Bald Eagle at Hastings

We took a quick outing to open-water areas on the Mississippi at Prescott, Wis., and Hastings, Minn., yesterday. Common mergansers, a large (21-28", slightly larger than mallards), handsome diving duck with the typical long, narrow merganser bill, were present in groups of a dozen to several dozen. Among them we saw a small number of common goldeneyes, another diving duck, not as large (15.7-20"), and notable for its black head, round white cheek patch and, yes, golden eyes. At Prescott we saw no bald eagles, but several could be seen in the air and trees near the Hastings bridge. My son took the photo above (and cropped, below) from our viewing point under the Wisconsin side of the bridge.

Fall Day at Frontenac State Park

Yesterday we spent a wonderful day outdoors in Frontenac State Park, located along the Mississippi south of Red Wing. We'd arranged to meet fellow nature blogger Bruce Ause of Red Wing Nature Notes, a blog I admire and am inspired by. He was leading an interpretive hike in the park, which we joined, after which we'd planned to have Bruce show us other favorite spots in the park.

As always, click on any of the photos to see them much larger. It's definitely worth doing!

One of the many scenic overlooks from the park's bluffs

Cottonwood tree in prairie succession area

Woodlands on a perfect fall day

Oak branches against the sky

Bench and overlook where we stopped to eat our lunch

Goldenrod gone to seed

This is our new friend and guide on the hike, Bruce Ause, who in 1970 became the founding director of the Red Wing Environmental Learning Center. We felt lucky to benefit from the knowledge and experience he's gained from 30-plus years conducting outdoor education programs in the area and leading interpretive hikes like this one as a DNR volunteer.

In the uplands area of the park, we saw quite a few bluebirds, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a meadowlark, some dark-eyed juncos, a red-breasted nuthatch, several types of sparrows, plenty of chickadees, one or more yellow-rumped warblers (we had a nice view of the warblers in the treetops from our lunch bench at the top of a steep drop-off), a turkey vulture, and a sharp-shinned hawk (no eagles today, that we noticed -- they will be gathering more along the river as other fishing sources start to freeze over). We also saw three deer quite close to us as we walked through open, grassy areas.

Another view of the river and the Wisconsin-side bluffs, with puffs of smoke in the Old Frontenac area below, perhaps from leaf- or brush-burning

After finishing the uplands part of our our hike, Bruce suggested that Dave and I might enjoy heading down to river level to follow the trail that crosses Wells Creek out to Sand Point -- so we did. Down here the trees were far bigger and older than most we had seen up above. There was a definite "forest primeval" sense to the place.

A lengthy boardwalk traverses some of the wetter areas along this .7-mile trail. It appeared that at least part of the boardwalk had been underwater during the recent flooding. Here, a tree had fallen across the boardwalk, knocking one section down. There was a fetid, swampy smell to these wetter areas.

Wells Creek, seen from trail bridge

The trail ended at the edge of the water, where usually there is a good area of mudflats attractive to shorebirds. Right now it is all underwater, and all we saw were gulls, grackles and (more excitingly) two belted kingfishers.

Thanks, Bruce, for a marvelous outing. We couldn't have picked a better day for it.

Eagles and Swans on the Mississippi

We drove over to Red Wing and Lake City yesterday to look for open water and see what early migrating ducks might be showing up. Because it was such a beautiful day, the waterfronts were busy with walkers, birders and other sun-starved Minnesotans, and open areas of the river at Red Wing were teeming with fishing boats. Apparently KARE-11 had just aired a story on eagle-viewing at Red Wing's Colvill Park, so the number of birdwatchers was higher than usual.

We saw little duck life -- mostly mallards and a distant glimpse of mergansers far out in the river at Lake City -- but plenty of bald eagles and at Lake City a flock of 50 or more swans settled on the ice at the edge of the open channel of water, again quite far out from shore. Our view of these distant birds through the spotting scope was hampered by ripples of heat haze, which I wouldn't have thought would be an issue over ice, but apparently so on a warm, early-spring day (well into the 50s at that point and warmer as the day went on).

We saw quite a few eagles soaring, but probably more out on the ice, looking like this. It's a rather startling sight to scan the large, mostly frozen Lake Pepin and see so many scattered dark blobs with white tops that prove to be bald eagles -- perhaps just resting and enjoying the sun, as we were. As more of the area lakes open up, the eagles will disperse; right now they are still concentrated at areas of open water like that downstream of the power plant at Red Wing. All together, we probably saw between 30 and 40 eagles during the course of the outing -- a few juveniles, still bearing dark head feathers, but mostly the dramatically colored adults.

Because of the distances involved, here was the only halfway decent photo opp of the day, of an eagle perched on a snag across the river at Colville Park.

Prothonotary Warbler Down the Great River Road

On Thursday, on the first leg of our journey to pick up my daughter from college in Ohio, Dave and I drove south down the Great River Road through the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge from far southeastern Minnesota into northeastern Iowa. We were looking for areas where the river spills over and floods woodlands -- the ideal habitat for the prothonotary warbler, whose breeding range finds its northwesternmost point, and its only Minnesota location, along this area of the Mississippi. (That's what the range maps in two of my bird guides indicate, at least, though the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology page linked to above shows the Minnesota range extending farther west across the southern part of the state.) We saw miles of the right kind of swampy habitat in the NWR and found easy access to a suitable spot for observation (above) just off the highway, where a road to a boat launch was closed after a few hundred feet due to high water.

We encouraged a visit from this brilliant yellow warbler by playing its call from a CD of birdcalls for a few minutes. We were rewarded within moments by a responding call from the trees and, soon thereafter, by a personal visit from the territorial male coming to challenge the supposed intruder. This was the first prothonotary warbler I had seen -- a life bird, as they say. I missed a great shot when the stunning little bird appeared against a dark tree trunk, but did catch this not-so-distinct photo (above, cropped close in, and below, less zoomed in) from which you can see the intense orange-yellow of the head and breast of this lovely bird. (Click on any of the photos for greater detail.)

We did not want to over-agitate the warbler, so we turned off the CD as soon as we had had the chance to see the bird for a couple of minutes. While on this little stake-out, we also saw and heard many other birds, including woodpeckers, a black-throated blue warbler and plenty of yellow-rumped warblers like the one below.

We were lucky that our trip wasn't later or that this year's late spring hadn't come earlier, since the trees were just starting to leaf out. Another couple of weeks of leaf growth and it's unlikely we would have been able to see these birds at all. As we drove further south and east, as far south as Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, spring advanced until we were seeing trees almost fully leafed out and lilacs and many other flowering shrubs and trees in bloom.