Sweet Briar Lake, North Dakota
Yes, you can hear the trucks in the background from I-94 but that is the only negative thing about this wonderful place.
Driving across country last summer, my husband and I were always on the lookout for nice, clean, free campgrounds. We found a handful that we remember with fondness and this one tops the list.
Sweet Briar Lake was created by a dam if I remember correctly, and it appears to be a good fishing spot. But if you care about birds, this place is a bonanza. From just our little spot overlooking the lake we watched white pelicans, double-crested cormorants and Canada geese swim around and generally busy themselves, and heard red-winged blackbirds make their lovely background music. Most likely a walk around the lake would have resulted in seeing more species but we were more than thrilled to just stay put and enjoy this peaceful display.
Randall Davey Audubon Center, Santa Fe
My husband and I were a little disappointed about only seeing a couple of birds at the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe but we went during the hottest part of the day in early May so we weren’t too surprised.
There were numerous finches at the feeder, a gorgeous hawk moth at some flowers, a squirrel keeping busy digging in the dirt, and an unknown bird foraging in the bushes and parking lot.
What makes this place special are of course the volunteers and the beautiful terrain including the hillside trails, and the gorgeous adobe buildings. And the awesome bee hotel deserves a mention. I’d like to go back someday when it’s a little cooler, perhaps in the winter when there are more birds around.
Salida, Colorado: Sands Lake SWA
The second part to the amazing May 2017 birding experience I had in Salida, Colorado was Sands Lake State Wildlife Area. It consists of Sands Lake and a stretch of the Arkansas River – my husband and I spent about an hour walking the lovely trails and walkway along the river.
The lake has had a lot of effort put into it to be bird friendly. Two islands naturally create a safe atmosphere for waterbirds like pelicans, geese and ducks. And at least two nesting platforms have been put up, as well as a handful of (floating?) platforms scattered around the lake.
The most exciting sighting of the day was an American Dipper, a first for me. And I even managed to get a decent shot of it.
We also saw a yellow-rumped warbler, several yellow warblers, cedar waxwings, and tree swallows in areas along the river and lake. A memorable sighting was the pair of ospreys, one on a nest and the other perched on a light pole nearby. Below are the rest of the photos. Hope you get to visit Salida some day!
Salida, Colorado: Frantz Lake & the Arkansas River
Last summer my husband and I were able to take a 3 month trip from Texas to Alaska. We spent most of our time in New Mexico and Colorado, in May, and both of those states provided some amazing birding.
Salida, Colorado was a birding bonanza: Frantz Lake along the Arkansas River and the nearby Sands Lake (in the next post).
Frantz Lake is located on county road 154 near the Mt. Shavano Fish Hatchery. Google Maps has it listed as “Franz” – a different spelling; I took my spelling from the sign at the lake.
County road 154 is a birding spot in itself. Mountain bluebirds and tree swallows nest in the birdhouses that have been erected along the road. Canada geese and mule deer abound. *Click on the first image below and scroll to the right to view a larger image and see captions.*
Frantz Lake itself is a nice little turquoise-tinted reservoir next to the Arkansas River. Here I found 2 grebes, a western and a pied-billed, common mergansers, and white-faced ibises (a first!). Along with Canada geese, blackbirds and mallards.
A little ways away, by the Arkansas River, a red-tailed hawk flew overhead and white-crowned sparrows were foraging and flitting around on the dirt trail.
(Some of these images are sized 1920×1080 so can be used for that size monitor, I kept the copyright small. I like desktop wallpaper with a lot of blank space so it doesn’t feel cluttered and a couple of these photos work well for that.)
It snowed while we were in Salida in the middle of May – it’s at 7000 feet – but that was the day we were leaving and the sun came out just a bit later, so no harm done. 🙂 Thanks for looking!
An Entwined Zebra Dove
The Ala Moana Mall in Honolulu Hawaii is not exactly a birder’s paradise. If you’ve ever been there 
you’ve probably seen the stage near the Waikiki side entrance. On the day of my visit it was draped in red curtains that created a deeply textured vision of color on the floorboards. Hence the photographs.
Oftentimes birds are there, probably because people feed them. Mall birds. Not exactly picturesque herons or majestic bluebirds. More like zebra doves and rock doves (pigeons). (Are pigeons, like, flying mall rats?)
But every one of those mall birds are just as worthy and deserving of life as any heron or bluebird. So it broke my heart when I discovered that this little zebra dove had its legs entangled with some of kind of thread or very thin fibers. The poor thing managed to walk but its appearance was disheveled, skinny, sickly. The entanglement was taking its toll.
You can see its entwined legs clearly in the silhouette photo on the left (click to enlarge).
I look back at that moment with regret. I regret that I did not help that bird. I 
could have found some big gloves and grabbed the bird and cut that twisted piece of twine that was holding it hostage. That would have at least given it a chance.
As you can see it came right over to me, along with several pigeons, probably looking for a generous person tossing scraps. It was close enough to me so that I could have done it!
But no, there were no gloves and I am not that gutsy. Not that spontaneous. And maybe it’s not a good idea to touch a bird that might be diseased or to take these matters into my own hands.
All I know is, we need to do more for the birds that are affected by our carelessness.
This is what a healthy zebra dove looks like, found right down the street near the Ala Wai Boat Harbor.
Raven yanks another raven’s tail
The average adult raven is about 2.5 pounds and it’s hard to tell adults from juveniles. The below video shows a power struggle between ravens at a food source. At the very beginning you can see a raven on the far left grab another raven’s tail feathers with his beak and pull him or her away from the food. Another seems to join in. (By the way, if the video is blurry find the settings in the bottom right hand corner of the player and change it to a higher resolution. Youtube automatically chooses a low setting so it will download faster.)
After reading Ravens in Winter, a book by Bernd Heinrich, I’m inclined to believe that the commotion going on in the video has to do with a power struggle (to gain access to the food) between the juvenile birds and the adults. According to Heinrich, adults are usually silent at carcasses (dead animals in the wild), and juveniles are very noisy. The juveniles “yell” at kills and make a commotion, possibly to attract more juveniles to the kill, in order to compete with the adults and gain access to the food.
Heinrich “proves” through observation and careful note-taking that ravens actively recruit other ravens to food piles. He speculates, after studying raven behavior for many years, that this recruitment is not necessarily altruistic, or done in order to get the favor back some day. Instead, it is probably related more to “gaining or maintaining access to the food than to sharing the wealth.”
Juveniles actively recruit, in order to overwhelm by sheer numbers, the adults at the carcass, so that the adults will give up defending the carcass, which they do when they are just too outnumbered.
So if we can extend this power struggle at carcasses in the field to city food (trash) then it’s possible the squawking raven in the video, the one being pulled from the food by his or her tail feathers, is likely a juvenile, being bossed around by the adults, who are not as vocal.
I strongly encourage any bird lover to read Ravens in Winter. This bird that I see nearly every day of my life is actually quite mysterious and Heinrich helps us understand their possible and likely motivations.
Thanks for reading! Happy New Year!
Spruce Grouse, not hunted
The spruce grouse is a very common bird in interior Alaska. It’s one of several species of grouse that live in this state.
The one on the left has red combs above its eyes so we know it’s a male (click it for a better view). I’ve seen quite a few spruce grouse over the years but never have I seen the courtship display. The National Geographic Feild Guide to Birds says “In courtship strutting display, male spreads his tail, erects the red combs above his eyes, and rapidly beats his wings; some males also give a series of low-pitched hoots.” This would be something to see!
The male on the left is standing next to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and my husband and I saw at least 10 or 20 when we were driving the pipeline access road for a couple of hours. The spruce grouse is a game bird and hunters can take them throughout Alaska except during the months of May, June & July (with a few exceptions). It is somewhat common to hunt them for food. To me, this is a necessary evil. I’m a birder and I consider myself an environmentalist but I think that hunting has a role to play in a healthy diet. As long as the bird dies quickly and the meat is used for food I am not against this. I have had ptarmigan myself, but never grouse. It was delicious. Eating a bird that has had a ‘happy’ life is better for everyone, and for the world, than one who lives in tiny cages or in huge flocks in warehouses.
Residents of Alaska can also kill cormorants, crows, and Snowy Owls, as long as they are taken for food or clothing. It sounds cruel but there are Alaska Native traditions that involve these birds and their feathers and this must be respected as long as the birds are not endangered.
The spruce grouse on the right, and its chick, were spotted on a trail about a mile off the Steese Highway north of Fairbanks, back in 2006. You can see the female has a 
reddish-brown stripe over its eye, reminiscent of the male. I don’t remember exactly what time of year I took the photos but it was probably early June or late May. (I’m not sure exactly what to call the baby since it seems bigger than a chick and smaller than a juvenile. It’s more like a ‘tween. 🙂
Hard to believe but this bird subsists mainly on spruce needles! They must have powerful digestive systems. They can stuff their crops full of the equivalent of 10% of their body weight, to be digested later, and their gizzards grow by 75% during the winter when their energy needs increase.
As someone who lives in interior Alaska year-round, I’m quite impressed with a bird that can live here in the winter. Along with ravens and chickadees, they have adapted some clever ways to make it.
Here’s to a mild winter for us all!
Bird Congregation
I don’t think this is a very common sight on the coastal plains of northern Alaska (or anywhere?), but as my husband drove in to Prudhoe Bay last spring, he spied this unusually large gathering of various birds.
The rough-legged hawk and raven seem to be acting as sentries over the vast flocks, but they are watching for sinister purposes.
Yes, watching carefully.
Sure enough, a hawk has gotten herself a meal.
But really, how can you blame her?
A short-eared owl perches nearby.
Kind of hard to believe that little twig can hold him up. He must be all fluff.
And life goes on….
Butterfly Exits Cocoon
I imagine that most people who like birds don’t mind butterflies, so here’s a slideshow I created from photos taken last summer of a butterfly leaving a cocoon. For over a week I kept the camera and its time lapse device set up outside, through heat and rain, waiting until it broke out of its temporary home… then the actual event lasted only a few minutes! And because of memory card limitations I could only set the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds – I wish it could’ve been a shorter interval – but I’m still pleased with the few shots I got.
I don’t know the specific name of this butterfly but I’ve definitely seen it before.
After the butterfly left the cocoon it crawled into some potato plant leaves and you can see that it dripped a dark fluid that looks like blood (but of course isn’t). Apparently it’s a waste product that doesn’t come from their wings as I had first assumed but from their abdomen, being released after chrysalis, the cocoon stage.
The butterfly never opened its wings for me so I didn’t get that photo. And I wish I knew the name of this butterfly! Please comment if you have any idea. Thanks and I hope everyone is having a terrific summer!
To Feed or Not to Feed
This junco hit our second story window and sat stunned, but alive, here on the ground last summer. Juncos are sweet little birds that we see from May to September all around our house pecking at seeds on the ground. They visit our feeder during this time but mostly stay on the floor of the deck or on the ground under the feeder, hopping around picking up fallen sunflower heart pieces and birch seeds. They can leave so late in the season, I believe, because they are only flying as far as the southern coast of Alaska where it doesn’t freeze so hard in the winter.
My husband and I immensely love watching our feeder birds: redpolls, juncos, chickadees, and hairy and downy woodpeckers. He often places small amounts of bird seed on the snow mounds that cover the deck railings and flower pots in the winter so that redpolls don’t have to mob the feeder and so that we can see them closer. We stand at the window and marvel at how they can live at 30 below zero, and at their quick movements and little arguments.
But I wonder that having a bird feeder is the best thing for the birds. Many birds hit our windows, but by far most of them end up alive (though certainly a bit damaged afterwards). After they hit the windows as they sit stunned until they are able to fly away, they are undoubtedly vulnerable to predation. There’s a neighborhood cat that I fear visits in the wee hours of the morning in the summer and I have no idea if it uses the feeder as a baiting station. I have no evidential reason to believe this but am concerned. Other than that cat our neighborhood totally lacks outdoor cats as far as we can tell. This one we’ve only seen twice in our 5 years here. (And our two cats don’t go outside without being chaperoned.)
Feeding birds seems on the surface not a bad idea. But is it good to get them reliant on what we provide? So that they lose just a little bit of their natural foraging skills to their eventual detriment? What about the seed itself… are there pesticides on it, or fungicides? Is it even good for a redpoll or chickadee to eat that much sunflower heart instead of what it would normally find in nature? Could there sometimes be mold on the seeds that would be dangerous to the birds? Is feeding birds related to the sickness of chickadees that results in 6-10% of them having beak deformities? I’ve read up a bit on this topic and there are not a lot of answers to be had (although plenty of guesses and opinions).
So unfortunately, I’m not convinced that feeding birds is the absolute right thing to do, but I’m unwilling to give it up unless I see direct evidence that it harms them more than it helps them. The only way I know for sure that it harms them is when they hit the windows. 
I’ve went to great lengths to try to prevent it, such as wiring and beads that I once strung across our largest window for a few years. The thing is, I know that they would hit the windows even if we didn’t purposefully draw them here to our house with food.
Alas, it would be a sad sad day for my husband and I if we were to decide that the harm to the birds outweighs the benefits (to us and the birds).
You can see here the redpolls chowing down today on the seed my husband has strewn on the snow in front of the window. The temperature gauge doesn’t go colder than 20 below – it’s about 30 below zero (F) right now. I can’t imagine those poor little guys can’t use some extra food at this temperature!
But am I justifying? This summer I plan to try something else on the windows: CDs strung on wires or string. I’ve also switched out the bird feeder when it was just too hard to clean anymore. Any tips are welcome! Thanks for reading.
A Snow Bunting at Pictured Rocks
I saw a snow bunting once before, in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. In its summer garb. But this one I spied on a gravel road in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan in its winter plumage. My husband and I were in the middle of a 6 week long road trip that started and ended at our home in Fairbanks, Alaska, but that took us through 4 Canadian provinces and at least 14 states. And of all the amazing times we had this snow bunting was actually pretty special because it was one of the few close encounters with birds that I had over the whole 6 weeks.
Michigan’s scenery, little did I know, is astoundingly beautiful! I had no idea there were sand dunes in the Midwest! Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (on left) is a must-see part of North America.
As is Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan. You can see red-orange sandstone that is 500 million years old in the photo on the right. This cliff has been beautifully sculpted by the waters of Lake Superior. The interesting part is that even though the rock that makes up the landform is hundreds of millions of years old, the cliff itself that you see jutting out into the water is only a few thousands of years old. No landform around this area could be older than 12,000 years old because that’s when glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. But this land is rising. It has risen far enough up since then, and been sculpted by the forces of erosion, to give us a spectacular view of rock formations that used to be buried.
So as my husband and I are visiting this most scenic of places, this snow bunting is pick pick picking at bits of something along a gravel road, letting me get closer and closer with my camera.
He must have just arrived from more northerly climes, smartly getting busy eating as many seeds and insects that he can before the coming winter. Snow buntings spend the summer in Alaska and northern Canada and before winter fly to the Midwest of America, southern Canada, and the coastlines of Alaska. Males have darker heads in the winter and more black on their wings, like this little guy.
I know all this about snow buntings now because I have my handy birding books around me. But when I was taking the photos I thought maybe it was a sparrow of some kind. To my delight, when I finally got home and looked it up I found out it was a snow bunting which is not a sparrow. I would have never recognized it because the one I saw in Prudhoe Bay was in it’s June breeding plumage which is mostly white. Moral of the story: take at least one birding book with you on your road trip!
Chipmunks at Athabasca Falls (not a bird to be seen)
My husband and I are presently traveling from the north of the United States – Alaska – to the south of it – North Carolina. I have gotten some unbelievable photographs of wildlife, including a close encounter with a grizzly bear that was digging up roots alongside the Alaska Highway (you can see them here).
Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada were spectacular. Surrounded by sunlit mountains, we drove 
through the parks with our mouths agape, peaks above us and streams meandering through valleys below us. And though we saw barely a creature but tourist’s dogs in the parks, I did catch a few up close photos of scurrying chipmunks at Athabasca Falls in Jasper.
Canadians definitely have their national parks figured out, if these two are representations of them as a whole.
Athabasca Falls had wooden stairways interspersed between towering rocks – sometimes you have to duck to or go single-file to get through. Lots of concrete walkways
in different viewpoints of the falls, accessed by sun dappled paths with views of game trails through the moss. A peaceful and necessary stop, and in our case at least, not too crowded.
The only large wild mammal we saw in the parks was Bighorn Sheep. A group of 6 or 7 were nibbling something on the rocks (my husband says they were ingesting minerals from the rocks). The chipmunks were also nibbling, moving with rocket speed over the concrete and moss, not too scared of us big hulking humans except perhaps to be caught underfoot.
So, no birds this time. The only ones I’ve managed to capture with my camera are swans and ravens, back up in the Yukon Territory. But that’s a post for another day. Until then, best wishes to you all…
Don’t forget to click for larger images! 
A Bridge to the Birds of Paradise
Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve was the single most heavenly tropical place I’ve ever been.
Even without the amazing birding experience, I would go back in a second.
Sian Ka’an is close to Tulum, Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula – a dazzling coastal ecosystem. My husband and I rambled along in our rented Jeep with no A/C on a long white gravel road that winds along the coast of the Caribbean Sea. It was a drop dead gorgeous sunny hot day. The shining white beaches were radiant even with the washed-up 
garbage strewn about. I hopped over photo op after photo op, looking for pieces of beach glass (something I could do for days, weeks, months!).
If it had been our choice, my husband and I would have driven that road till the end. But as we all know, daylight is limited and vacation time goes especially fast.
Possibly the best part of Sian Ka’an was the old weathered 
bridge that stood alongside the newer bridge that we traveled on. They cross a beautiful blue-green river that flows into the ocean. You can see a video of them here.
Locals fished off the bridges, breezes relieved the heat, and I found bird after bird to photograph.
To the left are female and male Great-Tailed Grackles. The gull, tern, and turnstone were firsts for me (below).
I’ll fondly remember this old weathered bridge for all my days, along with the fine feathered friends I met that day.
Honeymoon Bluebird
Exactly 4 years ago today I took this photo of a Mountain Bluebird in Yellowstone Park. It was 2 days after my wedding – my husband and I were on our honeymoon. (On the right is one of the amazing wedding photos Loneman Photography created.)
Supposedly Mountain Bluebirds do visit interior Alaska in the summer but I’ve never seen one here.
I’m happy to say that the population of Mountain Bluebirds, like Eastern Bluebirds, has been aided in conservation efforts by humans. By putting up nest boxes, humans have helped bluebirds increase in number since a decline in the mid-1900s. Finally, a success story!
Judy's Mostly Alaskan Bird Blog 