Tag Archives: birding

Great gray owl ‘irruption’ appears to be winding down

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The reports I’ve gotten from birding enthusiasts in the past few days indicate the influx of great gray owls that converged on parts of northwest Minnesota appears to be winding down as the birds move back north.

That being said, the “invasion” of owls moving down from Canada was big news in the bird world, and it provided some great viewing opportunities for both expert and novice birders alike.

In birding terms, the invasion was an “irruption,” a phenomenon that occurs when numbers of a particular species move into an area. In the case of the great gray owls, the birds converged on northwest Minnesota after supplies of the mice, moles and other small rodents they depend on for food ran short in Canada. And according to reports from wildlife managers, northwest Minnesota had a particularly abundant supply of small mammals for the owls to feast on this winter.

Some friends and I spent a few days on Oak Island of the Northwest Angle in late February and saw numbers of owls near Sprague, Man., just across the border. The owls seemed to be favoring areas that provided trees for perching, but with enough open habitat to offer a clear view of small critters scurrying on or under the snow. Once we got closer to the Northwest Angle, where the terrain is more heavily forested, the number of owls we saw declined.

Beth Siverhus of Warroad, Minn., photographed this great gray owl perched atop a flagpole north of Warroad earlier this week. She titled the photo “U.S. of O(wl).”

Beth Siverhus, an avid birdwatcher and amateur photographer from Warroad, Minn., has spent a lot of time watching and photographing owls during the past few weeks and says the number of birds she’s seeing has declined as the owls move back north. Siverhus, who also is a certified wildlife rehabilitator, said she knows of four owls killed by vehicle collisions, one that was shot and another that died of unknown causes. In every case, she said, the owls were in good physical condition, which suggests they were finding ample food supplies during their time in northwest Minnesota.

Siverhus got some excellent owl photos during the recent irruption, including this shot of an owl perched atop a flag along Roseau County Road 137 north of Warroad. She titled the photo “U.S. of O(wl).”

 

Wild hawk chase

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I’ve done enough stories on wildlife research projects over the years to know that capturing the animals needed for studies can be a real challenge.

One of the most notable occurred on a March day in the late 1990s, when a Herald photographer and I spent the majority of a long, cold day waiting for a crew of helicopter wranglers to capture a moose for a research project at Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge in northwest Minnesota.

They finally got their moose that blustery day, and the capture produced some excellent photos, but it was after 6 p.m. before frustration gave way to success. We’d been in “hurry up and wait” mode nearly 10 hours.

Tim Driscoll of Grand Forks carries a baby peregrine falcon back to a crate at the UND water tower in June. Driscoll is the project director of the Urban Raptor Research Project. (Herald file photo)

I was reminded of the challenge last week when I accompanied Tim Driscoll of Grand Forks on a mission to capture red-tailed hawks for a banding project he is conducting to learn more about the raptors. Director of the Urban Raptor Project in Grand Forks, Driscoll is widely known as “The Bird Guy,” and his efforts to trap and study raptors such as cooper’s hawks, peregrine falcons and redtails frequently take him across the region.

Once, for example, he successfully captured and released a sharp-shinned hawk that had gotten inside a Home Depot store in Fergus Falls, Minn. It had been flying around the store while people shopped for more than a day, but Driscoll said it took him only a few minutes to capture the bird and release it to the wild.

I’m writing a story about Driscoll, his research and his passion for raptors, and so getting a photo of him capturing and banding a redtail is a crucial part of the article.

So far this fall, Driscoll has captured and banded more than 15 redtails, but as we discovered last Wednesday afternoon, the birds can be camera-shy. A big change in the weather was brewing, and that could have driven the hawks into cover. We spent more than two hours and logged some 50 miles scouring the countryside west of Grand Forks for one of the large birds roosting on a power pole or a tree.

Sounds simple enough, right?

We spotted only three hawks, and all of them spooked before Driscoll could set a trap — a rectangular cage with monofilament nooses tied across the top and baited with two live mice.

When he spots a hawk, Driscoll drops the cage along the edge of the road. When the hawk flies in for a closer look, one of the nooses — in theory, at least — catches the bird by the foot, and Driscoll then is able to calm and subdue the raptor for banding.

That definitely isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Providing the rain subsides, Driscoll and I will be trying again this afternoon. Hopefully, we’ll be more successful this time around.

Roseau River Wildlife Management Area produces birding discoveries

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I took a drive down the “dike road” at Roseau River Wildlife Management Area in northwest Minnesota on Sunday morning to wet a line and see what I could see.

Once again, I was reminded why it’s always a good idea to carry a camera in the vehicle.

I was driving along the western end of Pool 1 when I came across several swans. Stopping for a closer look, I photographed a couple of the white birds, balancing the camera on the roof of my truck to minimize the chance of blurry images.

The birds were a few hundred yards out on the water, and I had to zoom in a long ways.

A family of trumpeter swans photographed Sunday morning at Roseau River Wildlife Management area. (Brad Dokken photo)

I had snapped several photos when I noticed a pair of swans farther east. Between them swam five fuzzy, gray-colored offspring, known as “cygnets.”

I drove a few hundred yards farther down the road for a clearer photo and managed to get several more shots of the swan family as the birds swam across a patch of open water.

I’m not a hard-core birder by any means, but the encounter was pretty cool, I thought, as I drove east down the dike road, which the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources opens to motor vehicles for a couple of weeks every summer.

The southern half of Minnesota is considered the range for great egrets but these birds were photographed Sunday morning at Roseau River Wildlife Management Area just a couple of miles south of the Canadian border. (Brad Dokken photo)

I’d driven another mile or so when I noticed three more white birds on the waterfront. They were much ganglier than the swans and more skittish, but they landed in a shallow area that offered me an unobstructed opportunity for more photos.

Sunday night, I emailed the photos to Heidi Hughes, manager of the Audubon Sanctuary of the Red River Valley near Warren, Minn. She confirmed the swans were trumpeter swans — “tundras don’t nest this far south,” she said. Hughes also said the Minnesota Ornithologists Union hadn’t received any reports of nesting trumpeter swans this year in Roseau County.

Well, they have now.

Trumpeter swan range in Minnesota.

Great egret range in Minnesota.

A Google search led me to conclude the next birds I photographed were great egrets. Their yellow bills were a dead giveaway. Hughes said the great egrets aren’t reported as a Roseau County nesting bird, either. A range map Hughes supplied shows the egrets are limited to the southern half of Minnesota.

Apparently, someone forgot to tell the trio I spotted Sunday.

Roseau River WMA is located north of Badger, Minn., on Roseau County Road 3 and the dike road will be open to vehicle traffic weekends through Aug. 19.

For more information on Roseau River WMA, click here: