peek in this one. He has his neck warmer pulled up as a kind of stovepipe hat; it was that cold. Oz never did give nothin' to the Tinman.
Outside was an old buckboard wagon. I wondered how long all this had stood on the prairie, covered by snow and battered by the incessant wind. It was freezing, even in June, on this drizzly day.Abandoned buidings are everywhere out here, each one lonelier and more evocative than the last. This one might have been a schoolhouse, with sturdy little blonde kids inside.
But the rarest of the rare came over the phone as we were birding our way back to Carrington after a long day in Kidder County. Three whooping cranes had been reported from a farm section that was about ten miles from nowhere. We swooped in and spotted them without any problem. It's hard to miss four-foot-high white birds on a muddy field.I am not proud of this photo, but we were almost a mile away, and even at that the cranes were nervous about us--walking away. We dared not press them. Because nothing goes unnoticed for long, even in the middle of nowhere, a truck soon rolled up. Inside was a landowner who had been watching over the birds for more than a week. He had been quiet about them, realizing that they were vanishingly rare and worthy of protection.

It was nice to know they'd had a good week's rest, especially when a car with three clued-in birders appeared on the horizon and drove perhaps a half-mile over the prairie directly toward the birds. The birders got out, bristling with scopes and telephoto lenses, and put them to wing, apparently for good. We were too far away to hail them or to do anything more than shake our heads in bewilderment at the intrusion. It was especially embarrassing given that the landowner had been so gracious to us. The cranes weren't seen again. There were a lot of disappointed birders at the festival for whom whooping crane would have been a life bird.

Asking around with USFWS personnel and checking listservs soon revealed that the three birds were one-year-old males that were led south via an ultralight aircraft from their natal area in Wisconsin. According to Tom Stehn, Whooping Crane Coordinator at Aransas NWR, they returned to central Wisconsin this spring just as researchers had hoped, then (naughty birds) took off for North Dakota. These are the things that radios and color bands tell us. If there's a silver lining to this story, it's probably a good thing that the cranes, imprinted as they are on an ultralight aircraft, still retain such a healthy and well-founded suspicion of people. It's tough to be a tall, white bird that everyone wants a piece of. They're the Brangelinas of the bird world, and they don't like the paparazzi, either.

Another Little Nothing

What are these people doing?

They are looking at a bird, a tiny brown streaked sparrow that they know they can't see anywhere else but here in North Dakota.

They have a lot of equipment with them, thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. All of it, along with all of their attention, is focused on the tiny brown bird popping in and out of the grasstops.One group is walking toward its bus as another group disembarks. The first group has seen the sparrow; the second wants to see it. Coming together on the plain, they look like pike-bearing Scots clansmen meeting the Hanoverians at the Battle of Culloden. The thought occurs to me and Rondeau Ric at precisely the same moment, and the good Scotsman is kind enough to send me his picture of the bloodless battle.Photo by Bonny Prince Ric MacArthur.

This scene seems ridiculous, even to me, but there you have it. And it's an efficient bit of ecotourism, to bring everyone out in one fell swoop to see a rare bird that will likely go undisturbed for most of the rest of the summer.

All right, then, the bird in question. You may gasp at its plainness, its lack of apparent distinction.
It is neither Count Raggi's bird of paradise nor a kiwi, cassowary or kagu. It is a small brown sparrow with a limited distribution in the northern Plains and prairie provinces of Canada, a small blue blob on a large white map.
But the Baird's sparrow sings with a mellow bouncing trill that is the sweet embodiment of prairie sun, and I am glad that there are people who can appreciate it and travel thousands of miles to see it.

A Barnstorming Harrier

On an afternoon that we got a chance to bird together, Bill and I were driving toward Tuttle, North Dakota, through some terrific grassland habitat. We saw a speck on the horizon (middle left) that resolved into a male northern harrier. (I include this picture to show you how far away he was). He was performing his courtship flight, something we'd seen once before near Burns, Oregon. The more I watched him, the more amazed I was. He'd rocket straight up, stall out, flip over, and dive earthward, describing a deep parabolic curve. At the bottom, he'd pull up, and use his momentum to shoot upward again.

He's near the apex here, preparing to flip over, hundreds of feet up.Here, he's in mid-flip at the apex of his climb.It wasn't until I got my photos on the computer and closely cropped (the bird was quite a distance away) that I realized that I'd photographed a bird flying upside down. He's completely inverted here, flapping away. It also became clear to me, watching this magnificent display, why male harriers are snow-white below. They are visible for miles when performing this rollercoaster display. A blinding white rump patch doesn't hurt, either. It all adds up to a neon sign, advertising his availability and his choice territory.

On his way back down--plummeting like an arrow. It worked for this gent. A big brown female harrier appeared out of nowhere and engaged him in some close passes, which may or may not have involved a vole engagement present. We were too far away to be sure. These pictures aren't publishable, but I'm happy to have them as a record of that beautiful flight against a stormy sky.

Rain on the Prairie

Traveling for the month of June builds up a powerful backlog of photos. I was mildly surprised to see that I had taken 1,000 images in Utah alone. My computer gagged, but accepted them. I now shoot on Medium resolution, as I have admitted to myself that my photos are merely snapshots whose highest purpose is to appear on this blog. There is no need to have a dozen images of the same butterfly at 10.1 megapixels each. Nor does Chet Baker's slightest glance need to be documented at that resolution. I know there are those who might argue...but when you're talking that kind of volume, you have to economize somewhere.

So. Maine, North Dakota, or Utah? Shall I handle them in the order in which they occurred? Do I dare to eat a peach?

All right, then. It will be North Dakota first. To the prairie we go.

The last three years we've visited the Potholes and Prairies festival in Carrington, ND, we've had a fair dose of rain. "Embrace the Weather" is a field trip leader's only choice. Work a little harder to see the extra beauty in a rainy prairiescape. An American wigeon takes flight over young corn.A ring-necked pheasant walks the rows.

It takes a bit of extra work to find birds in these conditions, too. My co-leader, Bruce, disappeared for a bit, and started walking resolutely out in a huge loop over the waving grass. As I watched, it occurred to me what he was up to. My hunch was proven good when five sharp-tailed grouse came rocketing by us. Bruce had been our bird-dog. It took him a good 45 minutes to complete the loop, but everyone got wonderful looks at these big tan birds. What a nice man, what a nice thing to do. I was impressed at how beautifuly he orchestrated the flyby. Sharp-tailed grouse are native, unlike ring-necked pheasants (imported from China and naturalized). Gray, or Hungarian partridges were also imported for hunting, and are much sought-after by birdwatchers looking to enlarge their life lists.
You tend to find them in newly planted fields with lots of exposed soil. Perhaps that's just where they're more visible. This little male momentarily lost track of his companions and is calling to them.

Pale-morph red-tailed hawks like this Krider's are frequently seen on the northern Plains. Note the white head and tail.
Please pardon these photos; it was pouring (as it is now, as I write--POURING.)Inundated marshes everywhere in North Dakota ring with the klonk and whirr of yellow-headed blackbirds. He's singin' in the rain.

An eastern kingbird is sufficiently disheveled to reveal its hidden crown patch of yellow-orange--kinglet like, and previously unknown to many birders on our trip.
Speaking of previously unknown, birding with natives invariably teaches us things we never knew. Ann Haffert exclaimed, "Oh, look! Green goslings!" And sure enough, the newly-hatched Canada geese did have a distinctly green tinge, which fades to yellow within a day or two.
Then, it goes to brown.
Whether it cleared up or not, there would be beauty at every turn on this rainswept prairie.

Dakota Doe

There’s no real plot in this one; just the beauty of a summer doe, surprised. North Dakota is famous for its "monster bucks," heads and antlers of which were hanging all over the hunting lodge where we stayed. Big. Really big.

We shocked this girl by stopping to look at a Krider’s redtail. I backed my telephoto off as far as I could but just barely got her in the picture. Unlike my Wisconsin model, she’s almost in full summer dress, just a few gray winter hairs hanging along her lower flanks and belly. I wonder why deer would change to red in summer, and remember that red radiates heat better than gray. The same explanation works for why there are so many more red-phase ruffed grouse and screech owls in the southern parts of their range. Red is a warm-weather color.

There had been perhaps eight inches of rain in the last two weeks. We’re in a drought, like much of the country, and it was pure heaven to be on squishy ground. Look at the droplets she flings up as she turns to flee.I’m sure the doe would disapprove of this shot, but it does show her nice full udder. She’s got a fawn somewhere hidden in the grass.Or maybe she’s just fixin’ to drop one. Either way, she’s got milk.Over the hill she goes.And stops for a last look back. Lucky girl, to be able to bring her baby up on the prairie, listening to western meadowlarks.I'm praying for rain tonight like a prospector prays for gold. Please. The sky is deep Payne's gray-blue, the leaves are inside out, the radar looks good, all sprinkled with green and yellow, and I hope this storm actually forms and gives us some relief. We had our last picking of sugar snap peas last night, and the first picking of snap beans, and the beans are all J-shaped, the shape of drought. My tomatoes are just sitting there, sulking, hard little green marbles hanging from their tiny limbs. I don't want to haul out 200 feet of hose if I don't have to. I'm waiting, hoping, visualizing inches of rain coming down on my crisp gardens. May it rain on you, too.

Bringing the Kids Along

One of my favorite images from the trip:
And what of the kids? How does that work, taking your kids along while you're birding and shooting endless photos of a single little longspur? (Here's Bill, with his tiny subject over on the right side of the picture, just to give you an idea of the scene:) Well, it works very well, if your kids are Phoebe and Liam. They were into it. They love North Dakota, and our friends treat them kindly and make them feel a part of things. They wander in and out of the scene, fetch forgotten bits of gear from the car for us, read their books (at 7, Liam is already devouring chapter books, at least one a day), eat copious and usually verboten candy bribes, and just generally mellow out. Liam amused himself making rockpiles on a rockpile. When I came closer, I could hear him humming softly and sweetly, and I made out the tune: "What Hurts the Most" by Rascal Flatts, a song that makes him very sad, and that he won't listen to any more, but obviously still loves. As sweet a sound as any singing meadowlark.
North Dakota is a state of mind. It's immensely calming to be out on the prairie in the mellow evening sun, to breathe air fresher than any you've ever breathed, to hear the burbling of western meadowlarks and the buzzing of grasshopper and Savannah sparrows. It worked its magic on kids, and they never fought or complained; they ate dinner with us at 10 pm when the sun finally disappeared, and went to bed at 11, and we dragged them out of bed at 6:30 AM for field trips, and they were absolutely great about it. This is the reward that was waiting when we were getting up several times each night to feed and comfort them as infants. They're full-fledged agreeable and adorable people now. Ahhhh.Phoebe and Liam explore an old engine and caboose at a little historic rail museum.The snowplow spoke silently of a different North Dakota--one buried under yards and yards of snow. That is a snowplow what am a snowplow.And a happy man, doing what he loves most, with his family close at hand. Blessings? We're soaking in them!

Aerial Broadcasting

Lacking a perch taller than a dried weed stem or a rock, the longspur resorts to flight songs--a lot of them. A surprising number of common birds have flight songs (indigo buntings, yellow-breasted chats, ovenbirds, Kentucky warblers, Acadian flycatchers, mockingbirds, and many others). These could be called forest birds, and flight songs are more or less optional for them. They'll fly and sing at dawn and dusk, or, like the chat and indigo bunting, intermittently through the day. For grassland birds, which have a hard time finding a perch tall enough to work with, flight songs are a more important component of their courtship display. Think horned lark, pipits, and these longspurs. Even the small, secretive sparrows engage in flight songs. The idea is to broadcast your message of sex or defiance as far and wide as you are able. Birds often adopt a striking flight style while singing on high. The longspur lifts his head and flutters shallowly, like a moth, as he pours out his song. It is not easy to get a picture of that, but we tried.
You have to envision BOTB and me standing under the bird, pointing our long lens barrels up at him as he circles overhead, singing his head off. We're laughing quietly and having so much fun.
It was a longspur feast. Just another time I am so happy not to be shooting film! I have him launching himself in the air, assuming a leg position I'd never dare draw... resting, singing, loafing,showing off his beauty from every angle, and filling the air with his silvery song.

Longspur Joy

Bill and I worked very hard at the Potholes and Prairies festival in Carrington, North Dakota. We led two field trips, each gave a seminar, performed music for two functions, and I gave a keynote--all in three days. We didn't get a chance to go to some of our favorite spots, like Chase or Horsehead Lakes, to see some of the prairie specialties. We birded when we could, squeezing in a few hours here and there. North Dakota is so generous with its landscapes and birds, though, that we were surrounded by beauty wherever we went. Imagine driving down a highway, and there are all kinds of birds in the air, and instead of being starlings or rock pigeons, they're all different kinds of ducks and shorebirds. That's what's common out there.

But we missed some birds, like Baird's and Nelson's sharp-tailed sparrow. And chestnut-collared longspur, one of my very favorites. This little bird likes unbroken prairie, with shallow, gravelly soil and protruding rocks. After five years, Bill and I will say things as we drive like, "This looks longspurry to me." And we've found lots of great birds that way. This time, though, we got exact directions to a place with longspurs, and took off at 5:30 PM Sunday to find them. Our dear friends Ann and Ernie Hoffert accompanied us. Ernie amused himself while we were shooting longspur portraits by dipping his toe into digiscoping, coming up with some excellent results. I think we may have gotten him hooked. And Ann birded for a long time, then just relaxed and soaked up the landscape, a pursuit she has taken to a high art. She is the most serene and contemplative of companions.And we found a longspur, perhaps the friendliest, most cooperative bird we could have asked for. He had a couple of favorite song perches and he sang like a madman, bopping from one to the other. Bill and I approached, slow and low, and eventually were just outside his comfort zone.

There is a decision to be made in cropping one's bird photos. Do you go for the luscious, full-frame bird, or do you try to give some idea of where and how it lives? Although closeups are delightful, I just can't bear to crop off the prairie plants that are so vital to its existence, and so I offer you these. I had to get down on my knees to bring the bird above the distant horizon. When you have a super-cooperative bird, you have the leisure to think about composition , instead of just trying to get the darn thing in focus.Perhaps my favorite shot, and it also happens to be sharp. When I cropped it in closely, the bird was tack-sharp, but the dried artemesia stalks seemed to evoke its liquid rollicking song, and so they stayed.And for a look at how the chestnut-collared longspur got its name, this:This is such an ornate little bird, and it's utterly different depending on what view you get. A black breast and belly make a potent visual message on bright, open grassland, and all a longspur has to do is face his rival to make a statement. No wonder good song perches are vital to good habitat for prairie birds. You have to make yourself known.This is why so many grassland birds--red-winged blackbirds, meadowlarks, dickcissels, horned larks, snow buntings and longspurs, to name a few, have such strikingly contrasting markings. Black reads well in landscapes that are flooded with light. There's nothing subtle about a longspur, head-on. And yet, he can turn his back on you, and melt into the grasses.

Meadowlarks do this all the time. Ever wonder why they always seem to be facing away from you when you try to get a look at them? They're hiding from you on purpose, because they know that their bright yellow breast and black vee will attract your attention. I'll never forget watching a migrating flock of eastern meadowlarks feeding at Anzalduas Park in south Texas. When we first spotted them, it was like a field full of daffodils. The moment the meadowlarks became aware that they were being watched, they all turned their backs on us at once, and the flowers melted away.

I originally made one huge post about this one sweet little bird, but decided to cleave it in half. So there will be more longspur joy in the morning.

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.