Share Saz-Zim Bog with a friend! Better yet, bring along two Lutheran pastors and hope some divine intervention will help your birding results! 🙂

Pastor Greg, Pastor John and I spent a delightful, productive day at the bog. We made the decision not to try for a great gray owl which would have required us to reach the bog by 6:45 am. Given the temperature was -17F, we waited for it to warm up a touch and did not reach the bog till about 8:20 a.m. when the sunny skies had warmed the area to -11F!

From the start we had a good time by seeing a small flock of sharp-tailed grouse. the grouse are located about 1.5 miles south of the Welcome Center. I have found these grouse may easily be found within 1.5 hours of sunrise, but later in the day it gets dicey. Checking out a number of other known hot spots we were able to get good looks at:

• Black Billed Magpies
• Boreal Chickadees
• Evening Grosbeaks
  and
• Grey Jays

In addition we saw all of the usual suspects! In short, a good day birding with friends.

• View this project’s Flickr photo stream. (click upon images to view at full size)

Sharp-Tailed Grouse

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Evening Grosbeak

Many folks might think I might be referring to the neat article featuring my year long photography project published on Friday as the cover article for Weekend Outdoors in the newspaper of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis / St. Paul), but you would be mistaken. Instead I learned an important lesson at sunrise yesterday, do not trust the collective intelligence of ice fishermen! Ever heard of Lemmings?!

24 hours earlier I had noticed ice fishermen heading out onto the Lake Superior ice in search of trout and salmon. I figured, if all these folks are out on the Lake Superior ice, it must be safe, correct? Not!

Although I was only 15 yards off shore at Brighton Beach, while fisherman were 600 yards out, guess who broke through and got wet? I suspect it was an ice pocket where water had seeped through a crack, but scary and not the kind of morning for a partial dunking. I immediately lay 100% prone to spread my weight and rolled onto some good ice. My clothes froze solid during the short 300 yard walk back to my car.

Later in the afternoon as I was returning from my volunteering gig at the Sax-Zim Bog Visitor Center, I noticed a huge expanse of open water out on the lake where it had been solid ice at sunrise. Finally, because this is mainly a “bird photography” blog, here is a sharp-tailed grouse I photographed during my morning drive to the visitor center.

• View this project’s Flickr photo stream. (click upon images to view at full size)

Addendum: The STRIB really did a nice job with their treatment of my 365 photo project. Read now via: Star Tribune Online| PDF Version

The Ice Planet Fishermen (photo taken moments before I broke through the ice)

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Sharp-Tailed Grouse