North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  Like a rapidly beating heart, the courtship drumming of a male Ruffed Grouse atop a fallen hollow log resonated from afar, so low-pitched that I felt it more than heard it. The characteristic cadenced North Woods drum of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker joined it. And the wood warblers were in voice, too: Golden-winged, Nashville, Black-and-white, Tennessee, Yellow, Wilson’s, Chestnut-sided, Common Yellowthroat, and Ovenbird. The woods trembled with birdsong. In the marshlands I heard the weird pump-er-lunk of the American Bittern—an uncommon marsh bird that is rarely seen except when in flight—and the spring courtship whinny of a Pied-billed Grebe.

  Yet I failed to detect three birds that I had specifically hoped to see at Crex Meadows: it is famous for Yellow Rail, Le Conte’s Sparrow, and Nelson’s Sparrow, all of which breed in low, wet, grassy, freshwater marshlands near the U.S.-Canada border. All three are elusive, and they stayed true to form on this day. I saw plenty of Sedge Wrens and Grasshopper Sparrows and even a Clay-colored Sparrow, but not a single hint of the more elusive trio—the early bird does not always catch the worm.

  Of course, I was eager to see other types of wildlife. The ranger at the visitor center had mentioned that a pack of wolves lurked near the northwestern corner of the reserve. I managed to locate wolf footprints in the sand but had no sightings of the animals themselves. I would have another chance for this wilderness wraith in Ontario.

  By midafternoon, I was back at my campsite to bird in the cool, sunny weather. The campground was favored by species of early successional vegetation: I found Interrupted Fern, White Trillium, and flowering Shadbush, and I was pleasantly surprised to find no Poison Ivy. Male Chestnut-sided Warblers chased about the edges of the campsite, singing frequently. A couple of Eastern Cottonwood trees shed their fluff in bits that filled the air throughout the afternoon. A migrant Philadelphia Vireo sang from various of the taller aspens in the campground.

  A vocal male Mourning Warbler moved about the tangled thicket in the adjacent campsite, and I spent an hour trying to get a decent photograph of him. He represented another quest bird; a raspberry-thicket specialist, the Mourning Warbler is most common in scrubby, regenerating clearings left after logging or fire. This big and handsome species is a favorite of birders, though not quite so revered as its lookalike, the Connecticut Warbler. The Mourning is neatly plumaged: dark-gray hood, olive back and wings, and yellow breast and belly. Its species name refers to the blackish bib that hints the bird is dressed for a funeral. A shy thicket-skulker, it is difficult to glimpse, but its strident song gives away its presence: cheerEE cheerEE cheerEE CHEEReeoh! This vocalization is evidently a favorite of U.S. TV advertising executives; one can often hear the Mourning’s song in make-believe suburban backyards on TV. Few people’s backyards actually boast singing Mourning Warblers, but my current side yard in northern Wisconsin did—one of the treats of staying at this little reserve on the Saint Croix.

  After dinner, I returned to Crex Meadows to watch the sun set over the marsh. Spring Peepers and Gray Treefrogs chorused. Two American Bitterns called back and forth. At 8:20 p.m., two Sandhill Cranes bugled. Various Sora rails sang out as the sun dropped below the horizon. The light dimmed and the temperature dropped, and yet the male Red-winged Blackbirds continued to vocalize from their exposed call perches, their testosterone pumping. Returning to camp after dark, I was greeted by the rapid and cadenced musical notes of a Whip-poor-will: wir-wuh-WRILL…wir-wuh-WRILL…wir-wuh-WRILL. A bit later, three Barred Owls held a noisy discussion in the trees behind my tent.

  On Sunday, I was up well before dawn to search again for that elusive threesome, the Yellow Rail, Le Conte’s Sparrow, and Nelson’s Sparrow. The cool, misty spring morning was perfect in every way but for the absence of the target birds. Yet other treats—Vesper Sparrow, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Sedge Wren—alleviated my disappointment. The Sora rails were singing. A Wilson’s Snipe noisily zigzagged past. I saw more large wolf tracks in the sand. A Red Fox crossed the road in front of my car; a flock of Black Terns foraged low over one of the impoundments; and I found a Pine Warbler in a big stand of planted pines. A morning highlight was a singing male Sedge Wren that refused to leave his perch in spite of my close approach; typically, getting a glimpse of this bird verges on the impossible. I spent more than ten minutes admiring the little extrovert. Then a statuesque Sandhill Crane posed for me, allowing me to photograph him from various angles.

  I also spotted the Golden-winged Warbler, a quest bird and one of North American birders’ rarely seen wood warblers. Once merely uncommon and patchily distributed, its population has declined substantially, and now it is a true rarity. The species breeds only in the mountain uplands of the Appalachians and the North Woods in the northern tier of central states into Manitoba. It favors early successional woodland clearings and bog edges and tends to disappear from places where it has long bred as the vegetation matures. The male is a stunner, with a black throat, black mask, golden cap and wing-bars, and natty gray-and-white body plumage. Seeing this bird sing its brief buzzy song from a small sapling in the sun is one of warbler-watching’s high points.

  In the afternoon, back in the state park, I biked the Wood River Trail down to Raspberry Landing, on the Saint Croix River. Young secondary hardwood forest, noisy with Veeries and Ovenbirds, dominated the whole area. The White Trillium was flowering in profusion in the forested bottoms, but here in the northlands it was still on the early side of spring. The Black Cherries were just now flowering. The only butterfly I encountered was a Pink-edged Sulphur.

  I returned to the Crex Meadows visitor center to get a map, and during our conversation the ranger told me that the town of Grantsburg had trapped and removed twelve nuisance bears the preceding summer. They were translocated to Chippewa National Forest, in northern Minnesota. The presence of bears and wolves seems to be taken in stride in northwestern Wisconsin, and people appreciate them as a part of the local environment. The nuisance animals are managed nonlethally, with a minimum of fuss. In the interior West, where cattle and sheep are grazed on open range, these predators are treated with less forbearance.

  In the evening, at 7:42 p.m., a Barred Owl hooted down in the hollow. A gorgeous sunset flamed behind the trees across the Saint Croix River. At 8:20 p.m., a Veery, Ovenbird, and Chestnut-sided Warbler were all still singing. As we head toward the summer solstice, the song of birds extends later and later into the evening hours—a welcome feature of late spring for birders.

  A review of the breeding ranges of the boreal wood warblers in the Sibley field guide shows a common pattern of geographic distribution. The breeding ranges of twenty-two species of wood warblers extend from the Canadian Maritimes, New England, and the Great Lakes region northwestward through central Canada to Alaska, with the largest part of the ranges located in eastern, central, and western Canada. This shared breeding range is typified by the ranges of the Tennessee, Cape May, Bay-breasted, and Mourning Warblers. These ranges all have the same environmental theme: they center on the Great North Woods, the spruce-fir forests of the taiga zone. At Crex Meadows, I was at the southern verge of this great swath of boreal vegetation, so extensive in Canada. Many of these warbler distributions also have the same geographic theme: they center on the heartland of northern Ontario.

  This is why I was headed to northern Ontario: to visit ground zero for breeding wood warblers. It was a place I had never been, and it is a wild region that has been little surveyed for birds. I did not know what I would find, but I had hopes that I’d see lots and lots of wood warblers of many species singing on their breeding territories. But, before my visit to Ontario, I had three stops to make in Minnesota.

  REVERSE MIGRATION

  The Tuesday after Memorial Day breaks rain free but misty. A stuttering Hairy Woodpecker and a singing Scarlet Tanager send me on my way to Duluth, Minnesota. I take the long way, visiting the Barnes and Mokwah pine barrens in search of patches of young Jack Pine and the rare Kirtland’s Warbler. I find plenty of pi
nes, some decent Kirtland’s habitat manufactured by the state, but no warblers. I also see along the way that northern Wisconsin, cut over repeatedly, remains a land of timber extraction and forest management focused on the timber and pulp industry—and not much on wilderness. Virtually all the roadside habitat I see is young second growth.

  In the early afternoon, I cross the big bridge from Superior, Wisconsin, to Duluth, Minnesota. On the south side of town I look up a hill to a small local ski area, where a snow patch lingers on a ski run—a remnant of winter.

  I’d scheduled a meeting with expert local birders Larry and Jan Kraemer at their home on a hill above Duluth this afternoon. The Kraemers know the area’s birds and wildlife and agreed to advise me on birding in the North Woods. We chatted about birding while we watched the bird feeders on their back porch: Pine Siskins, American Goldfinches, and various other songbirds came in to entertain us. The Kraemers noted that they had recorded 161 species of birds in their yard, including twenty-seven species of warblers, along with Black Bear, Coyote, Bobcat, both species of foxes, Pine Marten, and Fisher—and all this in suburban Duluth.

  The Kraemers also related the story of a major reverse songbird migration, which took place on May 19, 2013, on the southwest shore of Lake Superior at Duluth. During inclement weather accompanied by strong northeasterly winds, tens of thousands of songbirds that had already passed Duluth on their way north reversed course and returned southward in search of better weather and foraging opportunities. It was estimated that more than 80 percent of the southward-moving songbirds seen were not identified because of the terrific winds, which made it nearly impossible to focus binoculars on the flying birds. It was the biggest local fall-out of thrushes, warblers, and other passerines in recent memory.

  What they reported, however, was but a tip of an avian iceberg. None of the larger trees and shrubs on the shore of Lake Superior were leafed out due to winterlike weather that had extended well into May. Duluth had had its snowiest April ever, with more than fifty inches of snow and persistent cold. Despite the strong offshore winds, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of warblers were desperately trying to find food and shelter among the grasses and small shrubs along the lakeside dunes. Hummingbirds tried to find sustenance from willow catkins and buds on fruiting trees, without much success. Warblers congregated to forage along the southern shore of Lake Superior, Northern Waterthrush, American Redstart, and Magnolia and Yellow Warblers common among them. Orange-crowned, Tennessee, and Cape May Warblers were among the most common species foraging at or below eye level in willow, Red Osier Dogwood, and other small shrubs. American Redstarts and Cape May, Magnolia, and Chestnut-sided Warblers foraged on the ground and chased aerial insects from low perches. Warblers searched for invertebrate prey and any other available sustenance in the detritus washed up on the beach. Hundreds of Palm Warblers foraged along the wrack line. Most surprising to the observers were the Blackburnian and Blackpoll Warblers (species normally seen foraging in the high canopy) and the Mourning and Canada Warblers (species usually seen skulking in heavy undergrowth) that were out in the open, picking at debris down on the beach. Though adding a splash of color to the shore on a dreary and overcast day, the observers realized that these birds were suffering an existential threat from the cold, wind, and lack of food.

  During the fall-out, the Kraemers, along with local birding colleagues Mike Hendrickson and Peder Svingen, made observations at several sites around Duluth and the lakefront, and Svingen compiled a full report (which I relied on to retell the story here). The birders also noted an additional four thousand warblers that they were unable to identify to species. This incident of reverse migration in spring was new to me. Given the meteorological conditions, I hope I never experience one, for the sake of the birdlife. Still, it is a remarkable phenomenon that once again reveals the courage and tenacity of songbird migrants even under perilous climatological conditions. Presumably most of these birds survived the terrible storm (the observers found few dead birds in its aftermath), but certainly there must have been some mortality.

  HEADWATERS

  After a night’s stay in Duluth, I head westward to Park Rapids, in central Minnesota. Whereas Duluth, in eastern Minnesota, is deep in the forest zone, the western half of Minnesota is prairie country. The town of Park Rapids is right on the boundary between forest and prairie, where farmers grow corn, soybeans, and potatoes. It lies just south of Itasca State Park, which hosts the headwaters of the Mississippi River—one focus of my northward journey’s route for the past two months. I have been following the river’s course for weeks, and now I am almost at its source. Ornithologist Marshall Howe and his wife, Janet McMillen, live in Park Rapids, and Howe has offered to take me birding at the headwaters.

  The three-hour drive from Duluth was punctuated by a close encounter with a Sandhill Crane family foraging at the very edge of the highway. In front of me, a large truck roared by the group, and its slipstream toppled the two rusty-colored and fuzzy young into a grassy ditch. The parent cranes appeared nonchalant about this. When I stopped to look at the cranes, I saw Bobolinks in the field beside the road. The male Bobolink is mainly black, with bold white patches on the wings and a pale yellow nape, whereas the female has the look of a large, plain sparrow. Male Bobolinks displaying over an old field is an iconic boreal spring sight, made richer by the exuberant bubbling song of the displaying birds as they hover over the tall grass.

  In midafternoon I booked into Breezy Pines Campground, a few miles from Howe and McMillen’s home and hidden in the woods at the edge of small Crooked Lake. My campsite was idyllic—isolated from the rest of the main campground. From the picnic table I had a lovely lakefront vista west to north-country sunsets. And the birdlife was great, too: I hadn’t expected to see so many southern species so far north, but here in north-central Minnesota I would find Warbling Vireo, Baltimore Oriole, and Great Crested Flycatcher, among others. Still, I was up north, as the Common Loons’ song each night on the lake would remind me. A regal-looking adult Bald Eagle liked to perch atop a tall White Pine across the lake from the campsite, and many other species were in song—Red-winged Blackbirds, Common Yellowthroats, Yellow Warblers, Veeries, and American Robins.

  On the first day of June, Howe took me birding. First we visited Pine Lake County Forest, where we found a breeding male Golden-winged Warbler in song. I had seen the species several times at Crex Meadows, but one never tires of spending time with this rare bird. Then we moved on to Lake Alice Bog for boreal specialties, finding Yellow-bellied Flycatcher, Northern Waterthrush, Black-throated Green Warbler, and a singing Lincoln’s Sparrow.

  But the day’s main focus was Itasca State Park. We walked the spruce-forested Beaver Trail on the back side of the park, where we came upon a dried carcass of a long-dead Timber Wolf, completely intact and with a horrible toothy grimace. I couldn’t take my eyes off the grisly sight. We wondered what happened to the poor beast: perhaps it had died at the height of winter and been naturally freeze-dried. Not much farther down the trail lay the severed leg of a Snowshoe Hare. The name of the trail, I thought, perhaps should be “Red in Tooth and Claw.”

  Then Howe pulled one of his hearing aids from his ear and told me to pop it into my own. Suddenly a new soundscape appeared. I could hear several high-pitched warbler songs: there was a Blackburnian! Aha, a Black-and-white! A Canada Warbler in that dark forest thicket! Over there—a Golden-crowned Kinglet! It was a revelation: here was a device that could bring back much of the hearing of my youth. I high-fived Howe and, of course, refused to return the hearing aid until the end of the day. Now I was angry at myself for not purchasing a pair of hearing aids prior to the start of this journey; I hadn’t known what I was missing.

  Our morning in and around Itasca produced several new quest warblers. The Northern Waterthrush lies at the low end of the beauty spectrum but still was new to my quest. Another of the sparrowlike warblers, this species is dark olive-brown above, dull whitish-buff below, with dark br
east striping and a pale eyebrow. It forages on the ground in bogs and other northern wetlands, breeds from New England to Alaska, and winters south to Ecuador. Its crowning glory is its super-loud chattering song, which carries far across the boreal landscape—the most explosive song of any warbler.

  The Blackburnian Warbler, a common conifer-loving species and another quest bird, is one of the most admired wood warblers because of the male’s colors and patterning: glowing-orange throat and cheek and black-patterned head, back, and flanks, with streaks and splotches of bright white in all the right places. This gorgeous canopy dweller, which winters from northern South America into the Andes, has a very high-pitched, lisping song and is easily missed by novice birders standing far below if they don’t crane their necks to see into the tops of hemlocks and spruces. It had been a long time since I had been able to hear this bird sing, but today, with the loan of Howe’s hearing aid, I could.

  A third quest bird was the Black-throated Green Warbler. One of most familiar boreal warblers of the East, it ranges along the Appalachians south to Georgia and is most commonplace in the mixed conifer forests of New England and Canada. Wintering south to Colombia and Venezuela, it tends to be one of the earliest warbler migrants to return northward, heralding the arrival of the warbler waves. The male sports a black bib, yellow cheek, and green crown, back, and rump, and the plumage is further enlivened by black-and-white flanks and white wing-bars. Its cheery, buzzy, musical song is an announcement of spring migration: zee zee zee zo zeeet!

  We heard a fourth quest species singing from its territory in a dark glade: the Canada Warbler, another of the boreal breeders, with a nesting range in the Appalachians, New England, and Canada. Wintering in the Andes and northern South America, it is an uncommon migrant and tends to lurk in low tangles in mixed northern forest during the nesting season. This is one of the more handsome species, with delicate patterning: gray above, yellow below, with a black necklace and a black face with yellow “spectacles.” Its song—high, rapid, and chattery—is a distinctive voice of the dark forest interior.