Tag Archives: MN North: French River

Friends Don’t Let Birds Fly Drunk!

It is the season for drunk birds. We’ve had cold weather including snow and significantly sub freezing temperatures. The end result is the Mountain Ash berries when birds eat them tend to ferment in their gullets. As a young boy I would watch drunk Evening Grosbeaks in our yard. Today I found drunk Robins. Hundreds, if not thousands of Robins were migrating down the North Shore of Lake Superior. At the mouth of the French River there was an extremely popular Mountain Ash tree. Here are a few images:

Underneath the tree I found this Swainson’s Thrush. As first I thought it was picking up sloppy seconds (berries knocked off the tree by all the Robins). However the thrush proved me wrong by finding a nice juicy grub.

My morning actually started up at Sax-Zim Bog. While the Tamarack Pine needles were golden, the birds were not in evidence except these few wild turkeys.

McDavitt Crossing

Wild Turkeys

The rest of the “fall color” photographs are from my own yard and were taken yesterday afternoon. It was a gloomy day, but I finally got some bright clouds.

Blue Jay … White Throated Sparrow … White Crowned Sparrow … Dark Eyed Junco … Fox Sparrow

Ice-Rise over Lake Superior!

Per my norm I was out before sunrise this morning. While I did find owls, the beauty of the sunrise over the newly formed Lake Superior ice was awe inspiring. Perhaps the Ice Caves near the Apostle Islands will open after all this year. We can only hope. Here are a few pics from my 2015 visit to the Ice Caves.

Sunrise at French River on the North Shore of Lake Superior

20 Minutes earlier at Brighton Beach

Birds of the High Arctic .. in Minnesota

Folks like to see “northern” birds, and for that opportunity they could charter a bush pilot and fly into a remote lake near the Arctic Ocean, or they could visit Duluth in the late fall and winter. In a little over a month the visitor center at Sax-Zim Bog will open for the winter. I look forward to another winter of helping out at the center as a volunteer naturalist.

In the meantime one may enjoy the late fall migration along the north shore of Lake Superior. In the past few days I have enjoyed watching:

  • Hundreds & hundreds of Slate Colored Juncos
  • Large numbers of
    • Horned Larks
    • Lapland Longspurs
    • Snow Buntings
    • American Tree Sparrows
  • One Ross’s Goose (Park Point Recreation Fields)
  • Many, many Merlins chasing songbirds for breakfast
  • One Short Eared Owl (dune grasslands while hiking out to the Superior Entry)
  • At my own feeder:
    • Woodpeckers … Downy, Hairy, Red-Bellied, and Pilleated
    • Finches … Purple and Gold
    • Chickadees and Nuthatches (red and white breasted)
    • Mourning Doves
    • Juncos
    • White-Crowned Sparrows
    • Fox Sparrows
    • Cardinals
    • A Gray Fox (15 minutes under the feeders eating 50 minutes before sunrise)

Here are a few images from the past two days … a video of the snow buntings is included.

Ross’s Goose

Merlin (imitating a turkey … don’t think the songbirds were fooled!)

Lapland Longspur (just a few minutes after sunrise)

Snow Buntings

Slate-Colored Juncos