North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  The morning, with four new warblers, was a substantial step forward for my breeding warbler list, bringing me to twenty-four species. After a rewarding morning of warbler watching, we lunched in Itasca Park at Douglas Lodge, a handsome 1905 log structure with a huge stone chimney and fireplace, a perfect place to relax after a stiff session of wilderness birding. We relaxed, gazed out the window at the greenery, and dined slowly, savoring our meal and recalling the beautiful birds we had encountered.

  Blackburnian Warbler

  After we got our strength back, we drove a short distance to the Mississippi Headwaters Center and located the trailhead to the headwaters track for our pilgrimage to the source of the Mississippi. There is a lot of hype surrounding the source of “the Father of Waters,” but probably, for most pilgrims, it ends in disappointment; the flat path to the headwaters, no more than a couple of hundred yards from the crowded parking lot, ends at an underwhelming small, shallow stream flowing out of Lake Itasca. We learned that the Mississippi starts as this inconsequential feature on the landscape: there’s no waterfall here, no mountain tarn, just the small outlet stream. Howe and I were among a crowd of tourists shuffling down the short headwaters trail; when they arrived at the signboard identifying the source of the Mississippi, most snapped a quick picture and then turned to head back to the parking lot. Not all headwaters are so disappointing, of course—the headwaters of the Connecticut and Hudson rivers, for example, start in beautiful and isolated wilderness spots high in the mountains.

  The highlight of this iconic geographic locus was in fact a bird—a glossy adult male Black-backed Woodpecker, a rare boreal forest species, which flew into a big White Spruce next to a gravel path near the visitor center and offered us stupendously close looks before disappearing into the woods. It was our seventh species of woodpecker that day. Families and groups of tourists passed us by, oblivious to the elusive and handsome woodpecker. We also found a colony of a beautiful wildflower, the Large-flowered Bellwort, whose leaves look a bit like those of Solomon’s Seal, and whose bell-shaped yellow flowers hang off their stems. Returning to Howe’s home just outside Park Rapids, we found a wooded section of back road that swarmed with Band-winged Meadowhawks, which are large dragonflies with a bronze abdomen. Hundreds of the large odonates zipped back and forth over the road in an explosive emergence. They, too, were among the day’s best sightings, and more of spring’s riches.

  WARBLER SONG AND TERRITORIALITY

  Aside from their remarkable migratory story, warblers attract attention because of the males’ brightly patterned plumages and their diverse and often complex songs. The vivid plumage and song relate to the males’ territorial behavior: a male warbler arrives on his territory in late spring and spends much of each day for several weeks advertising and defending it. He sings thousands of times each day on territory to announce his presence to competitors, and his declaration of territorial ownership is a way that he defends his patch from other males. In addition, he employs the song to attract a mate to his territory. While males pursue this spring period of territorial establishment, they vocalize and perch in prominent places and make themselves accessible to birdwatchers. It is a behavior of such vitality and vigor that it brings joy to the heart of any birder experiencing it. When territorial song is being deployed by literally hundreds of birds scattered through the woods, it is one of nature’s most compelling seasonal events, and it is one of the great attractions of the boreal North Woods to naturalists and birders. Of course, we also love wood warblers because of their favored habitat: mature forest that in spring bristles with life of all kinds.

  MANUFACTURING HABITAT FOR THE GOLDENWING

  The morning after my insider’s tour of the Mississippi headwaters environs, I say my farewells to Howe and McMillen, break camp early, and depart toward forty-three-thousand-acre Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge, an hour west on back roads, where I’ll visit an American Bird Conservancy field project. Situated where the tallgrass prairie meets boreal and northern hardwood forests, Tamarac’s great mix of lakes, bogs, wetlands, streams, and forests is home to healthy populations of Timber Wolves, Trumpeter Swans, and Bald Eagles, as well as scores of breeding migratory songbirds. On the drive, I pass a pure stand of oaks that still has tiny, very pale young leaves. Spring is slow getting to some of these places.

  Meeting Peter Dieser and Aditi Desai of the American Bird Conservancy at the refuge headquarters, I headed out into the field with them to see what the conservancy is doing to increase Tamarac’s breeding habitat for Golden-winged Warbler and American Woodcock, both of which have been in widespread decline and are on the Watch List of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (the NABCI, as readers will recall, hosts the Joint Ventures work that I visited in Missouri). The woodcock is a chubby, short-legged, long-billed, bug-eyed sandpiper relative that has evolved to inhabit wet deciduous woods rather than the seashore. It breeds in the eastern United States and winters in the Southeast. Birders head out to boggy openings in rural areas in early spring to witness the woodcock display flight at dusk, and hunters and their dogs pursue woodcock as a game bird in the autumn.

  Dieser led the way to three sites where the refuge, working with ABC, had conducted habitat management plans to open up patches of closed deciduous forest to create early successional glades, prime habitat for Golden-winged Warbler and American Woodcock. This kind of management, as I had seen in Illinois and Missouri, is not for the faint of heart. Heavy equipment is brought in to thin closed forest and enable patchy regrowth of sapling-stage woody vegetation—ideal breeding habitat for the two target species. Although mechanical opening of the forest looks brutal, within a couple of years these areas green up nicely and start to attract the target bird species. All three managed sites at Tamarac were already supporting populations of the two species.

  Over the past seven years, ABC, partnering with various private, state, and federal landowners, has created more than twenty thousand acres of new early successional habitat for breeding Golden-winged Warblers and American Woodcocks in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Wisconsin as well as Minnesota. This is a working experiment, and associated censuses monitor impacts on the abundance of singing males onsite. ABC has found that the target species are already on territory and breeding in a number of the newly managed sites. In addition, recent field studies have shown that early successional habitat is an important foraging resource for young songbirds of the year in the late summer, prior to fall migration. Thus this extensive field experiment may produce additional benefits for migratory songbirds.

  At the third site, we met Earl Johnson, a forester and woodcock expert, who was using hunting dogs to census woodcock and locate woodcock nests in an attempt to document the effect of the ongoing habitat management. He showed us a nest, set inconspicuously on the ground in thick grass, with eggs upon which an adult American Woodcock sat. The dorsal plumage of this marvelously camouflaged species is patterned like dead leaves on the forest floor, and even from a few feet away, I’d been unable to detect the bird on its nest.

  Weather at Tamarac was gloomy, with on-and-off light rain and mist, but we were pleased that we were still able to carry out the field visit. Aside from the woodcock and Goldenwings, we observed Ring-necked Duck, Black-billed Cuckoo, Veery, Black-and-white Warbler, Yellow-throated Vireo, Scarlet Tanager, and Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I spotted two annoying species as well: Poison Ivy, surprising this far north, and Wood Tick, dozens of which I picked off my clothing at the end of the field visit. Because of warmer winters in recent decades, ticks of several species now abound in north-central Minnesota, as do the several diseases typically associated with tick bites.

  Once I dispensed with the ticks, I departed Tamarac and headed northeastward toward International Falls and the border with Canada. To date, I’d tallied twenty-four wood warbler species on their breeding grounds. Thirteen more to go. I was now in a northern zone where singing breeders outnumbered passage migrants, and I had high hopes f
or northern Ontario.

  SEVEN

  The Mysterious Northlands

  Early to Mid-June 2015

  Magnolia Warbler

  June comes with its own tranquility, predictable as sunrise, reassuring as the coolness of dusk….There is a certainty, an undiminished truth, in sunlight and rain and the fertility of the seed. The fundamentals persist.

  —HAL BORLAND, Sundial of the Seasons

  I break camp in Bemidji, Minnesota, and drive northeastward to the Canadian border. The narrow, empty road is flat and straight and cuts through clumps of aspens, stands of Balsam Fir and White Spruce, and Tamarack bogs. Some aspens exhibit young pastel-yellow leaves that seem to shout, “Early spring!” As the earth continues to tilt slowly southward toward the sun, I drive north, in retreat from approaching summer.

  At the International Falls border crossing I am nervous and jumpy, but the Canadian guard offers a warm welcome. Crossing the small bridge over Rainy River to Fort Frances, I am now safely into Canada. I have five hundred miles of back roads before me to reach the wilds of interior Ontario—the land of Woodland Caribou, Spruce Grouse, and Wolverine, and the breeding heartland of the boreal wood warblers. I cruise northward across Canadian shield rock cloaked with conifer and mixed forest. A large American Black Bear lumbers across the road in front of my car. Road signs warn of Moose wherever I cross a wetlands.

  Loaded down with several weeks’ worth of provisions I’d bought in Dryden, Ontario, I headed northeast to Sioux Lookout and Savant Lake, into the Kenora District of Ontario. As I drove the lonely roads, I received only a single signal from my radio: Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio (analogous to National Public Radio). I listened to a discussion regarding a recently released report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had issued a formal apology for the Canadian government’s practice of separating First Nations (indigenous) children from their families and placing them in distant “residential schools,” cruel treatment experienced by seven generations of First Nations children. The stated purpose was to train First Nations children to become “good Canadian citizens.” Similar stories abound about Indigenous Australian children and Native American children in the United States. As I headed deep into First Nations territory, the report introduced me to the types of social issues confronting minority aboriginal people living in white Canada.

  My destination today was Pickle Lake, the northernmost community accessible by paved all-weather road in Ontario. As I drove northward, the land became hilly, interspersed with lakes aligned in a northeast-to-southwest orientation. Not so long ago, in geological terms, a great block of ice had trended southwestward over this mass of shield rock, and as it retreated, it left lakes, outwash sand barrens of glacial till, scoured and scored bedrock, and moraines of gravel in its wake. I was now in the middle of a vast territory with few people. Ontario is half again larger than Texas, but most of the province is roadless, and industrial timber extraction has not yet made its way this far north. The province has a quarter-million lakes—twenty-five times the number in Minnesota (the land o’ lakes).

  WALLEYE NATION

  Moving northward, I passed the occasional sign pointing to road access to a resort fishing camp. It turns out that this is major recreational fishing country: the hundreds of lakes scattered east and west of Route 599 and its extension, the gravel-only Nord Road, support hungry populations of two important northern game fish, Northern Pike and Walleye. The elongated, sharp-toothed pike, a large predaceous fish with a Northern Hemisphere distribution, typically maxes out at about three feet long and twenty pounds. It is a popular game fish but is not prized for eating in North America because it is very bony. The smaller Walleye is a North American perch, growing to eighteen inches and weighing a couple of pounds. It is a beloved game and eating fish for Canadians as well as Americans living in the northern Midwest; fishing for it is a big deal from northern Ohio to Minnesota. In northern Ontario, Walleye (called Pickerel by Canadians) is the main sport-fishing target.

  The road north was empty of traffic, and I saw no one out and about in the several newly constructed First Nations settlements along the roadside. In fact, most First Nations settlements here lie off the highway, deep in the woods. Because of the boggy landscape, many of them are accessible by SUV or truck only in winter, on the “ice roads” made famous by the American cable TV show named for them. At about 7:30 p.m., I passed the community of New Osnaburgh, the Anglo name for the tribal seat of the Mishkeegogamang Band of the Ojibway Nation, and at last, after thirteen hours of driving, I arrived at Pickle Lake. This is where the paved road ends. In earlier decades, the town was bustling, enriched by local gold mining. Now it is primarily the site of local government and health facilities serving the vast First Nations territory that stretches to the horizon in all directions.

  LAND OF THE MISHKEEGOGAMANG

  In Pickle Lake, First Nations people stand on the street corners or gather in small groups. Few cars pass; most people walk to get where they need to go. Something seems lacking in the town. It has a mournful feeling, even though the sky is blue and the sun is shining. This was once an Anglo boom town, but those days are gone, and now the indigenous community seems weighed down by existential angst. I rest for the night in a guest house’s backyard in town, and in the morning break down my tent in the frosty morning air, pick up a camping permit from the Government Office, and buy gas from a First Nations convenience store. I head up the Nord Road to camp for a couple of weeks at three North Woods sites: Menako Lakes, Pipestone, and Badesdawa Lake, all in the Kenora District and all offering productive Walleye fishing. However, few birdwatchers like me venture this far north.

  The seventy-mile drive north on the wide gravel road wound around bogs, lakes, ridges, and rivers. Small First Nations camps sat just off the roadside: the Mishkeegogamang, enthusiastic Moose hunters, use the camps for autumn and winter hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering. Even though most of this area is Crown Land, First Nations people, based out of two small reservations, claim the land as traditional territory and are permitted to hunt and trap on it.

  The lake and river waters were cold and dark with tannins. The district campgrounds were spartan but nicely situated on the water, with places to put in a kayak or canoe. I set up my tent at Menako Lakes campsite, stretching a big nylon tarpaulin over my tent and the adjacent picnic table that would serve as my kitchen and dining room. Black flies and moose flies were bad during the day here, and mosquitoes swarmed in the evenings. To counteract the biting insects, I broke out a novel insect repellent device called Thermacell, a plastic unit about the size of a cordless phone handset. It uses a small butane cartridge to heat a small square fiber pad impregnated with synthetic pyrethrum. The heat vaporizes the repellent and creates an invisible protective cloud. By running the device on my picnic table, I could create a bug-free zone under the canopy of the rain tarp, which made cooking and dining up here bearable. Without it, I would have had to dine with a head net and gloves.

  American Three-toed Woodpecker

  Now I needed to get to know my new environment. I went out on bike trips mornings and afternoons, covering a lot of territory. I used the car for more distant travel in search of big game or unusual habitats, and drove to Musselwhite Gold Mine, about forty miles distant, to purchase gasoline and to get ice and supplies for the cooler. The mine, an isolated industrial operation, sat at the end of a long private access road northeast of Pipestone campground. I spent evenings kayaking to watch wildlife and to escape the mosquitoes, which followed my kayak out quite a distance, giving up only after I’d traveled a couple hundred yards from shore. Out on the water, I drifted and watched the sun setting behind the low hills, satisfied to be in wild nature. Spring Peepers chorused loudly and a Canadian Toad trilled. This was a superior way to end the day. The sun hit the horizon at a bit before ten, so I was in my tent before dark on most nights. My sixteen days up here in the far north followed this general routine: several sallies out on
foot, by bike, or in the car to hunt for birds and other wildlife, interspersed by simple meals, the occasional afternoon siesta, and a quiet and very peaceful night of sleep in the tent, only to be woken early by birdsong.

  BIRDING THE JACK PINE BARRENS

  Much of the upland territory where I camped was forested in a monoculture of Jack Pine. A large stretch of northern Ontario is considered a “barren,” underlain by nutrient-poor shield rock. The only soil available since the glaciers receded eleven thousand years ago is mostly sand. Low spots are boggy and wet, but the dominant uplands are dry and sparsely vegetated with the fire-prone Jack Pine. The summer brings drought conditions, when lightning strikes produce fires that, under these desiccated conditions, can rage for days. Jack Pine, with its sappy resins, burns like crazy, but this species happens to be a fire specialist, its seeds released from its cones by a fire event. Once I walked through the edge of a burned-over section of Jack Pine forest and saw, among the blackened and charred trunks, thousands of tiny green seedlings—Jack Pine begetting Jack Pine.

  The dominant dry upland forest here has an overstory of mature Jack Pine, with a scattering of fir and spruce saplings in the understory. Here a mature Jack Pine might stand thirty-five feet tall, with a basal diameter of no more than four inches. This, then, is “old-growth” Jack Pine, but I wondered how old it actually is—fifty years? The Jack Pine stands are quite open, and the ground is spongy, with a thick carpet of Sphagnum moss and Reindeer Lichen. In certain spots, spruce, fir, aspens, and poplars prosper, but Jack Pine is the dominant tree in this part of the North Woods.