Ciblek Mania

Some kind person recently said I was "outstanding in my field." I was flattered.
Then I remembered I'd shown them this photograph just moments before.

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.

I'm sure you've heard of The Darwin Awards...these are the awards given to people (humans) who improve our species by accidentally removing themselves from it—often in unintentionally creative ways. Well, I have a possible nominee for such recognition.

Last summer we took the kids to Teddy Roosevelt National Park in westernmost North Dakota. TRNP is famous for its herds of wild horses and bison. Signs all over the park contain warnings about the dangers of bison—how they are large and unpredictable creatures. People and their vehicles are sometimes attacked and badly damaged/injured by bison and because the herds at TRNP are free-roaming, you regularly encounter them as you drive around the park.

Notice that I said "drive."

Teddy Roosevelt National Park is huge. To get from one part to another requires driving your car, which is no problem because everywhere you look there's something new and amazing to see. Mostly you find yourself stopping at the designated overlooks and roadside pull-offs. I got my life look at American elk from one such vista.

Generally speaking you encounter the bison herds as you drive along the roads. Sometimes you have to wait for a herd of bison to cross the road. Sometimes you have to park on the road and wait while the herd moves around and past you. It's a bit terrifying, I have to admit, to be sitting in a small rental car with a dozen or more huge, dark, bellowing and grunting mammals on all sides—so close you can smell them!

The spots where we found ourselves getting out had no nearby bison (or we wouldn't have ventured from the car). And we knew better than to get our when we DID encounter bison.

Halfway around the driving route of the southern part of TRNP there's a side road that leads uphill to a very nice overlook named Buck Hill. As we turned into Buck Hill, we noticed that the guard rail on the corner of the two roads was rubbed to a high polish. From the footprints in the soil and the piles of chips scattered nearby, we deduced that this was a place where bison scratched themselves. There were no bison near, so we climbed out of the car to inspect things. Liam has always been fascinated by bison, so he took especial joy in feeling the rough metal rubbed smooth and shiny by the bisons' rough coats. He whooped with excitement at the wads of rubbed-off bison fur he found below the guard rail. We followed the bison tracks with our eyes, noting that they lead up the rise toward Buck Hill.

Back in the car we went, and up the road to Buck Hill. Parking in the lot, we took our time scaling one hill (not actually Buck Hill as it turned out) and then the other, more well-trod path to the overlook known as Buck Hill. It was from here that we scanned the miles of valley below us and found a large herd of female elk and calves (lifer!).

We spent a good couple of hours up on Buck Hill, feeling the energy of the landscape, marveling at the Badlands ecosystem, spotting tiny dark spots that were herds of grazing bison in the distant green valleys.


As the day drew down, the wind picked up and swiped what little heat the sunshine had lent us. So we tromped back to the car and headed down the road leading off the hill.

As we reached the T-intersection at the bottom, we saw a man standing outside his large pick-up truck, leaning on the back bed, intent on photographing something. Then we spotted the huge bull bison at his scratching post. The man, only feet away, was pointing a tiny point-and-shoot camera at the bull, taking flash photos as fast as he could. We stopped well back from the scene, unsure whether or not we wanted to:

• stay to watch a possible bison attack
• drive up to warn the man to get the heck back in his truck.
• drive up to ask him his name and contact info for the Darwin Awards application submission.
• drive past and hope for the best.
• all of the above

We watched for a minute or two, and then the man got back in his truck, smiling a very large and proud smile. As we pulled past the bull bison, I swear the giant creature rolled his eyes at us as if to say "Yeah I know I could've killed him...but I didn't."

I love nature.

My nominee for North America's Most Beautiful Blackbird is the Brewer's blackbird. Check out the iridescence on this dude I photographed on territory in North Dakota recently.

He's got that "look" in his pale eye that the ladies can't resist. Just enough of a bill to be taken seriously. Drooping his wings to show he's down with it. AND, he's got a sweet rock in the center of his turf, surrounded by blooming prairie wildflowers.

He reminds me of a gangster in a shiny, shark-skin suit (though there have not been any sharks in North Dakota for a few million years).

I trust you'll agree this is a beautiful blackbird. But I'll accept rebuttals and counter-nominations.

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.

She's called Salem Sue and she lives in—towers over, really—the town of New Salem, North Dakota on the south side of I-94, west of Bismarck. We saw a sign for her shortly before we saw her looming presence, standing tall on top of a hill. She is the world's largest Holstein cow statue. There was no way we were simply going to drive past her without stopping for a hi-dee-ho and a closer gander.


She did not disappoint. We stopped at the small entrance kiosk and happily donated our $3 per car full. Then we fish-tailed our way up the muddy road to Sue.



Three things struck us as we stepped out of our vehicle.

One, it was cold—probably about 45 degrees, not bad for a June afternoon.

Two, the wind hit us like a freight train. We needed to hold onto each other to keep from being blown off Sue's hill. Wind chill estimate: -73 degrees F. I could feel my skin turning blue, under my three coats. My exposed skin had lost all sensation.



Three: Sue was not only huge, she was anatomically correct. And she was in desperate need of a robust milking. It occurred to me that, had Sue's udders been leaking milk, the entire southeastern quarter of Morton County would have been covered in frothy dairy goodness.



We stood there, shivering in our amazement. Took some photos. Then each of us tracked a pound of mud into our Toyota Sasquatch (or whatever it was we were driving) and we headed west, toward the Montana border, our giant holstein jones having been satisfied.