Northern Minnesota Winter Weekend II Jan 19—23, 2008
Posted by Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert, with over 40 years of birding experience throughout the U.S. and Canada, has now been guiding birders or teaching bird identification classes for more than 25 o...Related Trips
The weather may not have been anything to write home about during our first Northern Minnesota Winter Weekend tour the week before, but it certainly caught our attention this time around! Dangerously low wind chills down to at least -35 were out there every one of the five days—with frostbite possible within 10 minutes on exposed skin when it's that cold. It was therefore fortunate in a way that we had no time for birding on the arrival and departure days of the tour, and even more fortuitous that virtually all the birding during this tour is done from or near the warmth of our vehicle.
Even without the wind, which was in the 10 to 20 m.p.h. range each day, it would have been cold enough. Note that our "warmest" day had a low of -9 at sunrise and only reached +8 that afternoon, some 10 degrees below normal. Note as well there was only one other day which managed to make it above zero. All this brought back fond memories of 1996, the first year of this winter tour. On our first morning in Duluth it bottomed out at -39 degrees, unofficially it was -48 as we birded in the Sax-Zim Bog, it never rose above -21 that afternoon, while 80 miles to the north in Tower the all-time Minnesota record of -60 was established! And those were unadulterated air temperatures—no wind chills involved!
So, as they say, it could have been a lot worse. Oddly enough, though, given what birds were possible, the birding couldn't have been that much better. No, the Great Grays and both crossbills again refused to show up for us (and every other birder) this week, and Bohemian Waxwings repeatedly failed to reappear at the two locations where others had recently found them. Indeed, despite the cold, we came up with an above average total of 44 species, two more than our first group operating in "balmy" conditions.
Part of the reason for our lofty list was the appearance of three special birds missed by the earlier tour. Two male Sharp-tailed Grouse chased each other around their Aitkin County lek as if it were April—relatively warm and snowless winters recently seem to have produced Sharp-taileds evolving to display in midwinter. At this same locale, a Lapland Longspur joined a flock of Snow Buntings, even though the species is practically unknown in winter in northern Minnesota. And a huge and handsome adult Northern Goshawk appeared out of nowhere on a back road; at best, I see this bird on one out of ten birding days in winter.
In addition, this second tour generally was able to relocate all the specialty species found the previous week. Ruffed Grouse fed on alders and aspens at dusk, and Glaucous Gulls still foraged at the Superior landfill. The same Snowy Owl was near the airport, as was a new and unexpected Northern Hawk Owl, while the other hawk owl in Sax-Zim was still there: this time chasing—and being chased by—Pine Grosbeaks. No fewer than five American Three-toed Woodpeckers (all males) were counted, while it took a while to turn up a single Black-backed. A new Townsend's Solitaire perched in a crabapple tree in a different neighborhood, while the same Varied Thrush, Harris's Sparrow, and Hoary Redpoll were still at their respective feeders.