Explorer: In a Minnesota Bog, a Festival of Birds

Paul Bannick

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

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.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimestravel for tips, features and photography from all over the globe.

Michael Furtman

A great gray owl, one of the major draws for birders visiting the Sax-Zim Bog in remote northern Minnesota.

"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.

On my first outing, I was overjoyed at the prospect of nailing down a great gray. "Stop!" squawked a middle-aged woman from the back of our bus. We had been instructed to yell out if we saw a bird. Mr. Weston peered though his binoculars. "Yup, ruffed grouse. Right there, in the willows," he said. Ruffed grouse? They're about as rare in Minnesota's North Woods as a chicken in a barnyard, I thought. But some folks from Arizona wanted to get a good look. The other buses rumbled off down the road. Impatience rumbled in my belly.

Ten minutes later, we joined a crowd of beaming, bundled-up birders at the edge of a clearing. "Sorry, you just missed it," said a woman, grinning. She was referring to the great gray owl, and she wasn't gloating. She was just happy. But it still stung.

On the bright side, it was only Friday. I still had the rest of the weekend. And Sax-Zim, while notorious for fierce windchills that dip to 40 below, is a hot spot for great grays, which come to hunt the area's abundant moles and voles. "It's certainly one of the top spots in the nation for boreal species," Mark Martell told me weeks later. Mr. Martell is bird conservation director for Audubon Minnesota, which classifies Sax-Zim as an Audubon Important Bird Area, a designation reserved for the best bird habitats in the world. "I can't think of any other place that combines the numbers of boreal birds with the access by car," he said. "I mean, sure, you could go bushwhacking up into remote roadless peatlands in Canada to find these birds. But who the hell wants to do that?"

Birders have traveled here from as far away as Norway, Ireland, Belgium and China. Sax-Zim got a reputation as one of birding's holy grounds in Mark Obmascik's 2004 book "The Big Year," which became a movie starring Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black in 2011. In the book, two birders, Al Levantin of Colorado and Sandy Komito of New Jersey, made pilgrimages to the bog in their quest to spot the most bird species in a single calendar year. Mr. Komito, who set the big year record, failed to get his owl at Sax-Zim. I was hoping for better luck.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Explorer: In a Minnesota Bog, a Festival of Birds

Dengan url

http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2013/01/explorer-in-minnesota-bog-festival-of.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Explorer: In a Minnesota Bog, a Festival of Birds

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Explorer: In a Minnesota Bog, a Festival of Birds

sebagai sumbernya