Winter birding in Minnesota

Paul Bannick — Birds of the bog: a pine grosbeak; bohemian waxwing; timber jay (gray jay). 

In a Minnesota Bog, a Festival of Birds

By GUSTAVE AXELSON, NYT

ON an early winter’s evening in northern Minnesota, a convoy of five snappy yellow school buses rolled out into the dusk. From the windows, the distant horizon of pointy evergreens and wide-open expanses of frosted wetlands looked like a frozen dead zone. But we were on a tour to see life — bird life.

“Welcome to the Sax-Zim Bog,” said our guide, Steve Weston. “Tonight we’ll be going through the towns of Sax and Zim, population nothing.” Moments later we drove by a snow-dusted, abandoned trailer, the front door hanging off one hinge. This was downtown Sax. Zim, a few miles to the north, wasn’t much more. Both are remnants of failed attempts to farm the bog that date back to the early 20th century. Now they are ghost towns surrounded by 200 square miles of wetlands.

Sax-Zim is no winter wonderland. But I and the 120 other birders — some from California and Texas — who had signed up for the Fifth Annual Sax-Zim Winter Birding Festival on a February weekend last year didn’t care about scenery. We were here to glimpse hard-to-spot boreal bird species — birds from Canada’s Great White North that fly down to Sax-Zim from December to March. Owls are a main attraction, including the majestic great gray owl, which, at nearly three feet, is North America’s tallest. In fact, in these first hours of the festival, we were en route to see one. An advance scout had found an owl in the bog and was keeping an eye on it, waiting for the buses to arrive.

The three-day festival consists mostly of tours like this, with breakfasts and dinners and bird talks served at the community center in the town of Meadowlands, just south of the bog. Birding guides from Duluth (about 60 miles to the southeast) lead the tours. Most festivalgoers also make the hour’s commute from Duluth each morning, since that’s where the hotels are.

(More here.)