Midsummer Birding

 Like just about everything else, birding has its seasons. In the early spring we have the ducks and the shorebirds. In May quite a few common birds return—swallows, flycatchers, vireos—and the warblers are also migrating through. By midsummer, we've see at least one of just about every bird we're going to see during the year. Yet it's possible that we'll "collect" ten or fifteen additional species here and there—birds that aren't rare, but aren't common either: a shrike, say, or an orchard oriole, or a lark sparrow.

Circumstance has a part to play, too. The bluebird is a common bird, but I haven't seen one this year, except, perhaps, whizzing past me in the parking lot at Como Park Pavilion. On the other hand, bobolinks are said to be in decline, and are not often seen on your usual bird hiking, but this year I've seen at least a hundred of them.

A few mornings ago, when Hilary and I drove down early to Veteran's Park in Richfield, we had two things in mind: to go for a pleasant walk in the unexpectedly cool morning, and to see a black-crowned night heron.

There was a time when we considered this beautiful bird "common." We would often see them hunched, immobile, on the deck of sailboats moored near the bandstand on Lake Harriet. At the time we didn't know they had a rookery nearby, on an island in Lake of the Isles. Once they vacated that spot, they were nowhere to be seen for years. I saw one once, sitting in a tree ten feet above Minnehaha Creek just south of Fiftieth Street, looking down into the water.

I learned from a friend only a year ago that they could still be found consistently at Veterans Park. Once again on an island, or in the nearby trees.

We came. We saw. 

The other morning we returned, and saw them again. Hilary got a good look at the bird, perched in a tree. I saw him only as he was departing. But I learned long ago, back when the birds were common, that the night heron in flight has a bulky body and very stiff wing beats, not at all like the lanky, loose-limbed flight of the great blue heron. There was no mistaking him.

The swampy environs of the park were alive with egrets, green herons, and broods of wood ducks. We saw one green heron dangling deftly from a branch, his neck extended like a pencil, waiting for his breakfast. As we walked the asphalt paths, we heard yellow-throats and warbling vireos, but the big thrill of the morning came when we ventured out along a plastic boardwalk in pursuit of a marsh wren. Its song is unmistakable: the clatter-clatter-clatter of an old-fashioned sewing machine. I've heard it often, but I'd never actually seen the bird.

We walked along the boardwalk, which was marginally stable but narrow and shaky, with bee-covered purple loosestrife to our left and an expanse of mucky-looking water to our right. We had seen the wren remove himself from our presence several times, darting up and then ducking into the cattails twenty or thirty feet ahead, but eventually he stopped, and when he started up his clatter-clatter chatter again we got an extended look at him. I even took a few pictures.

That would have been the thrill of the morning, except that we decided to stop at Wood Lake, a mile or two down the road, to check it out on our way home. Now, Richfield is perhaps best known these days as the home of the world headquarters of Best Buy, but it also deserves a note for having the most traffic circles in the shortest length of roadway anywhere this side of the British Isles.

Wood Lake is basically where we learned to watch birds, back in the 1970s. Over the years it's grown up, and it also seems to have gone downhill. We still go there from time to time, but we don't expect much.

This visit was as lackluster as ever...until I heard a squawk coming from the cattails alongside the boardwalk that crosses the lake. I stood for a moment, seeing nothing in the reeds. Then I noticed that there was a grayish-brown bird preening himself there. No bigger than a robin, it seemed. I whispered to Hilary, who had gone on ahead. Psst!

It was a Virginia rail. We saw the beak, curved, orange on the bottom, and much longer than that of a sora. We saw the gray cheek, the white stripes on the lower flanks. He paid no attention to us. Wow.

Virginia rails are secretive birds. I have only seen three of them over the course of almost half a century, and each time it was at Wood Lake.

Maybe that's what keeps us coming back. 

Buffalo River State Park to Hamden Slough

We spent the drizzly morning following the east bank of the Minnesota River, ducking into Milan to visit the Folk School (closed) and veering across the river on a gravel road that promised a route to the hamlet of Louisburg (pop. 89). The gravel seemed new and soggy, and we weren't keen on stopping just anywhere, but puttering along with the windows open we started to hear meadowlarks—Western meadowlarks—and we pulled over to take a closer look. Meadowlarks tend to perch on shrubs and fence posts, and it wasn't long before we spotted two or three.

It's an unusual landscape, boggy and expansive, but it seemed less hospitable in the drizzle. Once Hilary found Louisburg on the map we decided we didn't really want to go there, and we retraced our route to Highway 7. We crossed the river again—roughly fifteen feet wide at this point—near the headquarters of the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge, and swung back to the east side again along the top of a dam near Odessa. It was no tragedy to discover that the nine-mile tourist drive through the refuge was closed—that often seems to be the case—and before long we were rolling down the long, bedraggled main street of Ortonville.

From this point on, mighty Highway 7 becomes a narrow, two-lane road winding through the verdant countryside above the east shore of Big Stone Lake, midway in elevation between the floodplain below and the cropland above, which is largely hidden from view by the crest of the hill. Maybe it was the drizzle, or the lake—wide and seemingly endless in length, it has the look of a fjord or a loch—but I almost felt like we were back in Ireland.

That feeling vanished quickly once we left the river valley and found ourselves once again traveling on long, flat, and mostly deserted two-lane highways surrounded by fields of corn, wheat, soy beans, and sugar beets.

Beardsley. Wheaton. Breckenridge. Two hours later we were in Moorhead. Our plan was to "get to know" the city better. After all, it's home to three universities. Yet the central core has little of the hipster vitality of downtown Fargo, just across the river. On the contrary, that "core" seems to have been permanently disfigured by several major rail lines and the traffic booming into and out of town on the four lanes of Highway 10. The Moorhead Center Mall was perhaps built to address that issue, but it doesn't inspire much enthusiasm with its zany marque and puzzling slogan: "Another Great Place to Shop." It makes you wonder: Where can we find that other, and presumably greater, place to shop? Somewhere nearby?  

The Hjemkomst Center, located in a shady park tucked into a bend of the Red River, conveniently holds most of Moorhead's tourist attractions, including a full-scale facsimile of a Stave church and a locally built Viking ship that residents of Moorhead and nearby towns sailed all the way to Norway. Both are impressive. But both have been on exhibit for decades.

The building is also home to the Clay County Historical Society and several small gallery spaces. We spent some time viewing a splendid exhibit of watercolors (see above), then walked down the hall to a quilt show organized by Studio Art Quilt Associates the theme of which was emigration and displacement. Interesting. We took a stroll out past the stave church and down to the muddy river. Perhaps if we'd continued our stroll upstream past the canoe rental and under the highway, then turn east toward the public library and the Rourke Art Museum, we would have gotten a better feel for the older part of town, but the sun was coming out and the air was getting steamy.

While researching the trip I'd singled out two local restaurants that might enhance our urban interlude: Rustica offered an appealing tapas-inflected happy hour and  Sol Avenue Kitchen, a recently-opened café in a retrofitted gas station on the north side of town, was notable (according to the website) for its outdoor seating and "globally inspired" street food. We drove by both places, but neither seemed quite right at four in the afternoon. We were itching to get back out into the country.

We'd reserved a campsite at Buffalo River State Park, twelve miles east of town. Like most of the picturesque countryside hereabouts, it consists of a modest river winding through a sliver of hardwood forest with open fields on either side, all of it dropping almost imperceptibly to the west toward the distant Red River. The patch of land on which the park is located, roughly a thousand acres, is notable because most of it has been planted with prairie forbs and grasses. The adjacent Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area, on the south side of the river, has never been farmed and is considered one of the most pristine and ecologically valuable prairies in the state.

The next morning we crossed the river on a footbridge a few hundred feet from our campsite and spent three hours following various trails around and across the fields. Though we watched a flock of bobolinks courting amid the grasses for quite some time, and spotted a second juvenile orchard oriole, most of our attention was directed toward the wildflowers, which can be appreciated equally well as vast and variegated fields of plant life, mostly green and pale silver, or as individual specimens.

I don't know much about wildflowers, but can sometimes recognize the families. Yellow clover, purple vetch, this one looks like wild gallardia—I'm sure there's a name for it—and there's a wild sage (Artemisia?). Butterfly weed offers a rare burst of intense color, but is outdone by the orange field lilies, growing in isolation well off the path. Milkweed blooms are in their fleshy pink state, forming globes three inches in diameter that look like they belong in a tide pool in California. The coneflowers are ragged. So is the culver root, whose elegant and elongated white blooms are appealing just the same. 

 We stopped on several occasions to admire a spindly, silver-gray plant sparsely distributed with small, well-proportioned lanceolate leaves. Still don't know what it is, but the winding patterns of the stems, viewed from above, looked like a kitchy wrought-iron wall decoration, only far more exquisite and natural.

We saw no one in the fields, but on our return to camp through the river valley woods we met up with an elderly couple out for a walk. She had grown up in Red Lake Falls, we learned, he was from Fargo. They were both wearing floppy straw hats. 

When I asked, they had trouble explaining why Moorhead remained so lackluster. "They're building some new apartments on the north side of town," the man said, trying to show some enthusiasm. I could tell he didn't like them. Then he said: "How old are you? We're seventy-nine."

We broke camp and headed north on highway 9, cutting east on County 108 to explore a chunk of Felton Prairie. A sign alongside the gravel road leading in said "no outlet" but that didn't matter to us. The traffic that passed us consisted of semis loaded with gravel from the pits on the ridge.  

We stopped at an overgrown parking lot a few miles in, surrounded by huge boulders to keep the ATVs at bay. We saw nothing but brush and sky vanishing into the distance, read a few sun-bleached signs about rare prairie birds we'd never see--where are all the chestnut-collared longspurs?--and the importance of conserving gravel for later generations. And we watched empty semis bounding up the gravel road we'd come in on to get another load of rocks at the gravel pit that remained out of sight beyond the crest of the ridge to the south. We decided to go north along a dwindling, sandy, two-rut road past abandoned pits, disused swimming holes, copses of towering cottonwoods, and barbed-wire fences. 

It all seemed sort of abandoned, sort of beautiful. A good place for a kid to build a fort.  At another time of year, or another time of day, it might have been great. At midday in July, ninety degrees, without a hiking path in sight, it was still worth a visit, and more interesting by far than a corn field, but still, merely "interesting."

Our final stop of the day, Hamden Slough, was more rewarding. Open water surrounded by grassy slopes. Black terns, yellow-headed blackbirds, and distant ruddy ducks with bright blue bills and upturned tails, drifting in the open water.

The town of Audubon, a mile south of the slough, has a meager claim to fame. A year before it was incorporated in 1872, the famous naturalist's niece accompanied a party of railroad officials on an inspection tour. (Why? I have no idea.) She was so impressed with the beauty of the region that she requested, if a settlement were ever to be established there, that they name it after her uncle. And they did.

I read this charming tale on a kiosk near the slough, and could well believe that this rolling, grassy countryside at the tag end of the Alexandria Moraine might have inspired the admiration of a nature-lover passing by on a train. Back in 1871 there were far fewer farms and far more prairie potholes blanketing the countryside. But it got me wondering who Audubon's "niece" actually was. Audubon was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and his Breton chambermaid. I can find no record that he had any siblings other than a half-sister, Rose, also born in Haiti, also illegitimate, who has vanished from the historical record. Hmmm.

The Heart of the Country

For many urban Minnesotans, to vacation amid the pines and lakes of the north country is a frequent delight, but also a recreational commonplace. The thought of heading west out onto the prairie tends to hold less allure. When, at a recent family gathering,  I mentioned to Hilary's cousin's wife, who was visiting from Boston, that we were planning a trip to Thief River Falls, and added that "nobody goes there," she replied drolly, "Well, the name doesn't have much appeal."

In fact, we had plotted out an interesting route across the countryside and had researched a few cultural stops along the way to add variety to the hiking, birding, and camping that would occupy most of our time and attention. Most of western Minnesota has long since been converted to farmland, but even that can provide amusement and enlightenment. Is that wheat or flax? Are those sweet peas or soy beans? Is that an ethanol plant or a sugar beet factory?

And then you have that big, big sky and those enormous concrete-and-steel grain elevators for storing all the crops.

Every town you drive through offers food for thought. Is the architecture good? Probably not. Is the town "healthy?" Probably not. Does it have plenty of Lutheran churches? Very likely. But the Catholic one is probably more imposing.

The astronomical mural on the water tower in Cosmos is a hit, but the town itself has seen better days. Hutchinson has a fine town square, but it also has a 3M plant and a major medical center to feed the local economy; it's practically a suburb of the Twin Cities. Montevideo has a statue on Main Street of José Artigas, the national hero of Uruguay, where a much larger Montevideo is located.  (The two are sister cities, and the statue came from Uruguay in 1949.)

We want these communities to thrive, because they sustain our atavistic dreams of good-natured small-town life exemplified by Thornton Wilder's classic Our Town, The Andy Griffith Show, seven seasons of Northern Exposure, and even, in a strange way, Schitt's Creek. But arriving on the outskirts of Montevideo, for example, the first thing we come upon is the Walmart, its parking lot packed. And who are we to begrudge the locals a few dollars off on their potato chips and Kleenex?

Madison, MN

Madison may have a leg up on other towns nearby, not only because it's Lac Qui Parle's county seat, but also due to the fact that eminent poet Robert Bly grew up there and maintained a farm nearby for quite a few years. Most local farmers probably care little for his "leaping poetry," his anti-war protests, or his contributions to the Men's Movement, but at some time in the 1990s an abandoned schoolhouse on Bly's farm that he had converted to a study was moved into town and relocated within the confines of the county historical society's pioneer village.

We were lucky to get in. With July 4 landing on a Sunday, there was no way to tell whether a given business would open the next day, or would take that Monday as a holiday. We walked inside the main building—a huge pole barn full of bric-a-brac—and a voice from the next room said, "Can I help you?"

"We're here to see the museum," I said, stating the obvious, as we came around the corner into her office, "especially the Bly study."

"I haven't opened those buildings yet," she said, a little wearily. "I just got here."

"Well, we're glad you're open," I said.

"Yes, well, the boss called me last night and said, 'Are you opening tomorrow?' And I said, 'I don't know. Am I?'" By this time she was fumbling with her keys. Elderly, short, and stout, it seemed the afternoon heat was getting to her a little. 

"Do you want to see just the Bly schoolhouse or all the buildings?"

"Might as well open them all, if it isn't too much trouble."

"Just give me a few minutes."

"Sure. There's plenty to look at in here."

We wandered down one of the aisles, stopping here and there at a display of fifty-odd salt shakers; a room full of stuffed pheasants, mounted moose heads, and other hunting trophies; and (briefly) a local aficionado's personal collection of hand guns that had been fastened one after another in an orderly array to a  yellow wall. One section was devoted to musical instruments including several accordions, a hardanger fiddle, and a mold that a fiddle-maker evidently used to bend the delicate wood. A separate cubicle was devoted to each of the county's townships, and a sophisticated three-part banner offered a timeline of the county's history, running from the founding of the Lac Qui Parle mission in 1830—the first in the state—up to and including the first registered Covid infection and the first Covid death in the county.

We had passed the township of Cerro Gordo on our way into town, and I was curious to learn where it had gotten its name. Most of the families swimming and fishing at the dam were Latino, but 150 years ago that wouldn't have been the case. Turns out the man who platted the town had fought in the battle of that name during the Mexican-American War.

Twenty minutes might have passed before we left the building at the opposite end of the hall and walked out past the log cabin to the schoolhouse. It was blue, with white trim, and it was much larger than I expected. The main room could easily have housed eight or ten office workers comfortably. Some snapshots had been taped to one of the desks; broadsides of Robert's poems had been placed on other tables and desks. Visitors were invited to don the headphones hanging from the side of the desk, push the red plastic button, and listen to one of Bly's friends read the poem. But Bly himself is such a great reader that to anyone who has heard the man himself, these recitations would tend to deflate a given poem's effect, and I guess it was just as well that many of the headphones didn't work.

Most of the wall-space was lined with books, and I spent a few minutes looking them over. Some had been heavily used, others were pristine, as is typical in a personal library. Marx and Jung, Hamsun and the Kalavala, Arthur Waley and Octavio Paz. The range of subjects and the vintage of the editions reminded me of a well-stocked used bookstore of thirty years ago.

Hilary reminded me that Robert wasn't the only person to use the space. In the text of one small display we are informed that he and his wife, Carol, raised four children on the premises, and Bly hung a curtain across the room, dividing it in half, so he could have some privacy to think.

It's likely that Carol also spent a good deal of time in the building, though I don't know that for a fact. I had brought an old paperback edition of Bly's selected poems (ca 1986) along on the trip, but it occurred to me suddenly that Carol's book, Letters from the Country (1981), might have been a better pick.

In the end, the schoolhouse, well-lit by sash windows all the way around, had the feel less of a hermetic retreat or private study than a comfortable literary parlor—well worth a visit, though It would also be interesting, I think, to see Bly's farm itself, and the little chicken coop that served as his first makeshift rural study. (You can read more about the schoolhouse here.)

When we got back to the museum office, I asked the woman where the Bly farm was located. "Somewhere southwest of here, near Marietta. I don't know exactly," she said.

"Oh, out by Salt Lake," I said. "That's our next stop."

She became more animated when we started lavishing praise on the salt shakers, the doll collection, and the well-preserved antique carriages we'd come upon in another pole barn out back. "It's only a small part of the collection.," she said proudly.

In the end, we didn't drive the fifteen extra miles out to Salt Lake, though in recent days birders had been reporting eared grebes out there. We'd been on the road for four hours, the temperature had risen to 92 degrees, and it was time to "check in" at the park.

I was also somewhat anxious because I'd neglected to get the entry code to our camper cabin before we left home. When we pulled into our slot at the park a half-hour later, a vehicle with Texas plates was already parked there. We heard animated conversation as we approached the little cabin. It was the cleaners!

"We're just finishing up," the woman said, half-apologetically. "I'll leave the key here on the table." Crisis averted. (In fact, there never would have been a crisis: camper cabins don't use codes or key boxes.)

"I see you're from Texas," I said. "Come north to escape the heat?"

I was joking, but she replied, "That's right. "It's 115 degrees in San Antonio today."

____________

 If you're planning to rent a cabin at Lac Qui Parle, number two is far and away the best of the three. Number one is right next to the entry road to the campground, and number three, though somewhat better, is tucked back into the woods. Number two sits out on the top of the hill with an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside with Lac Qui Parle itself glistening in the distance.

Once we'd hauled all of our stuff into the little cabin, set up our camp chairs, and enjoyed the view for a while from the shade of the only large tree in the vicinity, I took a little stroll down the hill to the unoccupied walk-in campsite in the field just below. We've camped here more than once over the years, and on our most recent visit we saw several orchard orioles out in the field. I went down on what many would call a fool's errand to see if I could see another one.

The orchard oriole is considered an uncommon bird, by which ornithologists mean to suggest that it has a healthy but small population, and you don't see it often. The Baltimore oriole, on the other hand, is a common bird, and you're likely to see quite a few of them if you spend any time in city parks or out in the field. The Baltimore oriole is easier to see, not only because it's more common, but also  because it sings beautifully and it's lower body is a spectacular bright orange. The orchard oriole is somewhat smaller, and its lower body in a rich but dark rufus color—much darker than, say, a robin's breast.

In my book, to see an orchard oriole once a year is a thrill, and also a triumph.

Well. As I was looking around across the fields I spotted a strange bird in the middle distance. It was a smallish, silvery-yellow bird with a lark black bib under its beak. I'd never seen anything like it, but it occurred to me immediately that it might be a female orchard oriole. I took a few photos with the mediocre zoom on my Canon Powershot extended, and hurried back up the hill to get the bird book, and Hilary.

Adult male orchard oriole

A glance at the book confirmed that the bird was an orchard oriole—but a juvenile male rather than an adult female. Would it still be there when we got back? No. But then Hilary spotted a male orchard oriole on a branch nearby. A female adult showed up not long afterward, and so did the juvenile male.

 And then a Baltimore oriole flew out of the woods in the distance, as if he wanted a little attention, too.

Our dinner that night consisted of leftovers from two celebratory gatherings we'd hosted recently. The air conditioner was a welcome addition to the cabin amenities, though the only two fan setting were "off" and "automatic" and I felt I was sleeping next to an airport runway. At the sound of distant thunder we stepped out onto the wooden porch in the dark and were half-dazzled by a field of fireflies. A twisty wind came up around two in the morning, with rain soon after.  The morning arrived with gray skies, cool air, and drizzle, all of them welcome.