Great Horned Owl (not an individual I saw this year)

I do most of my birding alone, but every now and then it’s nice to spend a morning with a birding buddy. I got to spend this Monday morning with one of my best birding friends, though oddly enough, we’d never actually birded together before. Mike McDowell is one of the world’s premier digiscopers, and the kind of birder I consider the cream of the crop. He’s intimately knowledgeable about one place, the Pheasant Branch Conservancy in Middleton, Wisconsin, which he visits over and over throughout each year. Not only does he know all the regular birds found there, but also he discovers rarities like nesting Yellow-breasted Chats, and he’s taken gorgeous photos of many of these birds. This year I’m highlighting places and people important for bird conservation, so I made a special point to spend some time with Mike at Pheasant Branch.

Sunday I drove from Duluth to Middleton, and Mike and I got together Monday morning before sunrise. First thing he took me straight to a pair of Great Horned Owls, one sitting directly above the other in a medium-sized spruce tree. Mike has been keeping track of several pairs of owls at Pheasant Branch, and he knew exactly where to look. That was new for my Conservation Big Year count. He also showed me a huge tree cavity nearby that they’ve nested in some years.

Next, Mike brought me to a trail that has bird feeders alongside it. Here’s where I started feeling my age—I’ve been losing some of my high-frequency hearing, and never heard several Brown Creepers that Mike heard easily. He also pointed out a flicker, American Tree Sparrows, and several other little dickey birds that I had to strain to pick up. Scolding chickadees and a rush of wings put us both on a Cooper’s Hawk carrying prey.

Cooper’s Hawk holding prey and staring at us

We checked out a prairie area where a Horned Lark flew across the road—another new species. Then Mike had to get to work, but we’d amassed a list of 24 species, fully half new for my year list. The only species I got entirely skunked on that Mike heard was the Brown Creeper, but fortunately I’d seen two of them last week.

 

A major cold front had kept temperatures down around 10 that morning, but I still visited Picnic Point, on the University of Wisconsin Campus. This is a place I used to know as well as Mike knows Pheasant Branch. Just a couple of days before, a great assortment of waterfowl had been reported, but now Lake Mendota’s shoreline was frozen, and  almost all the ducks I saw were too far out for me to identify while I was shivering so hard, though I did manage to see enough to identify the closest ducks—a group of Red-breasted Mergansers, another new species. And visiting Picnic Point is never a waste of time. A gorgeous Red-tailed Hawk circled in the brilliant blue sky, an adult Bald Eagle perched in a large tree on the shoreline, and a Red-bellied Woodpecker gave me nice looks.

Red-bellied Woodpecker at Picnic Point

I would have been much sadder to leave if the weather had been a bit balmier. In Illinois, I saw a kestrel on a wire, bringing the number of new birds for the year to 14, and my total year list to 63. Not bad for the first two weeks of the year. The list will climb dramatically when I reach Florida this weekend. 

New birds for the year:

Miles driven today (from Middleton to Aurora, Illinois) 154 + 13 miles in Mike’s car = 167 miles

Every year in January I start a new year list. That makes even the most common species exciting for at least a moment, and makes me eager to get out at least once or twice to the Sax-Zim Bog, Port Wing, Wisconsin, and other favorite birding places so my year list doesn’t look too pitiful before the big migration hits each spring.

This year I’m trying to see as many species as I can, so I’ve been out a lot more than usual. So far I haven’t seen the Varied Thrushes that have been in Duluth—Janet Riegle and I saw one the day of the Christmas Bird Count in December, but the three times I looked there starting on New Year’s Day, I couldn’t find it. And I went to Wisconsin Point three times in search of a Barrow’s Goldeneye that has been hanging out with Common Goldeneyes in the Superior Entry, but kept getting skunked on that, too. When I left home on January 13 for my long drive to Florida, I had 47 species.

But since I was driving past Moccasin Mike Road anyway, I decided to make one last try for the goldeneye. The sky was dark and snow flurries made visibility poor, but I lucked out—Mike Hendrickson showed up with his spotting scope, and there it was! It started out on the Minnesota side, then a bunch of them took off and flew across to a little inlet on the Wisconsin side, and then it made its way back to the Minnesota side, so I got to count it for both states. I’d seen one once before in Minnesota, in 2001, but needed it for my Wisconsin list, so this was very exciting.

I saw my lifer Barrow’s Goldeneye in Yellowstone National Park in August 1979, and I saw several in Alaska in August 2001. These sightings make a lot of sense: Barrow’s Goldeneye was once referred to as the Rocky Mountain Goldeneye because it’s generally restricted to areas west of the Continental Divide. But satellite telemetry revealed an important breeding location in the forested regions of the Laurentian Highlands in southeastern Québec—this population may explain why small numbers are found every year in winter in the eastern Canadian Maritime Provinces and eastern United States.

Barrow’s Goldeneye is not listed as a species of conservation concern, but may well deserve to be. The entire world population numbers less than 200,000, so the conservation status is currently being reevaluated. This cavity nester is dependent on holes excavated by Pileated Woodpeckers or flicker holes that have been enlarged by mammals, cavities formed by broken branches, or the hollow tops of standing trees—they’ve also been known to nest in old crow nests and a marmot burrow. They’re surprisingly long-lived. One male was shot by a hunter when at least 15 years old, and another was reported to have lived over 18 years in the wild.

Spotting the lone male among the 600 or so Common Goldeneyes is like looking for a needle in a haystack or, as Mike Hendrickson said when we were looking for him, like “Where’s Waldo?” And like finding Waldo at last, getting a glimpse of this visitor from the North gave me a feeling of genuine satisfaction.

A female Lesser Scaup was also in the Superior Entry.

I searched but didn’t see a single Red-tailed Hawk before dark on my drive to Chicago–the cold and constant flurries may have kept them in more sheltered spots for the day. So I ended the day with a total of 49 species. Today I drove 342 miles.

1. Lesser Scaup
2. Barrow’s Goldeneye