I don't know what she's talking about. We've just returned from a roughly 5000 km roadtrip, the major destination of which was a small town in the middle of North Dakota that is distinguished by the Giant "Indian Chief" statue outside the main hotel, and whose culinary highlights include "almost broasted chicken."
Oh, and birds. It has hundreds of birds. More like thousands. Egged on by friends who work as guides at the Potholes and Prairie birding festival each year, we decided to make the trip. I know that potholes make you think of decrepit streets on an urban grid, but here's the view of our friend Bill at 42nd and 32nd in Carrington.
You'd never want to get a NoDak-sized pothole in Toronto or Victoria. That body of water behind Bill is a prairie pothole. These wetlands were created when the Wisconsin glacier receded about 10,000 years ago, leaving behind large dips in the land that, on a seasonal basis, fill up with water and provide rest stops for migrating shorebirds and, together with the native prairie, breeding territory for most of North America's ducks. And, for good measure, all kinds of field birds inhabit the prairie, while ferruginous and Swainson's hawks cruise overhead looking for dinner.
Broasted Nelson's Sparrow, anyone?
Our first day in the field was one life bird after another, rapid-fire. The secretive sora eventually showed itself while yellow-headed blackbirds hopped from reed to reed. Easy to get a picture of a yellow-headed blackbird; not so easy with the sora. Still, I enjoy the pictures that exist only in my head as much as the ones I can capture with my new Leica VLux 4. And I enjoy the common blackbird just as much as the elusive sora.
The American bittern is also shy and can be a very hard bird to see, but this one was completely unaware of about 30 cameras and binoculars pointed his way from inside the van that pulled up alongside his territory. He sang (kind of a choking, burping gulp) and displayed like crazy.
Some birds, like the American avocet, really knock your socks off. Even when photographed through the window of a moving van, it looks like one of those decorative items from the '60s where a crane bobs its head over a mirror, the point of its bill hypnotically meeting its reflection over and over again.
It's a shock to see something like white-faced ibis in a prairie wetland. This is a distant and obscured view, but the bird still looks like a tropical migrant gone astray rather than a North Dakota resident.
Wilson's phalarope, the feminist shorebird. In an avian role reversal, the colourful female finds herself a mate, picks and defends nesting territory, and takes off for the South pretty much as soon as the eggs are laid. The males stay behind to incubate. Our male guides were slightly obsessive about this this little bit of trivia, if you ask me.
The prairie was full of bobolinks, a bird that sounds like R2D2 and looks as if it put its suit on upside down: black on the bottom and all the colour on the top and sides.
We also had a good look at a breeding colony of western and a few Clark's grebes, in total over 1000 birds. This is a Western grebe on the nest.
Who would have thought that such diverse and abundant life --we saw 115 species in NoDak, 31 of them for the first time-- would be found on the prairie, a place that we equate with industrial grain and beef farming? I suppose that I knew it intellectually, just as I knew 7 years ago that songbirds migrate through Toronto. But it's one thing to grasp the idea of a migratory path and quite another to find yourself smack in the middle of it. We were surrounded by birds in North Dakota, waking early every morning to their song in the woods around our cabin, watching mesmerized as male ruddy ducks bubbled the water in front of them in a courtship dance, and gazing skyward (with our mouths hanging dangerously open!) as hundreds of pelicans flew overhead.
Like just about everything natural and beautiful these days, though, we're going to have to work to keep the prairie pothole region. The natural prairie is disappearing, and even the potholes are being drained out and planted with grain -- not so much for a successful crop as for the payout of crop insurance. Shorebirds seem to have rebounded from an aggressive sport hunt only to see their habitat ploughed up into something they can't recognize or use.
But we sure know how to use the land. We just don't recognize it for what it really is.
Some things, it seems to me, and some places have their own inherent worth. I wish more of us had the opportunity to walk the prairie under a big sky. You never know what --or who-- might turn up.
2 comments:
Have to ask this - when you bought your house, was it done with migration paths in mind. Or, was that just a happy accident?
Gorgeous photos, Sara. Thank you for letting me relive the festival in your gorgeous prose. And yes, we have a lot to do to keep ALL our habitats alive and balancing wildlife with human needs.
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