Southward Migration

The shallow water in Northwoods marshes and bays began to crackle with a skim of ice recently, gently reminding everyone that winter is on the way. Ice-up is a firm deadline for many beings who migrate to travel at least a little bit farther south. I got caught up in the flurry of activity and soon found myself in the Mississippi River Flyway swooping around the hills and corners of the Great River Road.

The Mississippi Flyway is busy this time of year! Photo by Emily Stone.

Just south of Brownsville, Minnesota, my skyward scanning for the bald eagles, who are always plentiful here, caught the graceful, long-necked shapes of three sandhill cranes flying in formation. As they circled between the forested bluffs and weedy backwaters, I swung into the small parking lot at the Brownsville Wildlife Overlook. The rattling bugles of the cranes sent a thrill down my spine. Could these birds be some of the thousands who we saw at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area near Grantsburg, Wisconsin just a few weeks ago? The biologist there did say that the cranes start to move on when the marshes freeze.

Two cranes feeding at Crex Meadows in late October. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Evening light shimmered on the calm surface of the Mississippi River backwater below the overlook, and a big white shape caught my eye. We had watched a trumpeter swan family with one cygnet feeding in Crex Meadows before the evening of cranes, and I chuckled at such elegant birds sticking their heads in the muck to feed.

A swan and cygnet feeding in Crex Meadows. Photo by Emily Stone.

But as I watched this big white bird foraging by repeatedly dipping a long orange bill in the shallow water, waggling it around, then tipping the pouched bill up to swallow, I realized that my first glance had been wrong. Pelican! American white pelicans forage in shallow water similar to the swans, but while swans eat aquatic plants, pelicans scoop up small fish and crustaceans in their pouch, then let the water drain before swallowing everything whole. Pelicans are known for nesting, migrating, and fishing in big flocks, but this migrating bird was solo. Where were their friends and family?

A white pelican feeds alone in the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Photo by Emily Stone.

My family was waiting for me to arrive in Northeast Iowa, so I left the rest of the cacophony of waterfowl, unidentifiable in the fading light, and continued south.

After supper we stepped outside into a crystal-clear night and found the sky aglow with northern lights. Red and white curtains shifted slowly above the tops of trees on our North Ridge. When we are south of the Auroral Oval, we only see the sides of those faint curtains of light on the northern horizon. When the oval widens or shifts far enough south, the light curtains appear straight above us, and you can look up at the bottom of the curtains instead of at their side. Then, the corona appears. After a few games of Bananagrams, we looked again, and this time we found streaks of light swirling around the top of the sky. The Auroral Oval had migrated south, too.

Looking south over my parents' house at the Northern Lights, you can just barely make out the old basketball hoop on our garage in Northeast Iowa...Photo by Emily Stone.

Thanks to the early sunsets and late sunrises this time of year, I wasn’t even tired when dawn light streamed through my window the next morning. Movement in the prairie grass caught my eye, and I watched in amusement as a dark-eyed junco fluttered up to grab the middle of a grass stalk, bending it toward the ground. The little bird then slid down toward the seedhead and pecked at a few bites of breakfast before jumping off and disappearing into the thicket.

Dark-eyed juncos breed across Canada. The northern forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota are at the southern edge of their mid-continent breeding habitat, and the Northwoods sometimes see a few juncos through the summer. The real influx comes when the leaves begin to fall and juncos head south to their winter range. The big push seems to have come and gone in the Northwoods, but now I’ve followed them south.

Later, as Mom and I drove along a winding, treeless, Driftless Area ridge, we spotted a hawk hovering over the corn stubble, their face to the wind. Black patches on the bird’s wrists and belly gave away their identity as a rough-legged hawk. After spending the summer on the arctic tundra, these beautiful birds head south to hunt in open country.

Back at home, we tackled some of the projects I’d come home to help with. Organizing bookshelves, I found my parents’ well-loved set of books by Sigurd Olson, one of the best-known authors to ever capture the Northwoods in words. In a roundabout way, these books are the reason I now live Up North. I often wish it was easier for my parents to visit the lakes and forests that Olson wrote about and I’ve fallen in love with, but this trip was a good reminder that pieces of the Northwoods also come south to visit them.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too. Natural Connections 3is available for pre-order from Honest Dog Books!

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.