We took a road trip along the Mississippi River yesterday, looking mostly for eagles. We found seven Bald Eagles at the Colville Park marina on the south edge of Red Wing. There is excellent river access there, plus a few dozen mallards. Two more eagles were seen between Colville and Wabasha. We visited the National Eagle Center in that city. This beautiful facility is worth a visit. It’s located in downtown Wabasha, on the river. It offers exhibits, well-informed volunteers to answer your questions, huge windows opening onto river views, and four resident birds, three Bald Eagles and one Golden Eagle. All are birds unable to successfully live in the wild.  The eagles are tethered inside. Visitors can get very close to the birds. ( The photo is of the Golden.) We took the Wisconsin side of the river north. A couple of dozen Bald Eagles were on the ice at Alma, just below the lock and dam there. Just south of Alma we watched a large flock of Wild Turkeys flush out of a cornfield and into the woods as a juvenile Golden Eagle made a lazy pass at them. That bird was the highlight of the day. (Web site: www.nationaleaglecenter.org)

 

This is a Great Kiskadee about to eat a crab. The photo was taken last week, but not around here. It was foraging along the shore of the Caribbean Sea about an hour south of Cancun. The birding was good, but not as good as the weather. We saw as many bird species that breed up here as we did birds that spend the year down there. Red-eyed Vireos were common. I had my best looks ever at Hooded Warbler. Redstarts, Yellow Warblers, and Yellow-throated Warblers were not hard to find. A Little Blue Heron was on the beach one day, along with a Black-bellied Plover, a Willet, Ruddy Turnstones, and Sanderlings. The week was way too short.

  A good quick late-fall early-winter birding trip is a tour of the west shore of Mille Lacs Lake. Jude and I were there a feew of days ago, sun shining, water blue. We hoped to find loons in large numbers, but I think we were late. Common Loons gather on the lake during fall migration. Over 1,000 birds have been counted in one day. From the overlook at Garrison we had 17 in sight at once. There were Red-breasted Mergansers, Bonaparte’s and Ring-billed gulls as well. Red-breasted and Pacific loons can be seen there, too, but not this day. Several years ago a Yellow-billed Loon, an extremely rare lower-48 visitor was seen for a few days. It arrived late in the season. Ice formed, trapping it because it did not have enough opem water for the long running takeoff loons need. Eventually, a Bald Eagle ate it. (Pictured are a pair of Bonaparte’s gulls in winter plumage.)

 If you like winter birds, northern Minnesota specialties in particular, there is a festival coming that can’t be beat. The second annual Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival will be held Feb. 13-15 in Meadowlands, northwest of Duluth. Birds to be seen include Sharp-tailed Grouse, Ruffed Grouse, Snowy Owl, Great Gray Owl, Northern Hawk-Owl, Northern Goshawk, Rough-legged Hawk, American Three-toed Woodpecker, Black-backed Woodpecker, Northern Shrike, Gray Jay, Black-billed Magpie, Boreal Chickadee, Bohemian Waxwing, Snow Bunting, Pine and Evening grosbeaks, Red and White-winged crossbills, and Hoary and Common redpolls. There are guided tours and programs. Check it out at http://moumn.org/sax-zim/. This might be the only true winter birding festival in the nation. Last year, birders from 21 states attended. (The bird in the photo is a Black-backed Woodpecker.)  Â

  The Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, along our border with Mexico, has long been a favorite destination for birders. It is a place where you can see bird species found nowhere else in the country. If you want to visit this special place, don’t delay. Go before our government finished The Wall. The Wall is that 16-foot-high concrete and steel barrier being built on our side of the Rio Grande River as part of our solution to illegal immigration.These comments are not about protecting our borders. I have no argument with that. What I don’t understand is why we can’t find a way to do that without demanding such huge environmental sacrafice. The Wall, according to an article in the American Birding Association’s newsletter, simply will remove some species from the United States. The Wall is being built within a 100-foot clearcut through habitat that sometimes is hardly 100 feet deep, squeezed between the river and the ag fields that dominate the Valley. Audubon’s Sabal Palm Bird Sanctuary actually will wind up on the Mexican side of the wall, access all but impossible. This sanctuary and several others sit in this special and rare wildlife corridor that our government has spent $100 million purchasing and restoring. Why is it that we so often seek to solve national problems by giving the environment a good shot in the shorts? Is this really the best we can do? (The White-winged Dove in the photo is found along the Rio Grande River.)Â

   Crex Meadows wildlife area will hold a festival this Sunday, Oct. 5, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Events will begin at the Crex Visitors’ Center just north of Grantsburg, Wisconsin. Crex is a wildlife area of more than 30,000 acres. The festival coincides with the peak gathering there of migrating Sandhill Cranes. Thousands of cranes will be seen, along with many other species of birds. There are guided tours at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. To get to Grantsburg, take I-35W north to Minnesota Highway 70 and follow it east for 15 miles to Grantsburg, which is just across the St. Croix River. In Grantsburg, follow the yellow goose footprints through town to the visitors’ center. The photo is of Sandhill Cranes at Crex.

  A contest for digital photos of prairie wildlife and landscape has been announced for all photographers age 18 or up. It is being sponsored by The Nature Conservancy as part of the celebration surrounding the 2009 federal Duck Stamp artwork competition, which is to be held in Bloomington in October. Photos need be taken in Minnesota or one of the Dakotas. Deadline for entries is midnight Sept. 15. Cash prizes will be awarded, $250 to first place. For complete entry information, go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/thenatureconservancyminnesota_prairie/  Â

My recent trip to the Kenai peninsula south of Anchorage, Alaska, was my fifth to that state. All trips were based on birds. I’ve birded in Anchorage, at Denali National Park, in and around Nome three times, on St. Lawrence Island three times, and once each on St. Paul island in the Pribilofs and Attu island at the end of the Aleutian chain. I had been to the Kenai once before, birding out of Seward and Homer. This time I was based in Soldotna. I like Alaska, all places and all times.This trip was different in two ways. First, I  had the advantage of cherry-picking sites along the 65-site Kenai Peninsula Wildlife Viewing Trail. It helps to have target spots that local birding enthusiasts have chosen. I think I got more birds for my buck, so to speak. The trail covers lakes, rivers, bays, inlets, shoreline, spruce forest, mixed forest, tundra — every habit type available. It was good birding.The second difference was season: this trip was in early July, fledging season. My other trips had been based either on spring or fall migration. We — an avid Kenai birder and I — saw young murres, murrelets, Mew Gulls, Herring Gulls, Bonaparte’s Gull, Glaucous-winged Gulls, Spruce Grouse, Red-breasted Mergansers, Surf Scoters, thrushes, ducks, and more.Someone once told me that you haven’t seen a bird until you’ve seen male and female of the species in breeding and non-breeding plumage, plus the chicks. We tend to lean toward the spring male plumage, the bright and colorful birds. Young birds are more subtle, like their moms, but no less beautiful. We saw eggs, too, and of course nests. All of that does complete the package.I did one other thing, too: over the years I have found that for me slow birding is better birding. The numbers might be smaller, but the experience is more intense.

Kenai Peninsula, Alaska — Day Six

The five-mile long spit that stretches into Kachemak Bay from Homer, Alaska, points across the bay at Gull Island. Today, we rode with Capt. Karl Stoltzfus of Bay Excursion Tours to check the bay for seabirds, and to circle Gull Island. Highlight of the expansive bay were sea otters, dozens of them dotting the absolutely calm water (no chop, no waves a bonus). Then came Gull Island. This is two islands, actually, rocky humps rising steeply from the water. Thousands of birds nest here — Common Murres, Pigeon Guillemots, Horned and Tufted Puffins, Red-faced and Pelagic Cormorants, Mew Gulls, and Marbled and Kittlitz’s Murrelets. The birds call incessently. They wheel above the island. They come from and leave on feeding forays. It is birding bedlum out there. We circled twice, slowly, high tide allowing us to be within 20 feet of shore at times. It is birding bedlam out there. And it stinks. Years (centuries?) worth of guano stain the rocks. Nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Kenai Peninsula, Alaska — Day Five

Doughnuts are fueling this trip. This day has been highlighted by three doughnuts and a pair of nesting dark-phase Parasitic Jaegers. We first saw one of the jaegers four days ago, over the tidal mud near the mouth of the Kenai River. The Kenai city docking site was our observation point. It is one of the stops on the Kenai Peninsula Wildlife Viewing Trail, the source of our various birding destinations on this trip. It’s salmon season here. Commercial fishermen come into the river near the docks to unload their fish at the processing plants along the river bank. Inside the plants, long tables are lined with men and women in yellow rubber bib overalls. They’re fileting salmon, thousands and thousands of fish. The discarded parts are ground into a slurry and discharged into the river. Gulls come to feed at this banquet. Perhaps 30,000 gulls — Herring, Glaucous-winged, and Mew — nest on a vast sedge meadow just across the river. The river front is jaeger heaven. They come to worry the gulls, chasing them in dog-fight pursuit, hoping a gull carrying food to chicks will drop the food during the chase. The gull’s loss is the jaeger’s gain. We watched that first jaeger, almost black against the gray-green river, as it swept among the white gulls looking for a victim. We were about 500 yards away. Eventually, we moved to another dock to be closer to the action. The jaeger, of course, immediately flew downstream to work in front of our previous viewing site. Then, we lost the bird. We’ve been checking that stretch of river twice a day, hoping to see that dark dart again. Today, we found the jaegers’ nest site. We stopped along a nearby highway to scan a mudflat for whatever. One jaeger was found standing on the mud. The second appeared minutes later, rising off what we believe is their nest. The birds are a rich chocolate brown with tan accents. They are almost exactly the same color as the dried silt on which they are nesting. If they hadn’t moved we wouldn’t have seen them. We watched the pair eventually fly off into the ever-present gull flock. We’re going back later this afternoon to see if they have returned to the nest site. It is less than 100 yards from the road, allowing good looks with binoculars. I never eat doughnuts, by the way, but this place, with its never-ending daylight and the wealth of birds, keeps me hungry.