TODAY is the day! My owl book (A Charisma of Owls) is out today! This is the first book which I have made any major effort to promote, and I need to do more. It’s tiring. I know my books won’t sell just because they exist. Sigh. So, I am actually having an event to promote this one. Below is my “ad” for the event. I hope somebody shows up or I will have to eat a lot of cookies!
What’s Happening – BOOK LAUNCH PARTY
for A CHARISMA OF OWLS by Lynn E. Barber
When – Saturday, February 7 at 2 pm
Learn a few things about owls, see beautiful pictures of owls and hear stories about owls, hear Lynn read a few words from her new book, maybe, buy a signed copy of her new book, and most importantly, eat some of Lynn’s cookies
Where – Peace United Church of Christ, 1530 Grand Ave., Schofield (park in back; go to upstairs fellowship hall)
Today is Polar Bear Day. None in Wisconsin, of course, but I did get to see them in far northern Alaska a couple of times, including during my ABA big year (2008) and when we lived in AK (2014-21). This painting, done a few years ago, is from one of my photos. Happy Polar Bear Day!
I am at the end of the second day of a 3-day trip to Sax-Zim Bog, a mega birding hot spot a bit less than an hour out of Duluth. I went there last year in early February and had planned to join this year’s Wausau Bird Club trip there which begins tomorrow, but their schedule wasn’t quite right for me.
Although I enjoy wandering the roads here to see what birds are around, my real goal is owls, and in particular, this year I mainly wanted to see a Boreal Owl. A few days ago, they had apparently been numerous east of the Bog, but reports had dwindled. My only previous Boreal Owl sightings were in Alaska when we lived there. My second most wanted bird for this trip was Great Gray Owl, which I saw last year here, but just cannot get enough of.
While there were a few Great Gray Owl reports in the Bog yesterday, I did not see one, and there were no Boreal Owl reports there yesterday. It all changed today. In addition to a very cooperative sleeping and then hunting Great Gray Owl that someone else found and reported and which I visited three times from late morning to late afternoon, there also was a Boreal Owl sleeping and then waking less than a mile from the Great Gray. On my way back to my motel, I found another Great Gray Owl on my own. LIFE IS GOOD!!!!
The first six photos are of the huge (over 26 inches long) Great Gray Owl that I just could not resist.
The three photos below are of the very tiny (under 10 inches long) Boreal Owl.
Sometimes my birding and my rhyming get mixed up with each other. Yesterday I went to a neighborhood in Wausau where a winter-open creek (Bos Creek) appears from somewhere. All I know is that each winter since we moved back here in 2021, Mallards have congregated there along with a few American Black Ducks. Yesterday’s goal was to add a Black Duck to my year list, which I did, even though I had to stand outside for a minute or so in the 1-degree weather to do it, peering down at the creek, and trying to pore through the nearly 100, or maybe more, Mallards to find one. It turns out that there were at least two of them, so similar and so different from, a female Mallard.
I added American Black Duck to my year list and went on to other birding and then to chores. But in the middle of the night (early this morning), I awoke, thinking of the Black Ducks and then thinking of the old children’s song, “Little White Duck” (there are a bunch of You Tube versions of it online if you are not familiar with it). I couldn’t get the new words that came to me out of my mind. So I got up, and wrote it down. Here is my oh-so-creative “new” song:
There’s some little Black Ducks, sitting in the water, some little Black Ducks, doing what they outer.
They swim with the Mallards at little Bos Creek. Each so black with a bright yellow beak.
There’s some little Black Ducks, sitting in the water. Quack. Quack. Quack.
While we do not seem to be getting quite as much snow as was forecast, it definitely has been snowing for hours and hasn’t yet stopped. No new winter birds have yet arrived in our yard. Maybe they are waiting for more snow. Mostly it’s American Goldfinches and Mourning Doves for now. The goldfinches (often over 30 of them) have been crowding around the feeders.
The doves (sometimes over 40) hustle around ground, or perch in the spruce tree, waiting for the snow to stop.
Waiting, waiting…
Right now, however, everybody has departed from our yard, spooked completely by a Cooper’s Hawk that barreled through the yard in hot pursuit of one of the doves.
Sometimes birding is not about chasing birds, or even about seeing them, but is about watching for and waiting for them. Right now, while we still have the residents, such as Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, most of our summer birds have left for southern climes, not knowing we were going to have a mild fall, and basically no winter yet.
Our normal wintertime birds are mostly somewhere north of here in Canada, with only a few having finally drifted down to the northern part of the state recently. Although we’ve had a few light snows, right now there is no snow on the ground. It’s mid-December in central Wisconsin!
So birding now is more about watching squirrels eat bird seed in my yard than it is about watching birds.
Winter is coming they say- it’s supposed to dip below zero (degrees F) at night two days from now and to barely rise above it during the next day. And maybe there will be an inch of snow. Slowly, slowly. Maybe more birds will arrive soon…
It turns out that blogs may be infinitely revivable. At least that’s my hope. I love to write in them, but then life just gets in the way, again and again. Since bloggers can put their work out into the world without being stopped by review or rejection by anyone, it has only been me (and my tendency to happily overcommit) that caused me to stop posting.
This revived version of my blog will be a bit different from previous iterations. It will still cover bird-related topics but will primarily cover my bird-related writing endeavors, month-by-month. Should I have any birding adventures or especially interesting sightings, I will, of course, note them. I may also include updates on activities of the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology (WSO), of which I currently am President. With perseverance I will post at least monthly. That’s the plan.
My two current “bird-related writing endeavors” have the running titles of: 1) A Charisma of Owls (my “owl book”); and 2) Birding Times, A Life in Rhymes (my “rhyme book”). Both are completely written, or at least I have written a complete draft of each of them.
My owl book draft is currently somewhere in the recesses of Texas A&M University Press (TAMU), being evaluated by them to see whether it might, when sufficiently edited, be worthy of being included in their book offerings. Their outside reviewers both concluded a month or so ago that it should be pursued, but the Press’s editorial board needs to make their decision, which I await. They previously published my three other books (Extreme Birder: One Woman’s Big Year (2011); Birds in Trouble (2016) and Big Years, Biggest States: Birding in Texas and Alaska (2020)). I would be delighted if they would take on this fourth book. It covers all the known North American owls, with an emphasis on the owls of the United States and Canada. It also includes summary information on all the world’s owl species, highlights of owl-related lore of the world and summaries of many previous owl-related books, both non-fiction and fiction. All the North American owls in the book are illustrated with my acrylic paintings (sample shown here). The schedule: if all goes well with TAMU, this book will be available in Spring, 2025. If things do not work out there, I will work on self-publishing it. In any case, I will have copies available to sell at some point and will also be on the lookout for places where I may give talks on it. I will keep readers updated on progress on this book.
My rhyme book is a rather odd autobiography with my rhymes and prose interspersed to tell the story of my birding life so far. The poems were written over approximately 70-plus years from when I was a grade-school student to the present. Much of the text in the book, whether poems or prose, relates to birds and my bird-related thoughts, covering my international birding trips, pelagic birding, and big years (TX, ABA area, SD, AK and WI). There are also non-bird sections about my life, the lengthiest being poems on why I have put my thoughts into rhyme over the years. This book is illustrated with black-and-white copies of my bird paintings and sketches. The plan: self-publish soon, somehow, and then sell the books myself, in person and online. I will let you know in upcoming blog posts just how well this self-publishing process goes (does anybody know of a publisher of bird-rhyme books?).
When I restarted my blog a couple of months ago, I intended to keep my blog limited to Wisconsin bird topics, but birding in Arizona and Texas is so special, I just need to include a few highlights in my blog from my recent trip there. It was both a wonderful and a horrible trip. The birds and the birding, of course, were wonderful, but at the start of the trip when I had just been in Arizona a couple of days, I learned that my beautiful longtime Texas friend, Debra, whom I was going to visit and stay with and bird with the next week, had just died of a very unexpected heart attack! Deciding that changing my travel plans would do nothing to bring her back, I kept on keeping on with my previous plans.
After I birded with a Wisconsin-Arizona friend south of Tucson, the Arizona portion of the trip was primarily a great night-birds tour offered by Field Guides to southeast Arizona birding hotspots. We visited places on the tour that I had birded many years ago with my Texas friend. Each day where we went and the birds we saw brought memories of her. On this year’s trip, we saw many southern Arizona birds including five owls plus another owl that we only heard. After Arizona, I flew to Texas and birded places that she and I had birded together and had planned to bird again. I also went on my originally scheduled trip to the King Ranch, especially with the goal of seeing the Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl. A photo sampler of my trip follows.
The first set of photos is from days 1-2 of the Field Guides tour. The birds shown are in order from top left across each row and then going downward and across each row of photos: Verdin, Vermilion Flycatcher, Broad-billed Hummingbird, Yellow-eyed Junco, Arizona Woodpecker, Acorn Woodpecker, Elf Owl, Whiskered Screech-Owl, and Red-faced Warbler.:
The next set of photos is from days 3-5 of the Arizona guided tour showing a Montezuma Quail (bad photo that still shows its distinctive silhouette), Elegant Trogon, Green-tailed Towhee, Western Screech-Owl by flashlight, Spotted Owl (back), Buff-breasted Flycatcher, Black-chinned Sparrow and Lazuli Buntings at a feeder.
The last set of photos is from the Texas portion of my trip taken along the Gulf coast and along the Rio Grande Valley, showing a Great Kiskadee, a perched Greater Roadrunner (they aren’t always running on roads), and a Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl (two back views – top photo shows the feathering on its back that looks like eyes, and the bottom photo shows one real eye and part of one of its fake eyes on its turned head).
The mission of the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin (NRF) is to “protect our state’s lands, waters, and wildlife by providing funding, leading partnerships, and connecting all people to nature.” The NRF organizes people all across the state to offer hundreds of field trips each year. The fees collected for each trip go to the NRF or other designated non-profit group.
I had been wait-listed on this morning’s very early (4 am) NRF trip to Paul J. Olson Wildlife Area south of Wausau about 30 miles, but thank goodness, at the last minute a space opened up. After our group met, we were led out to the fields where we split into two groups of 4 people each to go to the two different blinds, each of which is positioned in the middle of a lek area where Greater Prairie-Chickens display during the breeding season. Our wooden blind mounted on a wheeled base was set in the middle of a flat field where beans are grown during the summer but was now just dirt and old plants. These birds, while occurring in a couple of other states in the US, are very much threatened in Wisconsin and are only found in the center of the state in a few restricted areas. We sat on wooden benches totally protected from the elements, with openable windows to allow us to better hear and to photograph the chickens when they arrived.
We began to hear to their moaning hoots and clucks about 5:25. Soon after that we could see dim views of them as they danced around, sometimes having what seemed to be mock fights with other males. At first we could only see the displaying males, about 8-9 of them. Eventually three females casually appeared, pecking at the ground, while the males danced around. They moved around our blind coming closer and moving away as they danced, clearly accustomed to its presence. About an hour later, the females disappeared, but the males, now up to 12 or so, carried on. I’m not sure if they thought the females were still lurking nearby in the taller grass surrounding the lek area, which could have been the case, or if they were just practicing for tomorrow’s display. By about 7:30, most of the males had gone, and we headed back to the meeting area for coffee, food, and discussion about the world of the Prairie-Chickens and the people who manage and/or own the land where the Prairie-Chickens live.
This morning I saw my first Ruby-crowned KInglets of the year at McMillan Marsh about 45 minutes south of my Wausau home. There was a little flock of them singing and chattering, some of them coming down to bushes along the path, ignoring me entirely. Every now and then one of them would excitedly raise his red crest and chatter even more vigorously, apparently at another kinglet that came too close. There were also a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets that stayed higher in the trees. I spent about half an hour trying to get a photograph of the ever-moving Ruby-crowned Kinglets. Many many of my photos showed only branches, but finally one of the kinglets stayed near enough for long enough that I was able to get some pictures of it.
For many years, every time I have seen a Ruby-crowned Kinglet I have been suddenly reminded of a day long ago in North Carolina. After we moved to Raleigh in the late 70s, the heat and the ever-present numerous wood ticks mostly had kept me mostly indoors for weeks, maybe months. I had been a birder before the move, birding in the much cooler climates of Wisconsin, Alaska and Oregon, but now I just could not face the muggy frighteningly ticky out-of-doors. One day as I was taking trash out to our backyard garbage can, a sudden explosion of chattering came out of a sapling near the can. Just at eye level was an extremely tiny, extremely agitated bird, with the top of his head bright red. A beautiful little Ruby-crowned Kinglet. I was stunned. Why had I abandoned birding? Just because of heat and bugs? Really. There were too many birds waiting to be seen. I had to face it. I would face it. I would go back to birding! And I did! Since then I have never not been a birder. It is too much fun. There are too many remarkable little (and big) birds, and too many remarkable things to see them do. Thank you little Ruby-crowned Kinglet!
