Category Archives: Year 12

The Eternal Golden Hour … Ross’s Goose

Year 12

When you live up north the amount of daylight gets shorter and shorter during the winter months. Remember, meteorological winter starts December 1st which will soon be here. One big advantage of winter over summer is the sun now stays much lower in the southern sky. I call November, December and January the eternal “golden hour”. During these months the light available for photography is special … essentially the golden hour all day long. The days are short, but the light is nice.

Sunday I experienced a perfect example of this effect. A Ross’s Goose has been hanging out at Forest Hill Cemetery. This rare bird for our migration region has mainly white plumage, which easily gets blown out by the sun while one takes images. For these first two photographs, the sun temporarily came out and the bird was in direct sunlight, but is while plumage did not get blown out. One final note … while the Ross’s Goose is about 1/3 smaller than its Canada Geese cousins, it seemed to be much more aggressive … chasing the Canada folks all over the place!

Eternal Golden Hour Direct Sunlight … middle of the day … Ross’s Goose

More images under cloudy conditions

Birding Knowhow!

Year 12

Occasionally I feel it is necessary to post this content such that new subscribers to my blog … now in the thousands better understand the resources which may be found via 365 Days Of Birds (this website). Remember, this site is non commercial. You will never find a single pop-up advertisement, sponsored link or any other paid content. I am a failure as a “paid influencer”. LOL!

I just want folks to better understand and enjoy our feathered friends … whether it is a free PDF download of one of my owl children’s books to how one may build a BirdNET-Pi bird song listening device. The rest of this post is copied from my “Birding KnowHow” page (always found and linked via my menu system) and was current as of today’s date, November 3, 2025.

Birding Knowledge, Reviews, Evaluations and Services

Index of my Birding Reviews of Services / Products (alpha by subject)

Birding Migration Gems of the North Shore of Lake Superior

Year 12,

The last few days have been fun. Around the first of November, winds out of the North and Northwest bring unexpected pleasures to the North Shore region of Lake Superior. In short, migrating birds get pushed by strong winds against the big lake, and are feathered friends exclaim: “No way I’m heading out over that HUGE body of water!”. Instead birds meander in a southwesterly direction along the shore down towards Duluth. During this time of year, I still head inland to Sax-Zim Bog and Greenwood, but the largest number of my sightings are always within a few miles of Lake Superior.

Sunday started with the sighting I enjoyed the most … a Dark Morph Rough-Legged Hawk just after sunrise. Better yet, this species normally spooks and flushes very easily. Perhaps because I would soon be heading to church that morning, the hawk let me watch it hunt … often from distances as close as 50 yards away. However, I suspect the real reason it never flushed is the hawk was very, very hungry, and the need to feed drives all actions.

Dark Morph Rough-Legged Hawk

The next surprise was finding a Cattle Egret on a farm near the intersection of Ryan and Lismore Roads. This bird is still hanging out in this area, and my thanks to Peder Svingen for his initial sighting reports. Take a look at the range map for this bird (copyright to Cornell). The winds of migration must have blown this bird almost due west!

Western Cattle Egret

My finally sighting was a dark morph Snow Goose at the Lakeview Cemetery in Two Harbors. I had been checking the gold course, and cemetery for over one week hoping to find some snow geese. While thousands and thousands of these birds migrate south along the Red River on Minnesota’s border with the Dakotas, they are rare in NE Minnesota.

Dark Morph Snow Goose

I hope you are also enjoying the late season bird migration. The leading edge of the Arctic birds are just starting to arrive.