A Torrent of Mis-Named Birds

The tannin-stained waters of the Cascade River churned frothily into the cold, blue waters of Lake Superior. Upstream, impressive torrents of spring melt poured through the sculpted canyons as if they were a root beer float fountain belonging to a giant. My partner and I stayed well back from the edges of overlooks. Though unlikely, the thought of falling in and getting swept up in the flood was terrifying. How do the fish and aquatic invertebrates survive? Or maybe some don’t, and that’s why a couple dozen ducks had gathered to feed around the outflow.

The Cascade River floods through the canyon. Photo by Emily Stone. 

This is the outflow of the Temperance River, but it looked very similar to the mouth of the Cascade! Photo by Emily Stone. 

First, we squinted, then we peered through binoculars, and finally I zoomed in with my camera to make sense of the dark shapes. The ducks had a funny conehead and a gracefully swooped patch of gray on their side. The pale ring around their dark beak was the most distinctive character. I’m not good at waterfowl, so I wracked my brain for a likely ID…were they ring-billed ducks? That would be logical. But no, a quick peek through the Merlin app’s helpful photos confirmed that these were ring-necked ducks. Huh?

A very zoomed in shot of the ring-necked ducks. Photo by Emily Stone.

This name is a throwback to the days before binoculars and zoom lenses when ornithologists studied birds by shooting them, stuffing them, and then storing the preserved specimen in a museum drawer. Study skins are usually stored on their backs, so the first thing those early ornithologists would see upon opening the drawer was the belly of the bird, or in the case of the ring-necked duck, a handsome collar of chestnut brown. As valuable as museum specimens are, they can’t replace direct observation of a living being.

In life, ring-necked ducks have a prominent white ring around their bill. This fades quickly after death. Instead, early ornithologists named them for a band of feathers that’s most visible when laying on their back as a study skin. This taxidermy mount is old and looks like a female, so that makes the colors even less prominent.
Photo of the Cable Natural History Museum collections by Emily Stone.

My partner—a beginning birder—was interrupted from his rant about the negative impact of poorly named birds on the ability of people to get into birding by the squawk of a yellow-bellied sapsucker. We spotted the handsome little early returner nosing around an aspen tree. Although they are about the size of a downy woodpecker, and share the black-and-white checkered back feathers, sapsucker males have a matching throat patch to go with their crimson forehead. In contrast, the lemon-colored wash on their belly feathers is only visible in good light. Early ornithologists got their behavior wrong, too. They don’t suck sap; they lap it up with a brush-tipped tongue. This is one character that should have been more visible in a dead specimen than through binoculars, if anyone had been curious enough to look.

Open a drawer of bird study skins in any museum, and you’ll be treated to a look at their belly feathers. This led to birds being named for colors that are often hard to see in real life—like the yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Photo of the Cable Natural History Museum collections by Emily Stone.

Arriving home after the waterfall tour, we were thrilled to find our front yard filled with dark-eyed juncos. Our arrival startled the flock into a reverse cascade of gray and white feathers that whooshed lightly up among the birch twigs. Every grassy lawn and roadside across the Northwoods lately has been witness to these swirling flocks. Juncos winter only as far south as necessary to find bare ground and seeds. Now most of these common forest birds are headed far into Canada, while a few will stay here to nest.

Wetlands aren’t a place you’d expect to see juncos, and yet the word junco refers to Juncus, a genus of wetland plants that includes bulrush. One hypothesis is that juncos reminded those early ornithologists of a European bunting who does actually live among the reeds. In their defense, habitat isn’t so obvious once a bird is in a drawer. On the other hand, maybe they should have done a little more research.

Juncos are a type of sparrow, and joining the flock were two cousins. For once, the white-throated sparrows were aptly named. The American tree sparrows, though, spend most of their time on the ground or in low bushes, and nest on the tundra beyond the reach of true trees. This is likely another case of being named for a European look-alike that turned out to not have much in common with our North American neighbor.

White-throated sparrows are aptly named. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The list of mis-named birds is long, and more will be arriving any day now! Tennessee warblers will pass briefly through that locale before they go to breed mostly in the boreal forests of Canada. Cape May warblers do the same. Palm warblers will keep going—they are the second-most-northern-breeding warbler.

It could be worse. A study by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and New York University found that almost 90 percent of birds are named for their appearance, habitat, or other personal characteristics. Only 11 percent are named after people, with no connection to the birds’ natural history at all. So, 90 percent of the time, early ornithologists tried to be helpful and descriptive. It’s just that sometimes they described the wrong thing.

Maybe it’s understandable. In the 1700s and 1800s an entire continent of new species had just become accessible to people whose experience was based an ocean away. Many unfortunate barriers stood in the way of learning from the Indigenous peoples who already had names for and knowledge of these feathered relatives. There were more birds back then, too. Just since 1970, we’ve lost an estimated 29 percent of birds across North America. How many more birds would there have been during those early days of colonization?

Can you imagine the chaos of a spring with more than double our current number of birds feeding, singing, migrating? Amazing! But perhaps to those early ornithologists it felt a bit like an overwhelming torrent. Like the ring-necked ducks feeding on stunned invertebrates, they would have had to wait for birds to be incapacitated to get a better look. It’s no wonder those first birders got a few wrong.

But as we walked into the house, a black-capped chickadee scolded from the neighbor’s trees, reminding us that occasionally those early ornithologists got it just right.

Black-capped chickadees are named after their jaunty hat and scolding call.
Photo by Emily Stone. 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed until May 12 to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

A Shorebird in the Forest

A small strip of open water reflected the blazing sunset sky. Although my partner and I dug our toes into a sand beach at the Day Lake Recreation Area near Clam Lake, Wis., the punky ice with glimmering puddles of gold prevented any notion that we might still be on vacation in coastal South Carolina. Surprisingly, we experienced similar air temperatures on both beaches, but a stiff ocean breeze had chilled us even more than looking at this frozen lake.

Sunset at the Day Lake Recreation Area near Clam Lake, Wis., 

 

The beach in South Carolina got surprisingly chilly once a breeze picked up!

With one last glance at the fleecy orange clouds, we moseyed back to the car and started rolling slowly down the entrance road. In just the same stretch as last spring, a bit of movement caught our eye, and we followed the fluttering descent of an American woodcock as he returned to his dancing ground. Starting up his slow rhythm of distinctive peent calls, the small gent directed romantic messages to any female woodcocks hiding in the scrubby forest nearby.

Just having returned from a week of birdwatching on the Atlantic coast, the plump-bodied, long-billed silhouette of this “hokumpoke” reminded us of the sanderlings, dunlins, and willets we’d watched scurry ahead of the waves. It’s a strange fact that despite their preference for damp thickets instead of beaches, woodcocks are the most numerous sandpiper in North America.

American woodcocks are the most numerous sandpiper in North America.
Photo by Keith Ramos, USFWS.

Sandpipers are a group of small shorebirds in the family Scolopacidae who like to feed on little critters picked out of soft soil. Long, narrow wings aid in their impressive migrations from northern breeding habitat to southern wintering grounds. Their streaky gray-brown camouflage blends perfectly into the forest floor, or matches sand, rocks, dune grass, and wrack. And that camouflage comes in especially handy when they sit on their eggs, since their nests are just scrapes in the ground.

Sanderlings probe wet sand quickly for bits of food. Photo by Emily Stone.

This lesser yellowlegs stalked a mudflat and seemed to be catching aquatic worms.
Photo by Emily Stone.

Willets are shorebirds who breed in the Western U.S. and Canada. Photo by Emily Stone.

In the fading light, we could just make out the shape of the woodcock’s head bobbing and long beak opening in a hiccup-like reflex. Peent. Like all sandpipers, the tip of the woodcock’s beak is filled with touch sensors similar to those found in your tongue, but more focused on sensing vibrations. Can you imagine thrusting your tongue into mud and feeling a worm at the other end? Even if you could, how would you grab the tasty tidbit inside a narrow hole? Sandpipers solved this problem with rhynchokinesis (rin-koh-ki-nee-sis), which is just a fancy way of saying that they can flex open the tip of their upper mandible instead of opening their whole beak evenly like chopsticks.

Despite many similarities, sandpiper species forage using a variety of techniques. On the beach, we watched flocks of sanderlings chase the waves, then rapidly probe wet sand like feathered sewing machines. A willet spun in circles and grabbed for prey visible in the surf. Lesser yellowlegs stalked aquatic worms with staccato motions in the mudflats. I’ve never been lucky enough to watch a woodcock feeding, but in a video I found online, the bird repeatedly vibrated their beak into the ground like a gentle jackhammer, then paused thoughtfully. Presumably they were waiting to sense the vibrations of invertebrates in the soil with their beak.

What astounded me most about the video was how much time the “bog sucker” spent alone with their head in the sand—far more than any of the other shorebirds I watched feeding. For a tasty prey animal, that’s dangerous! Adapting to this behavior has rearranged woodcocks’ entire noggin. As their eyes moved upward and backward to give them a 360 degree view while feeding, their ears found a new home below their eyes and their nostrils approached the base of their bill. Then the parts of their brain that control movement migrated from the rear of their skull to the top of their spinal column. Their brain has essentially turned upside down to match their feeding posture!

After two minutes of peents, each preceded by a little hiccup if we were quiet enough to hear it, the “Labrador twister” burst up from the gravel with twittering wings. Rising in a broad spiral, the “timberdoodle” cleared the treetops and circled toward the gray clouds. Fatter than a robin, smaller than a grouse, the winged shape twittered ever higher into the navy blue. About 200 feet up, the twittering became sweet chirping, and the “night partridge” sideslipped down like a falling leaf. Peent. Back on his gravel dancing ground, the male continued his courtship display.

The entire sandpiper family is known for elaborate, fluttering mating displays with their own weird sounds. Maybe someday I’ll visit the Arctic tundra where many of them breed and witness that wonderful pageant of nature.

In the meantime, I’m happy to watch our most common local shorebird peent on a gravel road and flutter above a patch of tangled Northwoods. The female woodcocks laying low may pretend to be unimpressed by this display, but my partner and I have no reason to hide our delight.

 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed until May 12 to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Heron's Plan

Turkey vultures and black vultures circled above the trees. As expected, I’d spotted my first turkey vulture of the year the day after I wrote the article about them. Then, I promptly headed south to meet their migration.

Now, here I was on the entrance road to Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina, which follows a causeway through the salt marsh. Richard, a park volunteer who leads birding walks each Wednesday morning, patiently detailed the identification clues for the vultures in his New Jersey accent. Turning back to the shallow channels exposed by a falling tide, our group of about 15 regulars and vacationers focused binoculars on greater yellowlegs, willets, snowy egrets, great egrets, and more. With every sentence, Richard’s information gave me more confidence in birding this strange new ecosystem.

Out among cordgrass, finally I spotted a bird I didn’t need help identifying. The elegant silhouette of a great blue heron towered above the rest of the shorebirds. I’ve observed herons from coast to coast, since they thrive in a wide variety of wetlands. This bird lacked the striking black crown and head plumes of a mature adult, and the bit of mottled brown mixed into their plumage further gave away their youth. They stalked diligently, but unsuccessfully, for a meal.

I stalked the mudflats, too, but not for fish. Someone had pointed out the oyster beds being exposed by the receding tide, and told us to watch for the fountains of water they squirt at random intervals. They were excreting waste, but purifying the water in the process. It felt like winning the lottery every time I caught a squirt in my binoculars.

Then, with a whoosh, our attention returned upward. Another great blue heron, seeming huge in their proximity, swooped in on their six-foot wings and landed near a small, wooden observation pier. I admired the pale highlights on their slate-gray body feathers while sunshine highlighted their yellow beak and graceful black head plume. With fully adult plumage, this bird must be at least three years old.

The heron seemed to hold their breath as they peered into the shallow water, seeing things hidden from us by the glint of ripples. Feeling the bird’s intensity, I held my breath too. Then, in a swift motion, the heron’s legs bent backward as they leaned forward. It’s a strange sight, since we expect the joint in the middle of a leg to bend like our knees. But birds’ knees are hidden up near their body, and the knob halfway between feathers and feet is equivalent to our ankle. Herons’ necks have an odd hinging system, too. A pivot point between their sixth and seventh vertebrae allows their neck to double back in an S shape while at rest, then shoot out with lethal force.

When the heron straightened up, a fish at least as big as the bird’s own head was clasped in their ferocious beak. Patiently, the heron gripped tight while the fish thrashed. I’d read that herons will sometimes whack a fish to stun it, or drop it back in the water to try for a better grip. This heron just held on, their huge yellow eye appearing to bug out a little from the effort.

The fish appeared to be a striped mullet, a common species of coastal waters. At first, the mullet appeared to be winning. They flopped and slipped father through the herons bill, surely about to escape the final grip on their head. Then the heron’s plan became apparent. All the movement was maneuvering the fish’s head to aim aerodynamically into the heron’s beak. With one last toss of their head, the fish disappeared. The heron straightened their neck to help the bulge slide down, then gulped water, wiggled their long pink tongue, and snapped their beak. A few silver fish scales glinted on their lower mandible.

Watch my Facebook Reel of the event here! 

We moved on to get out of the midday sun, but I’ve read about what the heron would do next. Catching fish can be slimy business, and to keep themselves clean, herons use comb-like claws on their middle toes to preen “powder down” through their feathers. This removes slime and grime. The powder comes from the tips of down feathers that break into dust. These feathers are never molted, they just keep growing as they are used.

Despite the dozen or so new species of birds I spotted in the salt marshes, beaches, and forests of South Carolina, witnessing the amazing behavior of this familiar friend stands out. Black vultures, great egrets, and white-eyed vireos, will probably never be part of my daily life, but herons could be. And every sighting teaches me something new.

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed until May 12 to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Spring Cleaning with Turkey Vultures

PSA: you might want to finish eating your breakfast or lunch before you read about turkey vultures eating theirs!

Mesmerized, I paused in the warm, South Carolina sunshine to watch a kettle of turkey vultures circle lazily, their wings tracing the invisible movements of air. From a nearby tree line came the lusty singing of a brown thrasher, and the sweet trill of a pine warbler. The week I spent at Loon Camp on Lake Jocassee in early March was a delightful preview of spring.

Most people probably don’t associate turkey vultures with spring—or even realize that vultures may have flown as far as South America for the winter—but they are one of the earliest returning migrants. “What blazes the trail,” wrote Mary Oliver, “is not necessarily pretty.” Vultures need warm weather so that the smell of their food can rise skyward, and because it’s far easier to eat fresh roadkill than frozen dinners.

Of course, food spoils more quickly in warm weather, and eating the putrefying flesh of deer, raccoons, and other beings who’ve met their demise has its dangers. Getting hit by cars is an obvious one. Plus, rooting around in rotting meat would make you or me very sick. Despite their gross diet and appearance, every adaptation of the turkey vulture is aimed at cleanliness, and they have some ingenious ways of staying healthy.

For example, they defecate on their own legs, using the super acidic liquid as a disinfectant and to cool their body as it evaporates. The bare, red skin of their heads not only gives turkey vultures their name, it also allows the sterilizing effects of ultraviolet radiation from sunlight to kill bacteria. That’s very useful after sticking one’s head in a rotting carcass. UV sterilization works on their feathers to some degree as well. Especially after damp weather, you may notice them perched with their wings spread to the sun.

On the inside, turkey vultures’ intense stomach acids can kill the microbes that cause botulism, anthrax, cholera, tuberculosis, salmonella, and rabies. How appropriate that the birds’ scientific name—Cathartes aura—means “purifying breeze.”

Their digestive system is so powerful that it even destroys the DNA of their food. Isn’t that normal, you may wonder? Not at all. In fact, wildlife researchers often test the scat of their target species for the DNA of their prey to determine what they are eating. It even works for humans. Scientists have found it’s more accurate to test the DNA in a stool sample than to rely on people to self-report what they eat each day when doing dietary studies. That wouldn’t work for vultures.

At a roadkill, though, venison isn’t the only thing on the menu. Even if vultures find a dead animal quickly, they may eat on it for a few days. In that time, plenty of other critters join the feast—the meat will be colonized by a host of potentially pathogenic bacteria and invertebrates. Plus, if an animal’s tough hide wasn’t breached by the cause of death, vultures may need to use an existing hole to get inside, putting them in contact with feces, too. Despite the effectiveness of bare skin and sun baths, one study identified roughly 528 different types of microorganisms living on a vulture’s face.

See how the turkey vulture's eye looks cloudy? Like many birds and other animals, turkey vultures have a third eyelid called a nictitating membrane. It acts like goggles to protect their eyes while feeding. Photo by Emily Stone. 

What’s even more amazing was that only 76 (14%) of those microbes survived the vulture’s stomach and made it to the large intestine. It takes a very special microbe to make that journey intact!

In particular, researchers from Denmark discovered in 2014 that there are two groups of pathogenic bacteria possibly acquired from carcasses, that thrive in a vulture’s stomach. Clostridia bacteria cause food poisoning, lockjaw and malignant edema in people and cattle. Fusobacterium are flesh-digesting bacteria that would make most critters very sick. It’s thought that the vultures have developed a symbiotic relationship where they allow microbes who were starting to decompose the carcass to continue their work on into the vulture’s stomach, thereby assisting with digestion and releasing nutrients where the vulture can absorb them.

While this idea would once have been far-fetched, scientists continually uncover more examples of symbiotic relationships in nature. It’s not at all uncommon for an animal to rely on microbes to help digest their food—that’s how our stomachs work, too. And it’s also common for parents to pass those partners on to their children. Since vultures feed their chicks through regurgitation, they likely get a dose of those bacteria even before they start feeding on carcasses by themselves.

As of March 27, I still haven’t seen a turkey vulture in the Northwoods, but soon they’ll be showing up on the wind and helping us out with a little spring cleaning!

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar opens for registration on April 1st at 9:00 a.m.! The Museum is closed until May 12 to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Thrasher Concert

The air was cool but not crisp as a small group of loon researchers gathered in the morning light outside the villas at Devil’s Fork State Park on Lake Jocassee in South Carolina. “There’s a loon!” someone exclaimed, as they pointed through the screen of trees toward a familiar silhouette bobbing on the rippled surface. Since we had all gathered as part of Loon Camp—the week-long loon research experience for adult volunteers—this was an appropriate first bird of the morning.

First loon!

But spotting loons wasn’t our main goal, at least not yet. Each morning of Loon Camp beings with a land-based birding walk for anyone willing to wake up early. The cloudless blue sky of our first day made it truly feel like spring—and sound like spring, too! An eastern phoebe repeated their rough, two-note fee-bee! call from among the villas. As we ventured onto the pine-lined park road, the evergreen canopy came alive with the tiny, squeaky toy noises of brown-headed nuthatches. A northern cardinal scolded harshly from the brush, then posed briefly in a sunny tree to show off his scarlet crest. A pair of eastern bluebirds posed on their nest box.

Brown-headed nuthatch

Northern Cardinal

Eastern Bluebird

Those of us who had traveled from the still-wintery lands of Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio, reveled in the cacophony. And then it got louder. From the top of a leafless oak tree commenced a steady stream of whistles and warbles that sounded as if an entire flock of flickers, vireos, titmice, cardinals, and wood thrushes were all taking turns. Just one robin-sized bird perched there, though. Listen

Brown Thrasher

There are three “mimics” common across North America. These birds all increase their repertoire of songs and show off their skills to the ladies by copying from other birds. Northern mockingbirds repeat each stolen phrase several times. Brown thrashers tend to repeat each phrase twice. Gray catbirds say each phrase just once, and pepper their concert with a distinctive, cat-like mew.

With some imagination, I could hear the mnemonic plant a seed, plant a seed, bury it, bury it, cover it up, cover it up, let it grow, let it grow, pull it up, pull it up, eat it, eat it, in this bird’s song, and quickly identified him as a brown thrasher. Depending on who you believe, brown thrashers have a repertoire of over 1,000, over 2,000, or over 3,000 song types that they can string together in one run-on overture.

Brown thrashers are special not only in the variety of phrases they can sing, but the types of sounds they can make. Birds have a two-sided voice box called a syrinx, and by controlling each side independently, thrashers can harmonize with themselves!

We smiled at his enthusiasm, and then turned around so we wouldn’t be late for our first day of counting loons on Lake Jocassee—an experience I wrote about last week.

Later in the week, I set out by myself on an afternoon nature walk. As usual, the birds had stopped singing. The relative quiet made a rustling in the dry leaves even more noticeable. Pausing, I watched for movement, then zoomed in. Behind a screen of twigs, I glimpsed the striking black back, orange sides, and white breast of an eastern towhee. Barely a foot away, I spotted the rusty back and striped chest of the brown thrasher. Although these two birds are not closely related, they share a habit of living in brushy places, and scratching loudly through leaf litter to find insects, worms, lizards, frogs, fruits, and seeds. We’ve captured both of them during our Wisconsin Master Naturalist bird banding experiences in the Moquah Barrens—which is another similarly brushy habitat.

Eastern Towhee

Brown Thrasher

Amused, I watched as the brown thrasher used their long, curved beak to toss aside sticks and leaves with gusto. Their yellow eye with its large black pupil appeared to be open extra wide as if anxious not to miss any potential snack they had just uncovered. Once, they picked up an acorn and seemed to assess its value before tossing it aside.

Every single morning of Loon Camp we were treated to a concert from at least one, and often two, brown thrashers singing their hearts out, competing for females and territories in their own version of American Idol. As soon as the pairs start nesting, the guys will quiet down and focus their energy on more important tasks, like assisting with incubating their 2-6 eggs. These birds likely spend all year in the favorable climate of South Carolina, but across the Southeast are other brown thrashers who will soon be migrating north, just a little bit behind the loons. Their concert tour continues! Plan to attend one of their performances at dawn in your local shrubbery.

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar opens for registration on April 1st at 9:00 a.m.! The Museum is closed until early May to allow for construction of our new exhibit, The Wetland Way. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Loons of Lake Jocassee

Loons bobbed on the early morning ripples as our pontoon boat sped across the open waters of Lake Jocassee, South Carolina. “First loon!” someone exclaimed gleefully, but otherwise we ignored them. At least for the moment.

When Brooks Wade, our host and pontoon captain, crossed an imaginary line at the divide between the big, round lower lake and the narrow arms of the upper lake, he cut the engine. The sudden quiet gave Jay Mager a chance to explain our task. “We’re counting all the loons in our half of the lake,” he said. “The other pontoon will count the lower lake.” Brooks pointed out the imaginary center line of the upper lake, and we began puttering up the west side, counting all the loons between the center line and our nearest shore. We’d tally the east side on the way out.

Looking at a map of Lake Jocassee, it’s easy to tell that this was once a watershed of steep stream gorges cutting deep into the “Blue Wall” or the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Eons of water erosion—not glaciers—carved deep wrinkles in the landscape.

Then, in 1968, when Duke Energy began building the Oconee Nuclear Station, they dammed the confluence of four rivers to create a reliable source of cooling water for the plant. The 350-foot-deep-lake filled, and the atoms began splitting, in 1973. The plant is still providing electricity to one of the fastest growing states in the nation, and today, a network of dams in this watershed creates hydroelectric power, too.

The outstanding water quality of Lake Jocassee also provides excellent winter habitat for Common Loons. Brooks got a major case of loon love in February 2010, when he began his job as a campground host by walking down to the edge of the lake and hearing a loon wail. Although they were newly married and had just moved from Florida, he told his wife Kay that they were never leaving.

Scientists used to think that almost all our Common Loons spend the winter on salt water. From across the northern lakes, loons migrate to both coasts and the gulf each fall to avoid ice-up. After starting a business giving pontoon tours, Brooks began to think that the number of loons he saw each winter on this freshwater lake was significant.

In 2016, Brooks searched out LoonWatch at Northland College online and sent then-coordinator Erica LeMoine photos of wintering loons on Lake Jocassee. She put him in touch with former Northland College professor Jim Paruk, who by then was working for the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine. Within a matter of weeks, Jim flew in and partnered with Brooks to capture and band the first Lake Jocassee loon, which someone named Bob.

Bob is identifiable by colored bands on his legs. His frequent preening allows researchers to observe the bands and identify him. We were very glad to see him again this year!
Photo by Emily Stone.

The next year, Jim brought in his colleague, Jay Mager, an expert on loon vocalizations teaching at Ohio Northern University, and together with Earthwatch they hosted week-long loon research experiences for adult volunteers for three years. By then, Brooks and Kay had started their own non-profit outdoor education program, and they took over the organization of the “Jocassee Loon Camp,” with Jay Mager and Jim Paruk each leading a different week of research.

The first day of Jay’s week begins with a count of all the loons on Lake Jocassee, which is why I was now puttering through the upper lake on a pontoon boat with Jay, Brooks, and five other “loonatics” for the second year in a row. With eyes scanning and binoculars at the ready, we spotted solo loons fishing in the deep water, rafts of loons preening near shore, and gaggles of smaller waterfowl like horned grebes, too. Jay kept the tally on his data sheet, and we were free to be amazed by the loons.

Here, on their winter habitat, the loons are finishing up a “catastrophic molt” where they replace all their feathers, including flight feathers, and are water-bound for the duration. As a result, the loons here can look pretty scruffy. Many of their heads are grayish brown, and their black checkerboard backs are uneven. Stray feathers stick out at funny angles, and discarded feathers float on the waves after strenuous bouts of preening each day.

Loons molt their flight feathers while on their winter habitat. Photo by Emily Stone. 

One particularly avid preener’s antics showed off a specific combination of silver, red, blue, and yellow bands on his legs. This was one of just a few loons banded on Lake Jocassee five or six years ago. He yodeled when they captured him, which is how the researchers know that he’s a male. This loon was spotted in the summer on Upper Cormorant Lake in Minnesota. He was back on Lake Jocassee again to demonstrate that at least some loons return to the same winter habitat each year. Gathering this type of information is one of the main goals of banding birds.

The loons of Lake Jocassee don’t look like the Common Loons we know from summer in the Northwoods because they are in the middle of molting from winter brown to their snazzy summer tuxedoes. However, this particular loon was captured on Lake Jocassee in the winter, and outfitted with colored leg bands. Then he was spotted again last summer in Minnesota! Long-term research on the behavior of individual loons has been essential in advancing our understanding of their lives and conservation needs. Photo by Emily Stone.

The hours ticked off as we counted a dozen…two dozen…then eight dozen loons! We’d wound our way up and down every single narrow passage in the upper lake, admired cascading waterfalls, and enjoyed a calm winter day with ample sunshine. By the end, and with the tally of a second boat that explored the main lake basin, we counted 139 loons—nine more than last year!

All eighteen of us loonatics headed to shore—wind-burned and happy—ready for the next day’s task: observing and recording loon behavior.

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Winter 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.

*Portions of this article were originally published in 2025.

“Whooo” will we see?

After watching Canada jays, red squirrels, and boreal chickadees stuff their bellies with peanut butter at the Admiral Road feeders in Sax-Zim Bog, my family and I wandered over to the Friends of Sax-Zim Bog Welcome Center and took a walk down Gray Jay Way—a trail that was named before Canada jays had their name changed in 2018.

Gray jays became Canada jays again in 2018. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Mid-afternoon is a notoriously quiet time for birdwatching, but we admired the whimsical shapes of the black spruce and tamarack trees in the bog and enjoyed the sunshine of an unseasonably warm day. Hummocks of sphagnum moss, bog rosemary, leatherleaf, Labrador tea, and other bog plants had begun to emerge from beneath the drifts, so I often focused down.

A flutter of movement caught my eye. Crouching low, I spotted a tiny moth crawling on the glass-like jumble of half-melted snow. Brown wings folded over their back in a nondescript robe with a short fringe along the trailing edge. Thin antennae sensed the world. Uploading a photo to iNaturalist, I was amazed when the app provided a fairly confident identification: Acleris oxycoccana. According to Wikipedia, their caterpillars feed on leatherleaf—the plant I’d found them near, and the adults have been observed flying around in nearly every month of the year!

This tiny moth eats leatherleaf in bogs and has been observed in every month of the year! Photo by Emily Stone.

Seeing a moth seemed to signal that evening was coming, and our thoughts turned to owls. Sax-Zim Bog is famous for hosting rare owls. Last year was an incredible irruption year when great gray owls, boreal owls, and snowy owls visited from their homes farther north. This year has been much quieter. A few great gray owls nest here, but lately they’ve been secretive.

This is the southern edge of northern hawk owl breeding range, and sometimes more northern residents migrate here in the winter, too. We’d heard that a northern hawk owl was hunting at the edge of a field on some of the private land that makes up the patchwork of ownership in Sax-Zim Bog Important Bird Area in Northern Minnesota, so off we went!

The line of birders with spotting scopes and giant cameras on tripods was much easier to spot than the owl. She blended in with the brush at the base of aspen trees in the fencerow. Northern hawk owls are relatively small raptors who act more like hawks. She was using her excellent vision to look for voles in the field below. Hawk owls hunt more with their eyes than most other owls, who tend to rely on precision hearing for catching prey under grass and snow.

When she finally swooped down and then back up to a new perch in the aspen tree, we got a better look. Her breast was finely barred with brown stripes and the shoulder she turned toward us was dark brown. Dark feathers outlined her face and highlighted her yellow eyes. After a while she swooped down and disappeared again among the brush.

Northern hawk owls hunt more in the daylight, and more with their eyes than a typical owl. Photo by Larry Stone.

We’d also heard reports of both a long-eared and a short-eared owl hunting in a particular grassy field, so we went to investigate.

Long-eared owls look a bit like great horned owls, with two feather tufts (neither ears nor horns) sticking up above a tan facial disk. While they nest in the Northwoods and throughout Eurasia, somehow they’ve never been on my radar. They are secretive, and very nocturnal. Using precision hearing they can catch prey in complete darkness! During the breeding season only, they give a series of powerful but monotone whooo notes—not nearly as charismatic as the barred owl’s “who cooks for you?” call. The last rays of a setting Sun turned the field golden as we watched. This is where they like to hunt…but where was the owl?

Long-eared owl, Photo by By Pavlen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80979664

We also hoped to spot the short-eared owl, another hunter of open country. I have seen these widely distributed owls in two very different places. Once, while driving along the Dalton Highway in Alaska, one swooped over the pipeline—not too far from some caribou! And again, at dusk in Haleakala National Park in Hawaii, the local subspecies, called Pueo, soared over the switchbacks in the park road.

Short-eared owls can travel long distances even over the ocean, which is probably how they came to be found in Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and all over the world. A few even breed in Wisconsin! This photo is from Alaska. Photo by Emily Stone.

This is the Pueo, a subspecies of short-eared owl who live in Hawaii!

Scanning the horizon for owls, I finally spotted a black silhouette perched at the top of a far tree. My binoculars were no match for the distance and the dusk, but another birder with a powerful lens stopped to see what we were looking at. As the shape took flight, he snapped a few quick photos. Dark body, shoulders, and wrists contrasted with white trailing edges in a pattern that was unmistakable—a dark morph of a rough-legged hawk.

This is a rough-legged hawk from a different winter, probably a female because of the dark belly band, and probably in Iowa. The one we saw had even darker shoulders with no white mottling...at least that we could see in the dim light. Photo by Larry Stone.

These incredible raptors nest all around the top of the globe and migrate to the middle latitudes for the winter. Feathers all the way to their toes give them their name and the ability to withstand frigid temperatures while hunting lemmings and voles wherever they go.

The rough-legged hawk disappeared over the far trees, and the Sun sank below the horizon. We decided to head home. Thirty-six minutes after we left, more patient birders reported on social media that the long-eared owl came out to hunt. That’s the way it is with birding, and we wouldn’t have it any other way—now we have an excuse to go back to Sax-Zim Bog next winter!

Sunset + birds = joy!

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Winter 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.