Ciblek Mania

If you've never been to North Dakota on a birding trip this post will give you a taste of just some of the birds we see. Things like Virginia rail (above) and sharp-tailed grouse (below).




Male yellow-headed blackbirds sing their retching songs from every slough.


And drake blue-winged teal forage and float on flooded fields.


Marsh wrens send their chatter-scolds across the cattails, the sound often swept away by the swift prairie wind.


A shelter belt near an old farmstead might be the home of a pair of nesting Say's phoebes.


And American bitterns are fairly easy to see among the potholes in the coteau.



Some days are gray, chilly, and wet—but that never stops us. In fact the challenging weather makes it all the more sweet when you stop for lunch at one of the small ton cafes, like the great one in Woodworth.

Where they make amazing pies for their hungry customers.

Rhubarb pie is my favorite. I can already taste it!

For more information about birding in North Dakota and the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival, visit birdingdrives.com

In a bit more than a week the family and I will be back in North Dakota at the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival based in Carrington, ND. Every day out there we'll see the sky sliced by chevrons of American white pelicans.

You can find the festival HQ in Carrington by looking for the giant statue of a Native American outside The Chieftain Motor Lodge. He's waiting to give you a high five.

At the P&PBF we birders also throw our hands in the air (like we just don't care) when we celebrate seeing a life bird, like a Baird's sparrow or a Sprague's pipit.


Phoebe and Liam love coming with us on our prairie rambles. Nothing but grass and big sky. And smiles and hugs.


And a bit of music played at Ann & Ernie's place, near Pipestem Creek.

If you look carefully you can find some prairie smoke in bloom.

You can wander through and old homestead and image the lives that were lived there.

And you can watch the sun go down over the western horizon, seemingly just over yonder and a thousand miles away all at once.

The coteau region of North Dakota has called us to it for a decade now. It's a wide open place, where your mind sneaks out of your head and stretches itself in the prairie sunshine. The worries of the world seem so far away, and why not? It's the middle of nowhere, but farther along.

Hope to see you there.

After taking some time off between book projects I'll be back on the road this spring and summer hitting several new birding/nature events as well as some old favorites. I'm really ready to do some field birding. I really, truly enjoy guiding people and showing them birds.

Here's a list of where I'll be and what birds one might see at each event. I hope to see you out there with the birds!

Santee Birding & Nature Festival
Santee, South Carolina.
April 26-29, 2012

This will be my first time at this event deep in the heart of the range of the painted bunting (and Bachman's sparrow, red-cockaded woodpecker, Wilson's plover). Much of this event is held on and around the Santee National Wildlife Refuge. I'm leading a bird walk, giving the Friday keynote, and playing some music during the social hour on Saturday.


New River Birding & Nature Festival
Fayetteville, West Virginia
April 30-May 5, 2012
This down-home bird fest is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, in the mountains along the New River in south-central West Virginia. It is famous for warblers, including golden-winged, cerulean, and Swainson's warbler, but the spectacular vistas, amazing wildflowers, and Mountaineer hospitality also contribute to bringing back many repeat attendees each year. I'm leading a different field trip each day and The Rain Crows are playing a show on the final night in The Meadows lodge at the charming Opossum Creek Retreat, where the event is centered.

Wine & Warblers
Grange Insurance Audubon Center, Columbus, Ohio
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
I originally thought this was a birding-by-ear event called Whining Warblers, but I was happily wrong. The title says it all: There will be wine. There will be warblers. The setting is the amazing "green" GIAC building in downtown Columbus and, given the early May date, there will be loads of warblers and other migrants streaming through the trees along the Scioto River. Did I mention there will be wine? Julie Zickefoose and I will be leading a bird walk or two, after the wine, which should be interesting.

Kenai Birding Festival
May 17-20, 2012
Kenai, Alaska
We're really looking forward to heading to Alaska in May for this relatively new birding event on the Kenai Peninsula. The bird life there is going to be refreshingly different from what we will have been seeing during spring migration in the Midwest—and I'm hoping for a couple of lifers (Aleutian tern and spruce grouse—a jinx bird for me!) We'll be doing bird walks (including a float trip!), evening talks, and some music. Best of all, this event is totally free and open to the public!

Canton Audubon 50th Anniversary Dinner
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Canton, Ohio
Julie Zickefoose is the keynote speaker for this celebratory event for one of Ohio's oldest Audubon chapters. But after she's done yakkin' we'll be playing some music for everyone.


Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival
June 13-17, 2012
Carrington, North Dakota
Sooner or later you've got to go to the northern Great Plains to see some of the specialty sparrows that live there (Baird's, Nelson's, and LeConte's sparrows top the list). Why not do it this year during this charming, intimate event? The birds are enough to draw people to Carrington, ND for this event, but once you get there, the breathtaking prairie landscape and the small town hospitality will enthrall you. Highlights include the Pipits & Pie tours where we head out in the pre-dawn to find Spargue's pipit, then celebrate with lunch in a small-town cafe featuring homemade pie (I recommend the strawberry-rhubarb!). Oh and there will be music, too! Here's a photo gallery from last year's event.


Hog Island Audubon Camp "Joy of Birding"
June 24-29, 2012
Hog Island, Maine
Hog Island is legendary for many reasons: famed naturalists such as Roger Tory Peterson and Allan and Helen Cruickshank taught there for many years; and it's the home of Project Puffin, one of North America's most successful species reintroduction/preservation efforts (restoring the Atlantic puffin to its historic nesting sites off the Maine coast). Julie and I and the kids will be there the last full week of June immersing ourselves in the splendor of the Maine summer.

I've spent the past few days leading bird tours as part of The Potholes and Prairie Birding Festival in Carrington, North Dakota. The neat thing about bird watching out here is that everywhere you look, you see birds.

Another neat thing is the chance to see east meeting west, like with these kingbirds (eastern kingbird on the left, western kingbird on the right).

Among the specialty prairie birds to be found here is the chestnut-collared longspur. Here's a male on territory in Stutsman County.

With all the wetlands, sloughs, wet ditches, and flooded farm fields, there are many chances to see water-loving birds such as this Virginia rail, which came out to see us along Pipestem Creek.

Sharp-tailed grouse are common here but can be tricky to see. We found this one along a fence line while we birded the Jackson Highway.

If you've never birded in native prairie habitat, this event offers an excellent way to do just that. Great people, amazing birds, and rolling prairies that go on forever—all the way 'til they meet the sky.

Sometimes you act on a hunch and it pays off. On the night before the final field trip of the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival, most of the attendees gathered for a picnic on a rhubarb farm northeast of Carrington, ND. I was a bit worried—not about rhubarb—but about the fact that our trip, called "Dawn Birding in Kidder County," was going to find many of the same target birds everyone had already seen: Baird's sparrow, chestnut-collared longspur, Sprague's pipit, Nelson's sparrow, LeConte's sparrow. On Thursday or Friday, these birds were heavily desired lifers. But by Sunday morning, many festival attendees were wanting to see something new.


I decided to find out what our opportunities for finding something new would be. I talked to Ron Martin, who may be North Dakota's most knowledgeable birder and pried a bit of info out of him. Ron is a quiet, thoughtful man and he was happy to offer some advice. He suggested a birding spot, and then in the low-key manner that is typical of many North Dakotans, he began to rattle of the species we might see there: "ohh let's see, there are a lot of white-faced ibis there and a few glossies. Cattle egrets and night herons have a big nesting colony there. It's the best place in the state to see Clark's grebe. Lots of shorebirds in there and all the ducks, of course. Down the road is a spot for things like red-breasted nuthatch and yellow-billed cuckoo...."

I had to stop Ron and ask him to repeat himself so I could record his list of birds and, more importantly, his directions, into my iPhone. I wanted these directions so I could share them with my co-leaders in the morning so we could figure out how to go after all of these cool birds—very few of which had been seen by anyone else at the festival this year.

The next morning I shared my hot birding info with Julie Zickefoose and the other leaders for the trip, Paulette Scherr, Stacy Whipp, and Ann and Ernie Hoffert. Paulette and Stacy work for the Fish & Wildlife Service at the local national wildlife refuges. Ann and Ernie have been involved with the festival since its inception and are the de facto Welcome Wagon for the event. All four of these folks have been all over central North Dakota, but they'd never been to our new birding destination: DeWald Slough.

DeWald Slough is just south of the town of Dawson which is tucked along I-94, west of Jamestown. It's a series of sloughs, lakes, and wet fields through which farm roads wind. A quick pre-dawn poll of the trip participants gave support to the idea of going there first, then heading north to the pipits and sparrows, and a cafe lunch later in the day.

We drove about 45 minutes in an Etch-a-sketch pattern on the straight-as-a-string North Dakota roads until we got to I-94, then we bombed west to Dawson and dipped south to the slough.


By the time we got out of the people mover, a bank of gray clouds had moved in over the sun, but this did little to dampen our enthusiasm. The birds were EVERYWHERE!

Standing in one place and scanning in a 360-degree arc, here are a few of the birds I could see: glossy ibis, American avocet, 13 species of duck, greater yellowlegs, American bittern, cattle, snowy, and great egrets, northern harrier, black-crowned night-heron, western meadowlark, horned lark, grasshopper sparrow, vesper sparrow, Savannah sparrow, Nelson's sparrow, chestnut-collared longspur, western grebe, eared grebe, horned grebe, Franklin's gull, ring-billed gull, black tern, common tern, plus lots of other common stuff like red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds.


Soon we started picking out some even more exciting birds: including Clark's grebe and stilt sandpiper.

We spent about 90 minutes at this first spot, working through the birds. Everyone got scope looks every bird they wanted to see well, which goes a long way to making the satisfaction level high on a field trip. Then we moved on to several other vantage points down the road.

We never did pick out a glossy ibis from all the white-faceds, but that was a small thing for most of us. Our final stop on the DeWald Slough route was along a road that ran along a high hill above a big lake. About half of the group followed Julie and me out the hill to get a better, closer look at the Clark's grebes. The looks were still a bit distant but satisfactory enough to count as life birds for about a dozen folks. While we were on this side trip, Ernie walked farther up the road and scanned a muddy and wet portion of an agricultural field.

"I think I had some shorebirds in that wet field up the road on the east side," he said. (Note that in North Dakota, when giving directions, most locals use compass direction instead of "on the left side." And why not? As long as you know that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, you're OK. Except at night and on cloudy days...)

We stopped and scanned Ernie's field and sure enough, there were a dozen Wilson's phalaropes there and a smattering of killdeer. Then I spotted a couple of distant semipalmated plovers. Topping all of these sightings, Julie exclaimed "I just heard a piping plover call!"

Sure enough, there were at least three piping plovers scooting along the edge of the water. This federally endangered species is struggling throughout its range and declining in most places. It was a thrill to see these tiny pipers—a lifer for many of the trip's participants. I snapped a few quick digiscoped images to document the birds, which were un-banded, unlike most of the piping plovers along the East Coast, which are closely monitored.


Now it was time for coffee and a sweet roll and indoor bathrooms, so we headed into Dawson and invaded the cafe there in that special birders' way. The locals gave us bemused looks. But the cafe ladies were happy to sell us all of their hot coffee and homemade sweet rolls. We took our purchases outside and sat along the main drag, resting ourselves after several days of birding.

The sweet rolls were as big as saucers: three-inches thick of still-warm cinnamon-caramel icing goodness/badness. There was much groaning with delight as the sweet rolls were consumed, followed by loud smacks of finger licking. Liam asked for the last bite of my roll and nearly took the end of my forefinger off as he scarfed it down.

Just then, the sun came out and smiled warmly on our group, as if to endorse our decision to improvise the birding route. Certainly we were happy with the results.


Now, bellies full and bladders empty, we got back on the people mover and headed north to our original destination...

A few weeks ago, I found myself riding along one of the farm roads in northern Kidder County, North Dakota, with a busload of bird watchers, on a Big Day outing for the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival. It was late afternoon, the sky was gray and overcast. As we topped a small rise in the road (this part of ND is full of gentle, rolling hills) we came upon this very cooperative short-eared owl. Immediately the cameras swung into position and we tried to inch closer with the front door open to get a good shot.


I was looking at the bird's belly and wondering if this bird had just been on the nest incubating eggs or brooding owlets (note the obvious cleft in the breast and belly feathers). If this hypothesis is correct, that would make this bird a female since they do most of the incubation and brooding. Males help by bringing food to the nest site for the female and, eventually, the owlets.


She soon grew aware of our giant people-mover inching ever closer. So she shook herself, took a quick poop...

And launched into flight.

We saw at least five short-eared owls (and 109 other bird species) that day, but the owl was my favorite photo subject of the expedition.

In about a month, on the wide open prairie of central North Dakota, one of the most charming and wonderful birding festivals will be in full swing. Carrington, North Dakota will be invaded by bands of excited birders for the annual Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival, one of my favorite events every year.

If one or more of the bird species listed below sounds appealing to you (or remains unchecked on your life list) you should consider coming to Carrington for the 2010 festival, which runs from June 9 to 13. Among the target/highlight species: Chestnut-collared longspur, Sprague's pipit, Nelson's (sharp-tailed) sparrow, LeConte's sparrow, Baird's sparrow, gray partridge, sharp-tailed grouse, ferruginous hawk, white-rumped sandpiper, plus large numbers of waterfowl and shorebirds.


There are reasons other than the birds to come to this festival:

• The P&PBF is a relatively small event, so field trip groups are small too, with expert local leaders.
  
• It's hard to get lost in a place where all the roads run at right angles to one another.
• You can stop to look at birds along most of these roads and rarely have to worry about oncoming traffic.
• Spending time on the wide-open prairie does one's soul good.
• So does the delicious soup and pie at the local cafes where we often eat lunch.

I'll be in North Dakota again this year for the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival. Good spots are still available for this wonderful event and I hope you'll consider joining us.

When you are driving west on I-94 through the heart of North Dakota, it's hard to miss the World's Largest Sandhill Crane which lives in Steele, ND. I've been leading trips, giving talks, and digging the scene at The Potholes and Prairie Birding Festival in ND for the past six years and every June during the festival, I try to make the pilgrimage to this holy birding shrine.


You must approach Sandy with a mixture of caution and reverence.

It's a bit of a risk because he's perfectly bite-sized for a giant sandhill crane, but we let Liam pose beside Sandy's massive legs.

It's good to see you doing so well, Sandy. Until we meet again...keep your feet in the mud and your head in the clouds!

If you ever find yourself lost on the prairie, there's one giant clue to tell you that you're in Jamestown, North Dakota (aka Buffalo City): It's the World's Largest Buffalo and it lives at the National Buffalo Museum, right off I-94.

No it's not real. If it were, this fine city would never want for fresh fertilizer. And I (standing as I am in the photo above) would have been pulverized into a fine powder.