As my Big Birthday approached, my sons proposed an appealing activity: Let’s do a “Big Day” in Chisago County to celebrate! Andy had recently read Kenn Kaufman’s classic memoir, Kingbird Highway: the Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder, in which Kaufman drops out of school at age sixteen to criss-cross America for one year to see as many birds as possible in that time period. We would spend a Saturday in May counting the birds we encountered in one day in our home county, where the boys grew up. Andy had been enamored with raptors as a child, but had only recently come back to birding. John has been acquiring finesse in adulthood and participates in Wild River Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count every year.
I had done a Big Day in Chisago County some years before. Going out with a friend from the Minnesota Ornithologists Union in June, we had tallied 103 birds. I thought 90 birds might be possible for the Leafs. With that in mind, Tom and I met our sons at the Stacy dam on the Sunrise River in Carlos Avery State Wildlife Management Area on May 20th, at 7:30 a.m. When we arrived, the two were racking up a list. John was plugged into ebird to record our sightings. Andy had the bird identification app “Merlin” out.
We chose the Stacy dam as a jumping off point because it had a nice mix of habitats: water, grassland, woods. We could knock off both grassland and woodland species in one stop. When we opened the car doors, I heard a Baltimore Oriole and a Song Sparrow. The star of the moment, however, was a Grasshopper Sparrow, which sang from a nearby perch. Grasshopper Sparrows have a high-pitched, buzzy insect-like song preceded by a couple of “clicks.” “Can’t you hear it, Mom?”
I located the singer with my binoculars, but the unpleasant truth was, I heard only the “clicks.” The little bird threw back its head and opened its beak and I could hear…nothing. Neither could Tom. It was the first time I realized that I was losing my high-register hearing.
The fringe of woods yielded lots of warblers: redstarts, yellow warblers—nothing fancy. John came upon a sandpiper which flew, unidentified (we would not see another one); and he also spied a single Red-headed Woodpecker on a dead snag 50 feet from the dam. This was a productive first stop: 46 species.
Tom remembered seeing Black Terns (once the most common tern in Minnesota, now rarely seen) at the Stacy overlook on County 19 between Sunrise River Pool 1 and Mud Lake, so we headed there next. As cars whizzed by on the road, we saw the terns, and also picked up Trumpeter Swans and some ducks. Then it was on to Ivywood Trail, three miles east. This stretch of road was part of John’s beat on the bird count and it is always productive.
Ivywood came through for us this day, too. We discovered a flock of Cedar Waxwings in brushy red cedars, I heard a Blue-winged Warbler off in the woods, and John, striding ahead of us, wiggled a finger off to the east—“There. That. What is that?” Andy activated Merlin. “Wilson’s Snipe,” he said.
After this stop, we assessed. We did not have some very common species on our list, but we knew where to find them –in Wild River SP, so off we went, planning to eat lunch in the park. We started at the boat landing, parking lot where the WRA bird walk had commenced four hours before. We ate our tuna sandwiches watching the nesting phoebe down by the canoes; and saw Eastern Bluebirds, Tree Swallows and Orchard Orioles (Merlin helped us with that one.) There were Sedge Wrens in the marsh; a Wood Thrush singing off the Amik’s Pond trail, and then John heard a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher high overhead. Gnatcatchers are often first detected by their high-pitched, wheezy song—another species I totally missed unless it was directly overhead. Darn! No doubt about it. I was losing the sense I most depended on for birding.
By two o’clock, our foursome was focused on individual species. We drove to the Sunrise cemetery, which is shaded by mature white pines. Picked up a Pine Warbler—our reason for the stop—and also a Red-breasted Nuthatch, Eastern Wood-Peewee, and Pileated Woodpecker. The mosquitoes were horrendous. We didn’t linger, although the furry pines cast a beguiling shade.
One last stop: Tom wanted to visit the small, unnamed pond off 285th Street in southern Chisago County that usually has interesting ducks in the Spring. Sure enough, there was a female Common Merganser, paddling about with a pair of Blue-winged Teal.
Then we were done. Our list lacked some very common birds: no Rock Pigeons (!), no Downy or Hairy Woodpeckers, no Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, no Killdeer. Had we snagged those, our list might well have approached 100 species. But 90 it was. John and Andy told us they’d had a good time. Tom and I were thrilled that we had passed our legacy on.
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