Tamarac, a "Near Pristine" Refuge

In the last weekend in July, I headed northwest up to the Tamarac NWR. Established in 1938 Tamarac sits at the divergence of 3 biomes, coniferous forests, deciduous forest, and prairie grasslands. This provides a great diversity of habitat on the 42,724 acre refuge. These diverse habitats are a home to many different species of bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian and insect.

The refuge was originally set up to protect breeding habitat for migrating waterfowl. In the fall thousands of migrating waterfowl, often including more then 15,000 ring-necked ducks, stop over on the twenty-one lakes that are found on the refuge. Most of the lakes contain abundant food, such as wild rice beds, that the waterfowl take advantage of before they continue the trip south.
Some waterfowl remain on the refuge all summer long. Birds such as red-necked grebes, hooded mergansers, wood ducks and common loons will often nest and raise their young on the protected waters of the refuge.
With twenty-one lakes, three rivers and many other wetlands including marshes, bogs, swamps and ponds their is plenty of habitat for dragonflies. The most common that I spotted on my trip were Canada darner, blue dasher, and Halloween pennant, pictured above. There was also plenty of fields full of wild flowers with butterflies fluttering between the colorful blossoms.

The visitors center is located in the center area of the refuge over looking a beautiful wetlands. Refuge offices are also located in the building. From here they manage various aspects of the refuge including the management of wildlife such as trumpeter swans and bald eagles, water management, prescribed burnings and plantings, monitoring and controlling invasive species, and breeding bird and other surveys. All of this work has payed off to keep Tamarac in a "near pristine" state.

Old Faithful

I hope that you have enjoyed the posts over the past week. They were all posted in advance because Michelle and I have spent the past week taking pictures in Yellowstone National Park. I believe that this was our 7th trip to Yellowstone and despite some of the weather and other factors we had a very fun and productive trip.

Our typical day of vacation consisted of 12 to 15 hours of either shooting or driving or most often both. This did not leave me with much time to work on the raw images so I decided to start with something easy like Old Faithful. Old Faithful was named by the Washburn Expedition in 1870. The Washburn Expedition, which was headed by Henry Washburn the surveyor general of Montana, surveyed and named many of the landmarks in what is now Yellowstone Park.Old Faithful received its name because of its size and the frequency in which it erupted, however it is not the largest or the most regularly erupting geyser in Yellowstone. Old faithful erupts every 35 minutes to two hours. Because it has been thoroughly studied for many years it is pretty easy for the park staff to predict, with in a few minutes, when the next eruption will take place. Eruptions last anywhere from about a minute and a half to five minutes. From the first picture you can see that the eruption begins with small puffs of steam which emit from the geyser. Eventually boiling water joins with the steam rising anywhere from 90 to 184 feet above the ground, second pic. The flow of water and steam then begin to slow down until the geyser goes silent again, above.

Next to Old Faithful stand the Old Faithful Inn. The Inn was built back in 1903-1904 largely with local lodgepole pine logs. It is currently the worlds largest log hotel that is still in existence, at 700 feet in length and 7 stories high. The lobby opens up 65 feet to the ceiling with balconies lining its sides and a 85 foot 500 ton rhyolite fireplace standing in the center. The hotel was damaged during the Hebgen Lake earthquake in 1959 and was almost consumed by fire in the North Fork Fire of 1988 but it managed to survive and in 1987 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Through the century plus that the hotel has been standing it has housed many thousands of visitors to the park as well as 6 US Presidents.

Minnesota Capital

I work in St Paul, the capital of Minnesota, so one day last summer I stopped down by the capital with my camera to take some pictures. The capital building was constructed in 1905. It took around nine years to complete, with construction beginning in 1869. The cost of construction was 4.5 million. It's current estimated value is approximately 400 million.

The building was designed by Cass Gilbert who modeled it after the St Peter's Basilica in Rome. It is the second largest unsupported marble dome in the world, only St Peter's is larger. A guilded quadriga called The Progress of the State adorns the roof over the south entrance. It was sculpted by Daniel Chester French and Edward Clark Potter in 1906. Currently the capital dome is going through restorations.

You can also find the Minnesota Supreme Court Building as well as several other government buildings surrounding the capital courtyard in St Paul.

Another Sign of Spring

One of the first signs of spring here each year is the return of the herons to the rookery in the North Mississippi Regional Park. They usually start to arrive around St Patrick's Day so I headed over on March 19th. The rookery is located on a small island in the Mississippi. The park, where I shoot from, is located on the west bank of the river. Since the river is not very wide at this point distance is not much of a problem.

Even though the rookery is not very far it is still difficult to get an unobstructed photograph of the herons on the nest, because of all of the tree branches. So the best time to get a pic is when they are flying to or from the rookery.

As part of their mating rituals the males will go out and search for branches to bring back to the females for nest improvement. So on sunny days it is possible to sit on the shore of the Mississippi and watch these large birds fly over head carrying sticks of all sizes.

When they arrive at the nest with a stick their is a intricate ritual where the male passes the stick to the female from beak to beak. She will then take the stick and work it into the nest. This helps to replace nesting material that is lost over the long winter. I hope this year to get a chance to photograph some of the chicks but unfortunately the rookery becomes much more difficult to see once the trees begin to leaf out.

Canal Park Duluth, MN

I spent most of my weekend up north participating in the first ever Brrrrdathon. I took a lot of pictures of birds, which I will be sharing with you at some time over the next couple of weeks, but I also took time out to visit Canal Park in Duluth, MN.

Canal Park is a little tourist area around the canal that leads into the Saint Louis Bay and Duluth Harbor from Lake Superior. There are a lot of shops and restaurants around Canal Park but the center piece is the Aerial lift bridge that crosses the canal. On one side of the bridge is the city of Duluth on the other side is Minnesota Point, or Park Point, which is a seven mile sand bar that separates Lake Superior from Superior Bay.

The canal at Canal Park was built back in 1870 to allow ships a quicker access to the Duluth Harbor. As more people began to settle on Minnesota point traversing the canal became an issue. So in 1905 the city completed the bridge over the canal. The first bridge was a transporter bridge, on of only a few ever built, and had a gondola which was raised and transported across the top span.

By the 1920s the bridge could no longer handle the amount of traffic that was crossing the canal. So in 1929 they began work on remodeling the bridge. The new bridge would have the center span raised to accommodate ships traversing the canal. The work included raising the top span and adding a pulley and counter weight system to lift the center span. You can see the pulleys and the counterweight, from one side, in the photo above. Even though it was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1973 the bridge is still n use today and is typically raised 25 to 30 times a day during the busy shipping season.

Of course wherever you have open water in Minnesota during the winter you are bound to find some wildlife. So I managed to find a large flock of common goldeneye diving in the icy water looking for fish. There must have been good fishing near the canal walls because the birds kept diving real close to the side.

Wargo Nature Center

This year I decided to branch out a bit and check out some new places to do my photography. One of those places was the Wargo Nature Center in Hugo, MN. Wargo is part of the 5,000 acre Rice Creek Chain of Lakes Regional Park Reserve.

The nature center is located on a peninsula over looking George Watch Lake. Because of its accessibility to the lake it offers recreation opportunities, such as canoe, kayak or snow shoe rental, as well as nature watching.

The big reason for my visits was the occupied osprey platform. There are numerous osprey platforms around the Twin Cities, most of which were occupied and many closer to my house then Wargo, but Wargo is one of the best locations for photographing the osprey. Wargo is the only location that I know of in the Twin Cities with a blind set up to watch the nest. The blind has a good view of the poll and it is located south of the nest so the sun is always somewhat at your back.

After my many visits some of the people working at the visitors center began to recognize me and let me know about the upcoming banding. It was quite exciting to be there to photograph the banding of three new osprey chicks.

Mom and dad were pretty excited too, but it was a much different type of excitement. They circled in the sky above us as the invading predators took their babies from the nest. In the end though the osprey were victorious as the chicks were returned and the invaders driven away.

About six weeks later the chicks were full grown and ready to fledge. The adults had their work cut out for them trying to catch enough food to feed three full sized osprey plus themselves. Eventually the young were able to find their own food so there was no more reason for them to return to the nest which meant it was the end of my osprey photography but there was still plenty of wildlife at Wargo to photograph and hopefully next year the osprey will return.

An Example of Minnesot'a Scandinavian Heritage

Back in the pioneer days many people who came to this country from Scandinavian countries decided to settle here in Minnesota. This may be because Minnesota is very similar in climate to the places that they came from. Today there are examples around of how people in Minnesota are still very proud of their Scandinavian heritage. Our professional football team is called the Vikings, there is a Leaf Erickson Park in the city of Duluth, and there is this viking statue across from the state capital building in St Paul, just to name a few examples.

Javelina - Martin Refuge

What turned out to be probably our favorite location during our Texas trip, and probably the most productive, was a small private refuge near Mission Texas called the Javelina. The Javelina is about 300 acres of native Texas scrub habitat. It is owned by the Martin family and is the original home of private nature photography in the Rio Grande Valley.

Seven photo blinds are positioned through out the property with a dirt road winding between them. Three of the blinds are set up to get morning sun, three are more for the afternoon and one is all purpose. We started out in the raptor blind, pictured above in the morning.

As we got settled into the blind Patty Raney, photographer and our Certified Interpretive Guide for the day deposited chunks of meat and body parts that she had obtained from some of the local taxidermists. Soon after Patty left us the raptors started to come in to feast.

Northern caracara made up the bulk of the raptors that visited the area to feed. We did see and photograph caracara at other parks that we visited but none were as close up and personal as at the Javelina. Most were adults like the one two photos up but there were also some juveniles, like the one pictured above, mixed in.

Although the caracara had numbers the obvious bosses of the area were the Harris hawks. When they flew in to feed the caracara were quick to get out of their way. Harris hawks often nest and hunt in social units consisting of multiple birds. There was one unit consisting of 3 adults and one juvenile that appeared to rule this territory. When a group of about 8 turkey vultures begin to circle over head it was probably the presence of the Harris hawks that deterred them from coming in to feed.

After lunch we moved to an afternoon blind to photograph song birds and Texas specialties. These blinds are built sunken into the ground so that you can photograph the smaller birds at eye level. With a watering hole located near each blind and seed and meal worms supplied by Patty we were ready to get some good shots of some of the Texas specialty birds.

It did not take long before the birds came to check out the food. The first birds in were northern cardinals. Even though we snapped a few pics we were not all that excited because cardinals are pretty common in Minnesota. However the next bird that came into view where a species that has never, at least to my knowledge, been seen in Minnesota. Green jays are not known for being inhibited and as such they took over a lot of the feed for most of the time that we were there.

At our first afternoon blind the northern cardinals kept chasing away the smaller pyrrhuloxia from where the food was located in front of the blind. Since I was a lot more interested in getting pictures of pyrrhuloxia, a life bird for me, then of northern cardinals we decided to try a different afternoon blind. The second blind worked much better.

That afternoon we photographed great kiskadee, long-billed thrasher, white-tipped doves, common ground dove, plain chacalaca, pyrruloxia, green jays and olive sparrows, pictured above, all of which were life birds on that trip.

Split Rock Light House

I think that I jinxed Blogger this weekend. On Saturday I posted about how I had not missed a day of posting in two years and then on Sunday when I went to post Blogger was down. It was down all night and most of the day today. Now that I am home and I have finally found that it is working again I published the post that I could not publish yesterday. I also had a dilemma about my post for today. I have been posting all about the parks we visited on our Texas trip but they are very time consuming and since I was not able to start on the post until a few minutes ago, because blogger was down, I decided to instead post this picture of the Split Rock Light House that I took in the fog on Saturday.

Bentson-Rio Grande Valley State Park

No birding trip to south Texas would be complete with out a visit to the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. Bentsen is comprised of 760 acres of wetland, scrub brush, riparian and woodland habitat. It is surrounded by 1900 acres of protected native habitat, 1700 acres of which are Federal Refuge lands.

Bentsen is located on the Rio Grande River. Centuries worth of Rio Grande River flooding has made the soil more hospitable, making it possible for large tracks of floodplain forest to flourish in the park, especially near the river. Some of the border markers, that fix the official border between the US and Mexico, are no longer very close to the Rio Grande demonstrating how the path of the river has changed over time.

Bentsen is also the headquarters for the World Bird Center. The World Birding Center is an organization that promotes conservation and ecotourism, centered primarily around birds, in the Rio Grande Valley. The WBC had many blinds and feeders set up in Benson to attract birds like this golden-fronted woodpecker.

Due to large tracks of different types of habitat Bentsen is a magnet for many of the different south Texas and northern Mexican specialty birds such as the Altamira Oriole.

The Rio Grande Valley is one of the best spots in the United States to go birding. The reason is because of the variety of birds. Many birds either spend the winter in the area or pass through while they migrate south, or back north. Besides the spectacular variety that you see during migration the Rio Grande is also the northern edge of the range of many different tropical birds. These birds are usually very colorful like this great kiskadee.

Bentsen is not only about the birds though. Javelina's take advantage of seeds that spill from the many feeders in the park. Even though they may look like it Javelina are not pics. Javelina are peccaries. Peccaries are native to North, South and Central America and have several differences from pigs originated from Europe, Asia and Africa.
Around the visitors center the staff has planted many native flowering plants in order to help attract humming birds and butterflies. Small ponds and pools in the park provide excellent habitat for dragonfly larva, some of which emerge as colorful adults like this red saddlebags.

If you are very lucky you may get a peek at one of the secretive cats that live in and around the park. Bobcats, like this young one that was crossing the road with its mother, are the most common wild cat in North America. Their smaller size, stealthy movement and the fact that they are crepuscular, active mostly at dusk and dawn, help keep them hidden from most people. This is the first wild cat that I have ever seen or photographed, a lifer. Michelle was not there to see them but she got her chance to see her first wild cat later in the trip.