Penelopedia: Nature and Garden in Northfield, MN

Cardinals

2012-02-08T22:38:00.000-06:00

Around this time last year, when we were deep in snow, I wrote twice about the female cardinal / the beauty of the female cardinal and once about a pair of cardinals at our feeder.

Female cardinal, February 2011

This year, of course, we have had such a mild, dry winter that unless we get some big storms we're likely to be completely snow-free within a few weeks (one good warm day would probably do it, around where we live). But the cardinals are still here and still beautiful, even if they don't look quite so stunning without a blanket of white behind them.

Male and female cardinals, January 2011

I noted last year that the male is not friendly to the female until the spring breeding season arrives, at which point he stops chasing her away and starts offering her food. In the photo above, taken last January, it's unclear whether he was tolerating her or whether the divided feeding area kept him from being aware she was so close.

House Finches on January Morning

2012-02-02T21:50:00.000-06:00

The same day I was collecting brief video clips of the birds at the feeders, I also took some stills in rapid-fire mode to see what I might capture. Here is a sequence of house finches at the tube feeder. I love the house finch in flight below. Click on any of the photos to see them larger.

Incoming!

Caught them both with their mouths full

January Morning at the Feeders (Video)

2012-01-28T23:38:00.001-06:00

Here is a little video I made of some of the action at our feeders this morning, with a blue jay, a downy woodpecker and some house finches.

Owl City

2012-01-27T21:23:00.000-06:00

My life owl score:

May 1959 to December 2011: no owls seen in the wild. Not a one, as far as I am aware.
January 2012: Three owls (individuals and species) seen so far.

Go figure.

One trick is: go where the owls are, when the owls are. Hmmmm. Very smart.

Three weekends ago we went to the airport in search of a snowy owl that had been reported there. And there it was, with a group of birders with binoculars and spotting scopes all pointing at it. (I forgot to take my camera. Rats.)

Two weekends ago on one of those nice mild days, we went for a walk near the pine plantation in the Carleton arboretum, hoping to see a great horned owl that a couple of people had spotted there in the day or two previously, and one flew out of the trees right over our heads. (I had my camera, but didn't have time to do anything with it as the owl suddenly appeared.)

This evening, an "owl hearing walk" led by two of the arboretum student naturalists was publicized, and about 22 people showed up for it, mostly students. They told us they couldn't promise any owls, but they would take us to some likely areas. Before setting off they played sound clips of the calls of the owls we had some chance of hearing, and we were shown photos of the owls as well.

Well, off we marched, in two straight lines just like the little girls in the book Madeline, because we were staying clear of the groomed cross-country ski trails down the the middle of the path.

Our guides took us to the floodplain alongside the Cannon River, where some of the larger and older trees in the arb are found. And there, before long, we came abruptly to a halt, because there was a barred owl 20 or 30 feet off the ground in a tree right next to the trail.

Back at the orientation talk before we set out, we learned that a quick way to tell whether you are looking at a barred owl is to look for very dark eyes (it's the only owl around here with dark eyes) and a yellowish beak. Yep, a barred owl is what it was.

And there you have it. Owl species #3 for the month, and the year, and my life. And the very first owl I have photographed. It posed nicely, didn't it?

After a short time it flew to a tree a few dozen yards further from the trail, and we stood and watched it as best we could for a while. We didn't see or hear any other owls on the walk, but that one great sighting was well worth the rather vigorous outing -- except for that one long pause and a couple of brief ones, we walked very briskly indeed over variable terrain in increasing darkness for considerably more than an hour. Thanks to Carleton senior Emma, who kept me company as I straggled at the end of the line for the last 20 minutes or so of the walk.

Then I went home and fixed myself some nice hot mulled wine.

Thanks, Jared and Owen, for leading the outing and teaching us some things about owls. Here is some more good information about looking for owls in this area, from the Carleton naturalists.

Hundreds of Mallards at Sunset

2012-01-15T17:25:00.000-06:00

Just east of Northfield, returning from a walk in the northern leg of the Arb (where we had hoped with luck to spot a great horned owl, and in fact one flew over our heads without warning), we saw a large, swirling flock of birds over a field. They proved to be mallards. They landed in the corn stubble, but soon took to the air again. Soon afterward, skein after skein of geese flew eastward away from a stunning sunset behind them. Who knew there were so many geese and ducks spending the winter here?

Mallards over fields at sunset

Mallards - close to 150 in this crop alone

Carleton College Chapel with geese

Carleton College at sunset

Red-breasted Nuthatch

2012-01-15T13:05:00.000-06:00

The colder temperatures lately have increased the activity at some of our feeders, and yesterday as light snow fell I was happy to see this red-breasted nuthatch make a number of visits to the peanut and sunflower seed feeders. I haven't seen one too often this winter. So cute.

I wrote three posts about nuthatches (red-breasted and white-breasted) at around this time last year: January 2, January 18, and January 23.

The Year in Birds: 2011 (Part 2)

2012-01-08T13:07:00.000-06:00

After I posted birding highlights of 2011 yesterday, of course some more occurred to us. Perhaps foremost among these was our January sighting of a northern shrike going after prey in open farmland east of Northfield.

We also had two most unexpected yard birds (species seen in or from our yard) in 2011:

In the spring my son and husband saw a ring-necked pheasant in our front yard, under a young evergreen that often provides cover for the birds who visit our feeders. We are not far from the eastern edge of town, and pheasants are a fairly common sight in the farm fields just down the road, but we'd never seen a pheasant within the city limits before, let alone on our property -- and so far, never have again.
Also in the extremely wet spring, when a medium-sized marsh had developed in low-lying land just to the east of our property, we joked about the prospects of attracting shorebirds and were utterly dumbfounded to actually have several visits from a migrating solitary sandpiper. I took some photos through the spotting scope from our three-season porch, just to be able to say I'd photographed a sandpiper from our house.This is a bird I was even more surprised to find within the city limits than the pheasant mentioned above.

2011 was also a year of many firsts for my son, who really caught the birding bug last December and was eager to add to his list. One amusing episode concerned his first red-winged blackbirds. These of course are very common birds once they arrive in the spring, but on this day we had not yet seen any for the season. We were near the ponds on the southeast end of town, where the cattails provide prime RWB habitat. At long last we saw a lone blackbird, and a bit later another, so he was quite pleased and gratified -- and then a flock of about 300 of them flew overhead. I think we actually burst out laughing.
Those ponds, particularly the deep, spring-fed pond south of Superior Drive, provide us much pleasure in the spring. The Superior Drive pond is usually ice-free before any other water in the area and so it attracts a really spectacular mix of migrating ducks and geese and even loons in early spring. In 2011, the year of the early but cool, wet spring, the ice was out and the pond full of ducks by mid-March.

The Year in Birds: 2011

2012-01-07T14:01:00.002-06:00

See also The Year in Birds: 2011 (Part 2).

I've just caught up with our official 2011 bird list, which I forgot to keep updated in the final months of the year. We have 137 birds on the list this year, including birds seen in California. That's up from only 95 last year, but we didn't have a western trip last year.

Our birding highlights of 2011 included:

Rare whooping cranes in Rice County in the fall (also spotted by others in the spring):

My first sight of a large gathering of sandhill cranes at the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in early November.
My first white-tailed kite, seen hovering over dunes in a Berkeley, CA, bayside park in August -- a beautiful, medium-sized white hawk that at first I took to be yet another gull but whose hovering behavior caught my eye as something very different. This is a coastal bird, in the U.S. generally only to be seen along the west coast, the southern Texas gulf coast and the tip of Florida.
My first scarlet tanagers, seen on the same mid-May day as 10 or so species of migrating spring warblers at the Cannon River Wilderness Area; the bay-breasted warbler became a new favorite for me the same day.

A March trip to California that included shorebird- and waterfowl-watching in fairly industrialized East Bay locations and a very enjoyable outing to the Las Gallinas Wildlife Ponds (a.k.a. sewage ponds) in Marin County. Birds included marbled godwit, black-necked stilt, dunlin, pectoral sandpiper, American avocet, willet, American wigeon, northern mockingbird, black-crowned night-heron, black-bellied plover, western grebe, surf scoter, black turnstone and snowy egret. (Addendum, Jan. 8: I've been reminded to add violet-green swallow and cinnamon teal to this trip report.)
An August trip to California with my then-almost-12-year-old son, where we saw the above-mentioned white-tailed kite and hiked up into the Sunol Wilderness Area in the southern East Bay hills to see golden eagles soaring around the hilltops. This was by our terms a substantial hike (about three hours fairly steeply uphill and down again, in very dry conditions), which challenged and rewarded both of us. I came away from it with an enhanced sense of power to push myself physically and an appreciation for my son's stamina. I'll close with this image of that trail: leading onward and upward to new discoveries about ourselves and the world.

Wishing you adventures in 2012.

Winter Robin

2011-12-21T14:54:00.001-06:00

We spotted this robin during the Christmas Bird Count last Saturday. This is my Solstice/Hannukah/Christmas photo for 2011: warmest wishes to everyone, and thanks for reading Penelopedia.

Christmas Bird Count 2011

2011-12-17T20:25:00.003-06:00

This was the view from the passenger seat at just after 8 o'clock this morning, as my little Christmas Bird Count group set off to spend the morning slowly driving the back roads southeast of Northfield, as well driving and walking the southeast section of town. We covered 29 miles by car and about half a mile on foot (mostly on the footpaths near Sibley Elementary School) in 3.5 hours. It was a pretty morning, with last night's dusting of snow still fresh on the fields and trees, but it was relatively slow morning for birding. While we had a few exciting moments, things were generally pretty quiet. We spotted or identified by sound approximately:

80 European starlings in a single group
51 house finches (about 40 in a single flock)
50 mallards (flying overhead)
26 American crows
21 house sparrows
17 black-capped chickadees
9 mourning doves (7 in a small backyard tree visible from a footpath)
7 blue jays
7 wild turkeys
6 dark-eyed juncos
5 American robins
4 downy woodpeckers
3 American goldfinches
3 northern cardinals
3 red-tailed hawks
2 northern shrikes (one in town, near the ponds off Jefferson Parkway near Prairie St. -- an exciting "spot")
1 red-bellied woodpecker
1 white-breasted nuthatch

There were also a few pigeons, which are officially called rock pigeons these days. Numbers above are from memory and may be inexact, as we didn't keep our tally sheet after making our official report, but they are close.

Dan and Erika Tallman were the Northfield-area coordinators this year and hosted the pre-Count breakfast and the post-Count lunch. It's always fun to sit around the table with other bird-minded Northfielders, and some who come from elsewhere to participate because their home regions don't have a count.

We joined in the Christmas Bird Count the previous two years as well, and I blogged about both outings. In 2009 I saw my first horned larks and provided more general background about the Christmas Bird Count, and in 2010 I saw my first northern shrike and wrote about the frustration of unofficial turkeys -- turkeys that were on the wrong side of the road along our area boundary and so could not be officially counted.

The history and research value of the annual Christmas Bird Count (a project of the National Audubon Society and partners) were nicely described in an article that ran in the most recent Northfield News. Read it here.

Squirrel Outside Looking In

2011-12-14T22:08:00.000-06:00

At least one local squirrel that scavenges for seeds under our bird feeders has learned it can (apparently) be easier on the feet to run across the brick ledge outside our living room window than to hop through the snow. And it's learned to stop sometimes and take a look inside. I wonder what it thinks. I know more or less what our cats think: "Furry, pernicious, probably edible trespasser! High alert!" The squirrel seems remarkably unconcerned by their ready-to-pounce posture and frenzied tail-lashing.

The Belly in Red-bellied Woodpecker

2011-12-11T20:48:00.000-06:00

As I've noted before, and as others have certainly also observed, red-bellied woodpeckers would doubtless be called red-headed woodpeckers if not for the red-all-over head of the extremely handsome bird that actually bears that name.The eponymous red belly of the former is not very red and not very easy to see, so it's hardly a good field mark. It does show a little, however, in this shot of a red-bellied woodpecker in our front-yard maple tree this morning.

Earlier posts I've written about red-bellied woodpeckers can be found here. It hasn't been a common bird for us in the past, but we have seen one two or three times since we started tracking our observations for this Project FeederWatch season, which started about a month ago.

Next Saturday we'll be participating in the annual Christmas Bird Count for the third time. In the past two years we've been assigned to areas to the east of Northfield as well as some in town. I'm looking forward to it. One slight hope is that in a morning out and about in the countryside we might see a snowy owl. Many snowy owls have been sighted in the northern U.S. in the past several weeks, signalling a major "irruption" year. They come south in search of food when their usual sources are scarce, and unfortunately a number of the birds that have been reported have been emaciated and some have been found dead. A Google map showing rough locations of snowy owl sightings is available here.

From Brown to White as December Arrives

2011-12-04T16:52:00.000-06:00

Last weekend it was unseasonably mild and dry, as it had been through much of November this year, and the light snow cover of the previous week was gone. We went for a walk through the woods at the northern end of the Lower Arb (part of Carleton College's Cowling Arboretum). Signs alerted us that an archery hunt to manage the white-tailed deer population was in progress in the Arb and that other users should keep to the trails. That was slightly unnerving, but we saw no sign of hunting. Here's an Arb Talk article about the reasons for the annual archery hunt.

One section of the trail I mentally nicknamed Chickadee Woods for all the birds of that name we could hear and see around us, and further on there was a flock of American robins high in the bare trees. Though we usually think of robins as birds that go south for the winter, they will sometimes stay, often in large flocks, if food is available and snow cover not too heavy.

Dead tree stripped of most of its bark

This dead tree caught my eye, as it had lost its branches and most of its bark (above). When looking at the bare wood of the trunk, trails of insect larvae were visible (below).

Closeup of same tree with signs of insect activity

A cut section of fallen wood also captured our attention, as it was decorated with delicate layers of a pale fungus (below).

Log with fungi

Closer view - fungi look like oyster shells

Closer view

And even closer - how pretty and delicate

I don't know much about fungi. These appear to be a type of bracket, or shelf, fungus, a description which refers to the growth pattern but doesn't by itself closely identify the species. Judging by the shape and the concentric half-rings of varying color, these look as if they might have some relation to the so-called Turkey Tail Mushroom (Trametes versicolor). Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I am will weigh in with an opinion.

By now, of course, they are covered by the 4.5 inches of fluffy snow we received yesterday -- the first substantial snowfall of the season here in the Northfield area. Below are a couple of photos of improbably tall caps of snow adhering to purple coneflower seedheads in our front flowerbed this morning.

Amazing Nature Photos

2011-11-26T19:39:00.000-06:00

Some amazing photos -- winners of the 2011 National Wildlife Photo Competition. Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T21:17:00.000-06:00

May we all have enough, and be able to find it when the snow comes.

Downy Woodpecker Chowing Down

2011-11-22T06:04:00.003-06:00

Now that the weather has turned quite cold, we've put out suet in a couple of feeders. On Sunday we saw a female downy woodpecker in several locations -- moving up and down the tree out front, at the log-style suet feeder, and at the cage-style suet feeder. Females are all black-and-white; males have a red spot on the backs of their heads. In many bird species juveniles look like the females, but in this case the juvenile has its own distinctive look, with a red spot on the top (not the back) of the head.

Note the tongue showing in the photo below (click on the photo to see it larger). Have you ever seen a woodpecker's tongue before?

In this next sequence you can see the bird excavating a chunk of suet, using an open-beak approach rather than simply chiseling at the suet with a closed beak.

I don't think the first bird above is the same as the one at the log feeder. There are three dark spots showing on the white left outer tail feather immediately above, which is common but not universal for the downy woodpecker, and you can see a hint of a dark spot on its hard-to-see right outer tail feather. I'm pretty sure the bird in the top photo is also a downy, and I would have thought it was the same bird, but there are no spots on the right outer tail feather.

As Dan Tallman noted in a comment to my August 3 post about hairy woodpeckers, an all-white outer tail feather is a good indication of a hairy, rather than a downy, woodpecker. However, the bird in the top photo did not seem to be the larger size of a hairy, and its beak didn't seem to have the length and heft of a hairy's. So it seems more likely we have two female downy woodpeckers hanging around our feeders.

Pine Siskins and Snow - First of the Season

2011-11-20T17:52:00.001-06:00

We had a wonderful turnout at the feeders today, after it sleeted and snowed much of the day yesterday -- the first snow that has "stuck" here in south-central Minnesota this season. During the lunch rush, I noticed some familiar figures I hadn't seen since May: three pine siskins. Last year we first noticed them on December 5.

Pine siskin (above) and white-breasted nuthatch

Similar in size and body style to an American goldfinch (and listed next to it in the various field guides), the pine siskin has a heavily streaked underside, a sharp, narrow beak, a notched tail, and a yellowish tinge to its wings.

Two pine siskins

The photos above and below, caught while I was using my camera's rapid-burst mode, crack me up -- it appears that this little guy does not need to use his or her wings to fly.

Good Advice on Birding (and Life) Skills

2011-11-18T21:29:00.001-06:00

Deb at Sand Creek Almanac (who is a biologist who works for the DNR up towards Duluth) had a post I really liked the other day. She described first hearing and then spotting some birds she wanted to identify but couldn't see very well. She went through a sequence of steps, or birding skills, to narrow down what she was hearing and seeing, starting with these three:

Birding skill #1: Use your ears.
Birding skill #2: Think habitat.
Birding skill #3: Watch for behavioral cues.

I encourage you to read her post to learn how she applied these skills, and others, to the challenge at hand. She concluded:

Perhaps the best way to develop identification skills is not by being told what species is in front of you and then watching it, but by being presented with an unfamiliar species and figuring out what cues might distinguish it from other species.

In birding as in life, isn't this true? Figure something out for yourself and you've really "got" that bird, or that math problem, or the way to set up your computer or stereo system.

Deb identified the birds she saw that day, by the way, as white-winged crossbills, which I've never seen. We could see them here in the winter. Their crossed bills are nicely adapted for prying seeds out of the cones of pines and other coniferous trees.

Cannon River in November Twilight

2011-11-15T20:34:00.000-06:00

Cannon River from the Canada Avenue bridge - click to see larger version

Returning to Northfield from an appointment in Stillwater this afternoon, I cut over from Highway 47 onto Canada Avenue to come into town from the east side. Crossing the sturdy new bridge (right next to the historic Waterford Iron Bridge that was awarded $95,000 in the recent Partners in Preservation competition for restoration funds), I was struck by the beautiful late-afternoon light and the shirring on the water's surface from the breeze. I parked beyond the bridge and walked back to capture this view.

Project FeederWatch

2011-11-13T17:10:00.000-06:00

This was the kickoff weekend for the 2011-2012 Project FeederWatch season. Project FeederWatch is a citizen science project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada that invites people to track the birds that visit their feeders from November to April (the nonbreeding season). Over a two-day period each week, you watch when you can and note the species seen, as well as the largest number of each species seen at once. It's not too late to sign up -- last year we didn't get going until at least January. I'm excited to track our visitors for the whole period this time.

Blue jay at wreath feeder
(photo taken last summer)

Having been hit by a bad cold at the end of the week, it was a perfect weekend to spend a lot of time in a living room chair with a book, looking out frequently between nose-blows to see if there was any action at the feeders. Yesterday was fairly quiet, but today we put out some additional food and we had a lot of visitors, by our standards:

American Goldfinch (3)
Black-capped Chickadee (3)
Blue Jay (4)
Dark-eyed Junco (5)
Downy Woodpecker (1)
House Finch (8)
Northern Cardinal (1)
Red-bellied Woodpecker (1)
White-breasted Nuthatch (1)

Red-bellied woodpecker
(photo taken last winter)

The blue jays put on a lovely show for us when I put out some whole (in-shell) peanuts for them. They cleaned out the four or five handfuls of peanuts in a couple of hours. We've learned not to fill our wreath-style peanut feeder, because they'll polish off the lot in less than a day, so we only fill it about a quarter full at a time, typically.

The red-bellied woodpecker was an unexpected treat for the start of the season. I've written in the past about not seeing them often, and mainly in deep cold spells, though we did start to see one a bit more often last year.

Sandhill Cranes at Sherburne NWR (Video)

2011-11-06T18:05:00.001-06:00

I was itchin' to go birding somewhere today while the weather was still mild, and thanks to a couple of blogging friends who mentioned sandhill cranes recently (see Dan Tallman's Bird Blog and Nature Knitter), I'd heard that the cranes have been congregating in large numbers in places like Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in central Minnesota and at Crex Meadows in Wisconsin. We decided to head to the closer of these, Sherburne NWR, to see if we could spot some cranes. The refuge is north of Elk River and Zimmerman, to the northwest of the Twin Cities metro area, about 90 minutes' drive from Northfield.

I've seen sandhill cranes before -- here and there in fields in central Wisconsin last month, for example, while driving to visit our daughter at Lawrence University -- but only a few at a time. The idea of seeing them congregating in large numbers, staging for their upcoming migration south, was an exciting prospect.

The Sherburne NWR website has a nice guide to where to view sandhill cranes, and it was right on target. We started to see some in the air, and then came upon a field where many dozens were foraging, joined almost every minute by new groups of anywhere from three to eight or more gliding in from the east. At a conservative count there must have been at least 300 cranes there while we watched. Here is a short video of some of the cranes on the ground and others flying in. I love how their long legs dangle as they come in. Toward the end of the video you can hear their calls.

Here are some photos as well.

We also saw a pair of swans fly by.

This was my first trip to Sherburne, and I look forward to exploring it further when it's not deer hunting season. We saw a lot of trucks pulled over and quite a bit of blaze orange hunting gear. We stayed in our car, needless to say.

We've talked about going to Nebraska's Platte River Valley flyway to witness the spring migration of half a million sandhill cranes, considered one of the most amazing experiences in birding anywhere. Dave's seen it, and I'd love to. Getting just a taste of it today has whetted my appetite for that trip even more.

Recent Observations (Late-fall Phenology)

2011-11-06T10:12:00.004-06:00

Gray skies and brown ground. It's November.

We had a hard cold snap a couple of nights ago, and many trees that had been hanging onto their leaves dropped them within hours. On the whole, though, it's been a mild autumn. Today the forecast high is around 55 F., but with the recent leaf-drop we are really entering the drab brown period of late fall.

Many of our summer birds have moved on by now and a few of the birds that winter here have appeared. We started to see dark-eyed juncos on the ground under our evergreen tree and under the feeders a couple of weeks ago. And last weekend we noticed a red-breasted nuthatch for the first time in many weeks.

Crows have been congregating in large groups. Several days recently I've seen many of them in seemingly random swooping movements overhead in the late afternoon, and a couple of times (as seen in this recent video) a large, raucous group has gathered in the treetops behind our house and then flown away.

Boxelder bugs always swarm on the south face of our house in the fall, after the first cold snap. I will look forward to having them disappear soon as they find hiding places in the cracks and crevices to spend the winter.

We set our clocks back overnight, and I always picture some phenology-minded birds or animals noting, "Oh yes, at about this time of year, as if coordinating through some magic signal, or pheromones, the humans suddenly do everything a bit later in the day."

Enjoy the extra hour. My son and I are off on an expedition. If we're lucky, I'll have a good post to write in the next day or so.

Best Bird Photograph Ever?

2011-11-01T08:25:00.000-05:00

This photo of an osprey diving for a fish near Cocoa Beach, Florida, taken by Mike Wulf, is featured in the December 2011 issue of Birdwatching magazine (formerly Birder's World). The symmetry, the balletic power, the squared-off angularity of those enormous folded wings, the reach of those talons all amaze me. (Definitely click on the photo to see a larger version!)

Crows at Dawn - video

2011-10-30T09:10:00.002-05:00

Yesterday morning I was up early as usual and started to hear a tremendous, raucous cawing at the back of the house. I stepped onto the deck and could see in the early light what at first seemed to be dozens of crows at the tops of the neighbor's cottonwood trees but eventually proved to be a couple of hundred or more. Here's a look -- and a listen.

What Stealth!

2011-10-28T13:40:00.000-05:00

Action here on Penelopedia has been so slow of late that people (at least, people named Dan) have started asking me if I'm okay. All is well, but the zoom on my camera is sticking and things have been busy. I hope to have a proper new post soon, but in the meantime, I will share this wonderful video by Clay Taylor, which I heard about from Birdchick (via Facebook), who called it Best Green Heron Video Ever. Very nicely captured, Clay!