All posts by richardhoeg@gmail.com

Great Gray Owl Northeastern Minnesota Update

Year 10

I had a great morning up in Sax-Zim Bog watching Great Gray Owls … many of them! In fact over the past two weeks I have seen quite a few Great Gray Owls throughout Northeastern Minnesota (not just Sax-Zim Bog). Yesterday over one hundred miles from the Bog I saw owls both in the morning and the early afternoon … with a break in between for church. About nine days earlier I saw some Great Grays in a totally different part of NE Minnesota. My point is our local owls seemed to have had a decent time this year raising owlets. I suspect a lot of the birds I am seeing right now are juveniles who are lousy hunters, and thus have to spend more time in search of prey.

Part of the reason for my success over the past two days in seeing owls is the weather had been ugly for many, many days which prevented Great Grays from successfully hunting. Normally I would never have looked for owls this morning. It was windy and very sunny which are NOT conditions which encourage owls to hunt, but if you are hungry …

Here is a picture of a Gray Jay / Canada Jay taken two days ago. Note how the bird is drenched. As noted the weather has been horrible.

As noted the sun finally returned this morning. Can you image having this experience??! I talked with the young couple and their car had an “open moon roof”. Perhaps the wife looked like a meadow vole!

Here are some more images from this morning. A good time was had by all (specially me, or at least me and the couple in the car).

Pine Island State Forest Birding

Year 10

This post is a bit different as it shows some of my favorite “hang outs” in northern Minnesota, including the Toomey Williams Forest Road. However, the DNR has now locked the gate at the beginning of the road in the middle of the Pine Island State Forest wilderness. Our recent spell of temperatures above freezing had softened up the ground making the road very rutted. When the weather returns to “the norm” and the ground refreezes the gate will be reopened.

I spent two glorious days (Wednesday and Thursday) this past week in this remote area. I arrived on Toomey Williams long before sunrise. After all, owling requires one to get up long before sunrise. This was my view as I started owling

30 minutes later when the sun was finally making its presence know I took these pictures with my cell phone. My Subaru Outback is my trusty backwoods steed. It now has 216,000 miles on the car, and is going strong. These images also show why I love Toomey Williams … remote, with Boreal forest bog. I saw zero other cars or people during my morning.

More and more cell towers have changed the back country. Occasionally a person will actually have mobile phone coverage. Most of the time I had no signal, but after 35 miles of driving on various forest roads (all dirt … successively more remote), I arrived at Phone Box Corner. In my younger days this box would have had a satellite phone. No more!

Phone Box Corner

And yes, I did see some birds! (Pine Grosbeak, Bald Eagles, Rough-Legged Hawks, Spruce Grouse)