Eclectic travelers

WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley Herons and egrets are birds that skulk along the edges of streams, ponds and rivers waiting for an unwary fish or frog to come within striking distance.  Faster than the eye can follow, their long necks uncoil as their beaks spear the water and their prey.  You have to admire their patience as they stand absolutely still for minutes at a time, and when they do begin to move through the water it is almost in slow motion. We’ve been seeing a lot of great egrets along the banks of the Mississippi River down here in Mississippi and Louisiana.  They have departed their summer haunts in Minnesota in advance of the coming winter, but will remain active down here in the Delta throughout the winter months. These birds remind us of the disaster that nearly befell them and other water birds at the end of the 19 th Century.  It was a time when women’s fashion decreed that hats must be adorned with plumage of all sorts, but the most elab...

GOING NATURE’S WAY By Kate Crowley We have now officially said farewell to summer.  On September 23 rd the sun had moved far enough south that we had nearly equal hours of daylight and night time.  Now it’s just a gradual, but inevitable slide into the darkness (a bleak description I know).  I am already looking forward to December 21 st .   But as I thought about the change of season I wondered why and how we call this particular season, both Autumn and Fall; the only season that has two words to describe it. I had to do some research to satisfy my curiosity. Turns out that for most of recorded human history there was recognition of just two seasons – winter and summer, the exception being the Chinese who divided the year into what we now call spring and autumn.  The word ‘autumn’ is Latin in origin and was first used in the 14 th Century, replacing the term ‘harvest’. The use of Fall appears in the 16 th or 17 th century, depending on who you co...

inhabit.com WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley Black-billed magpies are one of my favorite birds, even though I have to travel west to see them in abundance.  But this column is not going to be all about magpies; it is going to be about cats, as you will see momentarily.  Last week I was in Bozeman, Montana visiting my son and his family and while my granddaughter Teagan and I were in the backyard, we suddenly heard the loud and excited calls of a magpie in their neighbor’s yard.  Jon’s dog, Paolo rushed towards the fence and I told Teagan there must be a cat out; both Paolo and the magpie knew it.  Their next door neighbor could probably be called a ‘cat’ lady.  She lives alone and has at least four cats, which she allows roam outside.  One of the reasons Jon built the fence that separates the two yards was to keep her cats from coming into his yard, but it hasn’t stopped them.  Cats can leap high and scale barriers. As the magpie continued to ‘...

WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley Every year about this time my birding thoughts are focused on migration. I can’t help it.  Everywhere I look; up, down and straight ahead I see birds in motion and I know that they are heading south. I admit to feeling a bit melancholy about this annual procession, because I know it’s going to be a long seven to eight months before we will see them again. Just how birds make this biannual trip remains in some ways as much as a mystery as it was for our ancestors.  We have developed different technologies that give us a great deal of information about the routes they follow, but just how they manage the journey continues to inspire researchers and amaze the rest of us. We know that for millennia before humans walked the earth birds have been flying between North and South America. They are called neotropical migrants and we know that they come up from the south in the spring because the food sources in the northern regions are so overly abu...

GOING NATURE’S WAY By Kate Crowley   As I look outdoors this morning, I find myself wondering whether the sky is really covered with clouds or if it is more high altitude haze coming from the forest fires out west.  Several times this summer we have found ourselves witnessing the after effects of hundreds of wildfires burning in Canada, California, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Montana – each with more than 10 major fires burning right now.  We have all been in awe of the effect it produces on our sunsets, creating magnificent auroras of orange, yellow and pink.  For people living in those states and in Saskatchewan, the reality has been much less pleasant.  Smoke has descended into valleys and created dangerous air quality, not to mention the life altering devastation for people who have had the fires destroy their homes and surrounding forests.  As of right now - 30,000 fire fighters in the U.S. are battling these blazes; the largest number in 1...

WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley By the time you read this they may have already passed further south, but Oh, I hope you looked up and saw the Common Nighthawks flying overhead this past week.  You may have seen them and thought you were seeing gulls, but their sharply pointed wings and erratic flight patterns are unique.  We saw the first flocks as we were driving around Bay Lake.  I looked up and saw large flocks sweeping over the trees, probably hunting on the wing, which is one reason why their name includes ‘hawk’ in it.  This particular type of hunting and eating insects is actually called ‘hawking’.  It was mid-afternoon, not night when we saw the flocks, but I was first introduced to these birds when I was growing up in Minneapolis. I didn’t have a name for them at that time, but on warm summer nights when we would be playing kick-the-can out at the street corner, they would be a constant presence around the street lamps, diving down and sweeping upward ...

It was 33F Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. when I went out to feed the birds. Tiny bits of white flittered down.  I refused to believe it was snow and continued to trust in the weather report which said we were going to have a day with sunshine and 50 degrees.  As I drove north to Duluth I looked to the east and could see the sun trying to break through the clouds and by the time I reached Thompson Hill it was well on the way to succeeding.  The lake had a silvery sheen and more blue patches of sky were poking through the clouds.  It was going to be a beautiful morning on the Lake. I was headed to the U.S. Corps of Army Engineer pier where the R/V Blue Heron was docked, but first I and a lot of other cars had to wait for a gigantic freighter to pass through the canal and under the Lift Bridge.  From my position it looked as if the ship was as long as the entire Canal. It’s always a thrill to see one of these huge vessels pass so close by. We had met Bob Stern...