Bobolink

Summer wanes; the children are grown;
Fun and frolic no more he knows;
Robert of Lincoln’s a humdrum crone;
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes:
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,
Spink, spank, spink;
When you can pipe that merry old strain,
Robert of Lincoln, come back again.
Chee, chee, chee.

-William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem about Robert of Lincoln and ended the poem with above verse.

Summer is waning at Goose Pond Sanctuary and the Sanctuary is serving as a stop-over and refueling site for migrating wildlife including bobolinks that are heading south. They are a long distance migrant heading on a 6,000 mile journey to the grasslands, wetlands, and grain fields of interior southern South America.

Bobolinks are in the blackbird family and their species name, oryzivorus means “rice-eating” and refers to this bird’s appetite for rice and other grains, especially during migration and in winter. Sam Robbins nick name for bobolinks was “rice bird” since they like to feed on wild rice in Wisconsin that ripens in late August and September.    

A flock of 60 bobolinks were first seen at Goose Pond on August 29 as they fed on Pennsylvania smartweeds seeds from plants located south of our barn. Smartweeds are abundant this year and the seeds provide high energy fuel. Bobolinks were still present in the same smartweed patch on September 10th. The male is unmistakable in spring finery of black, white, and yellow but before fall migration he molts into a striped brown appearance like that of the female.

Bobolinks will be leaving us shortly since they have a long way to go. It is interesting that migrating bobolinks can orient themselves with the earth’s magnetic field, thanks to iron oxide in bristles of its nasal cavity and in tissues around the olfactory bulb and nerve. Bobolinks also use the starry night sky to guide their travels.   

We hope you get a chance to see some rice birds on fall migration and look forward to their return in spring!

Written by Mark Martin & Sue Foote-Martin

Photo by USFWS Midwest, Flickr Creative Commons

Great Egret

There's a bird, it's all white, flying towards a dead tree. It's a great egret. A couple of its group have flown into the tree before me. Graceful, in its white plumage sliding silently towards the tree, the bird looks out of place, but its relatives in the dead hickory look decorated and stately. They are the decoration, strung about the treeline like ornaments. The egret in flight glides toward the tree, picks its spot, flares its wings, and drills a tree branch. Knocked onto its back in mid-air, the bird rights itself and flies slowly in a circle around the nearby pond. I try to track the bird, see where it goes, but more egrets circle in from the west and I lose track. Most of the birds land successfully in the trees, though a few more drill branches. I count sixteen in all. Are they only looking for a place to spend the night?

As it turns out, these birds stay for about a week, perched in trees and wading in the pond along Highway 89 here at Faville Grove Sanctuary. Some stragglers still remain. The sixteen pioneers on the first day turned into hundreds of egrets a few days later. A handful of great blue herons joined the stand. Herons are a bit larger, but the egrets steal the show this week. Cars stop along Highway 89 to spectate, pausing their commute, grocery run, and progress. How many times have these cars, these people, stopped, in awe of nature in their own backyards? This week they stopped where the egrets did. On the 89 pond, the stopped cars don't have much to see beside the stillness of the egrets. The white birds seem enough.

They are for me. Wading imperceptibly, one bird takes a stab into the water. Every ten seconds or so this recurs. The movement, however quick, doesn't affect the group's stillness.

People have been trying to glean something from egrets for a long time. It started as hats. Egret plumage made great wear for women's hats. Around the 1890's state Audubon societies started forming to protect birds from the feather trade. This represented one of the first explicit conservation movements. Wearing birds on your head meant you were progressive, upper middle class, but it also meant that someone had killed a bird to put on your head. Activists against feathered hats declared hats “unwomanly.” Their arguments considered the grace and beauty of the birds, their use on farms keeping down insects, but their most provocative argument at the time was that the birds being killed were mothers. In the case of snowy egrets in Florida, it was most useful to wait until the birds had a nest and then raid the nest since they adults wouldn't leave their young. Adults were killed, the young left to die in their nests. This imagery twisted the meaning of hat wearing from fashion to morality—women were embracing womanhood with hats, but in doing so they were killing mothers.

Of course, the women weren't doing the actual killing. The complicity of the middle men—sportsmen and shippers—was overlooked. Also overlooked was the ecology of the egret. Females were not the only birds dying. Egrets split time on the nest, and so half of the dead birds were male. The other arguments about the grace and the beauty of the birds don't necessarily hold up either. Egrets practice siblicide, where the larger chicks kill their younger siblings. They're also a bit awkward landing in trees, as I witnessed. The snowy egret became, and still is, part of the logo for the National Audubon Society. The efforts of activists reversed the prospects of many birds, and egrets have been recovering since. It is estimated that more than 95% of the egret population in North America was killed in the 19th and early 20th century.

You can find a lot of this history, and much more environmental history, in Jennifer Price's book Flight Maps. Price argues that the birds of the feather trade were unmoored from their ecology and the destruction of habitat and birds came about because economic forces separated connections to nature.

Where did the egrets at Faville Grove come from? Probably Horicon Marsh, or another rookery around the Oshkosh area. With such numbers though, it's possible that the birds we witnessed this past week were from all over: the Mississippi River, Canada, Minnesota. Those sixteen great egrets the first day were perhaps a flight map for other migrating egrets this week. They found wetlands, stillness, frogs, and insects. We were happy to have them.  

Photo by Dennis Church, Flickr Creative Commons

Northern Mockingbird

A rare summer resident in Wisconsin, the northern mockingbird is often seen so sporadically around the state that searching for evidence of breeding is not unlike looking for a needle in a haystack.

In fact, Sam Robbins wrote in 1991 that on average eight sightings were reported each year since 1960. With that knowledge, Goose Pond Sanctuary staff felt very fortunate to spot a northern mockingbird atop a tree along the eastern edge of the Hopkins Road Prairie on June 25th.

The northern mockingbird is fairly easy to identify and frequently gives a "wing flash" display, where it half or fully opens its wings in jerky intermediate steps, showing off the big white patches. We frequently think of the northern mocking bird as a southern species. This might be one species that increases in Wisconsin with climate change.

The bird was heard before it was seen, stringing together many different calls in a seemingly endless effort – a characteristic of the species. An adept mimic, the northern mockingbird is able to perfectly replicate many of Wisconsin’s beloved bird calls, including those of the American robin, eastern bluebird, mourning dove, tree swallow, whip-poor-will, and meadowlark. Each individual continues to add new sounds to its range, and an adult male may learn around 200 songs in its lifetime.  Northern Mockingbirds sing all through the day, and often into the night. Most nocturnal singers are unmated males, which sing more than mated males during the day, too. Nighttime singing is more common during the full moon.

Several days after the first sighting, David Shealer, a black tern researcher from Loras College, spotted a northern mockingbird on a telephone wire near the intersection of Highways 22 and 51/60 in North Leeds, less than a mile northeast of Hopkins Road Prairie. Despite our best efforts to locate the bird, this was the last sighting near Goose Pond Sanctuary.

Northern mockingbirds are often seen singing high atop vegetation, fences, and telephone wires, but prefer feeding in areas with open ground and shrubby vegetation, like hedges, fruiting bushes, and thickets.

In early summer, Sue Foote-Martin, co-manager of Goose Pond Sanctuary, spotted a northern mockingbird at their property in Columbia County that has an easement held by Madison Audubon Society. That made three sightings in one summer in Columbia County – not too shabby.

Columbia County has a history of northern mockingbird nesting activity, with two of the seven confirmed nesting sites found within a few miles of Goose Pond during the six years of the first Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas. Nests can be found in trees and shrubs 3-10 feet off the ground, but may be even higher.  Hopefully our shrub plantings at Goose Pond will attract northern mockingbirds in the future. Atlas workers will have to be extremely vigilant and very lucky if they hope to find the needle in the haystack.

Written by Tony Abate, former Goose Pond Sanctuary Land Steward

Photo by Eric Heupel, Flickr Creative Commons

Black-Billed Cuckoo

A long-tailed bird flies past us, into a thicket of brush. The interns and I stand for minutes, peering into the brush. We see a flash here, a tussle there. Someone spots a red eye. It's a black-billed cuckoo, an admittedly secretive bird. Standing only feet from the tangle of willow and aspen where the bird landed, we still couldn't make out where it was located.

The unique call of the cuckoo—“coo-coo-coo”—often greets early mornings or fills late summer nights during the breeding season. The black-billed cuckoo is one of the fastest birds to rear its young, taking on average 17 days from egg laying to fledgling.

Like most wild animals, the cuckoo's diet dictates its habits and ecology. Cuckoos especially enjoy caterpillars, and large infestations of caterpillars can attract higher populations of cuckoos. Additionally, high caterpillar density during the breeding season can cause these birds to deliver a second clutch of eggs. The problem with caterpillars, for cuckoos, is that the spines and defense mechanisms of the caterpillar can get caught in their digestive system. Cuckoos periodically shed their stomach lining to combat this issue.

Relatively common in Wisconsin, cuckoos prefer upland wooded or shrubby areas. You can find black-billed cuckoos, or at least hear them, at our Faville Grove Sanctuary along North Shore Road.

Photo by Jeff Bryant, Flickr Creative Commons

Sedge Wren

The somewhat late arrival of sedge wrens this year at Goose Pond Sanctuary has not affected the overall numbers of this small bird.

The Birds of North America publication states that “The sedge wren appears to be one of the most nomadic terrestrial birds in North American with breeding concentrated in widely different portions of its range at different times of the breeding season.  A first period of nesting is concentrated primarily in the upper midwest (Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota) and occurs during late May and June. A second, more widespread, nesting period occurs late in the summer (July-September) with birds expanding out into southern (Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri) portions of the breeding range.”

At Goose Pond, we expect sedge wrens to return around the 4th of July.  We anticipated their return this year so we could confirm nesting for them in our Breeding Bird Atlas blocks.  However, while on a frog count at Goose Pond on July 14 at 10:30 p.m. we were listening to the calls of two Virginia rails when we heard our first harsh introductory notes followed by a slow buzzy trill of a sedge wren. Sedge wrens can call throughout the day and night.  

Goose Pond staffers Tony Abate and Maddie Van Cleve found four sedge wrens west of the pond the next morning. Two days later while working with interns in the Wood Family Prairie, nine male sedge wrens were counted and Tony spotted a bird carrying nesting material in its feet, a confirmation for the Arlington priority atlas block. Over the next few days we found sedge wrens present at many of our prairies including the Browne and Sue Ames Prairies.

In the first Atlas project, sedge wrens were found primarily in sedge meadows and in native and restored prairies that provide tall, dense habitat. Their close cousin the marsh wren is primarily found in cattail marshes.

In 1991, Sam Robbins listed the sedge wren as a common summer resident. He went on to mention that in 1911, Columbus area farmers reported that they saw “hundreds” of eggs” destroyed by machinery when cutting hay, most of which were likely to be the eggs of sedge wrens. Sedge wrens were probably “abundant” at the turn of the century.  

In 1999, the Fish and Wildlife Service “identified the sedge wren as a conservation priority in the Midwest due to its rarity and declining population.” Researchers believe that Wisconsin is in the center of the sedge wrens breeding range. There have been relatively few field studies of this species, and thus many aspects of its natural history remain poorly understood. It would be nice to learn why sedge wrens return in July to Goose Pond when they are reported to nest in Wisconsin in late May and June.

We invite you to visit Goose Pond in August to view your beautiful prairies and to search for the nomadic sedge wren.

Written by Mark Martin & Sue-Foote Martin

Photo by Arlene Koziol