Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

My daughter and son-in-law moved to Duluth from Brooklyn, New York, in April 2020, during the pandemic. She was pregnant at the time, and they lived with us, both working remotely, until Walter’s first birthday, when they moved into a house just 3 miles away, on Tischer Creek. I was in heaven getting to spend so much time with Walter while Katherine and Michael were working, plus I got to start a new yard list!

The house they moved to is next door to a good birding friend of mine, Bruce Munson. He and I started texting back and forth when one of us saw a good bird so the other could see it too, like Great Horned Owl, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, and Wood Thrush. This year on January 23, while I was babysitting, he spotted a Barred Owl in his backyard, close to his house. I couldn’t see it from my daughter’s place but went over and saw it through his window.

When a rarer bird is involved, to get the word out to a wider circle, Bruce and I both post on to local rare-bird report text group. Early in the morning on May 17, 2022, I spotted a bird at my feeders that isn’t rare in most of the state but is very unusual up here—a Field Sparrow.

It was new for both my backyard and county lists, so I sent a text to the group before heading to Walter’s to babysit. The birders on that list know they can come right into my backyard as long as they close the gate behind them so our dog doesn’t get out. Several birders showed up to see it.

Then I got a group message from Bruce, who’d spotted a mega rarity—a White-winged Dove! And what on earth—he was looking at it in my backyard! I can’t remember if there was ever a time when over a dozen birders saw a rarity in my backyard before I even knew about it. My son-in-law Michael had a pretty flexible schedule that day so he gave me time off for good behavior—I raced home and voilà!

The White-winged Dove is a bird of the American Southwest, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In recent decades, the White-winged Dove has been extending its range northward. Several birds were released in Dade County, Florida, in 1959, and after the introduced population there got established, it expanded its Florida range northward, too, so now I see it just about every time I visit my son in Orlando.

Some plucky White-winged Dove individuals have wandered far, far beyond even those range expansions. As of this year, there have been more than three dozen sightings of White-winged Doves in Minnesota. The first two sightings were all the way up here in Duluth. Parker Backstrom spotted the first when he was counting migrating birds at the Lakewood Pumping Station way back on October 13, 1985. That was less than a week after my son Tom was born, so I’d taken a few weeks off from counting which was just as well—Parker had way more experience than I did with southwestern birds, and I really might not have recognized it.

The second Minnesota record of White-winged Dove was on September 15, 1994, at Hawk Ridge. Like the first, it was a fly-by, so no one not there on the spot at that moment had a chance of seeing it.

The next Duluth sightings, 15 years later, were both in the fall of 2009. The first was in August, just a few blocks from my house, and the second was in October at Erie Pier—that bird stuck around for 7 days so was seen by many, but not by me. I missed them both because I was working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York at the time.

We went another 12 years before a White-winged Dove turned up in Duluth again—the one in my own backyard. I was of course thrilled. Someone among the many birders there would of course send out the alert, but I was thrilled that it was Bruce Munson posting from my place while I was next door to his.

This week, Bruce texted with a wonderfully cool rarity—a Carolina Wren! I’d heard and taken photos of one on Park Point on April 10, 2024. There’ve been a few recent Duluth and northern Minnesota sightings of this southerly bird, including on August 14 when one was reported up in Grand Marais. But this beautiful, charismatic wren with the big, beautiful voice—the state bird of South Carolina—is always lovely to see and especially to hear.

Bruce originally heard and saw it in the morning on August 25, but it flew off before I could get away. Then about 5:00 pm he saw it again and texted me, and I was there in a flash. It disappeared just before I got there, but Bruce and I kept a lookout. A thunderstorm was looming and I was close to giving up when suddenly a beautiful song rang out. I had the bird in view for a minute or two on a closed umbrella on Bruce’s deck. It took off just before the downpour materialized. I retreated to my daughter’s house to spend time with Walter until the storm let up, and then headed for home. The bird must have stuck around somewhere—Bruce heard and saw it again this morning, the 26th.

Neighbors share gossip, cups of sugar, and a lot of other things. Bruce is the best kind of neighbor. He shares wonderful birds.