The Snowbird Returns

Columbia, the snowy owl that Madison Audubon assisted in banding with help from ProjectSNOWstorm, is back on the radar and in the United States. Will she head back to Wisconsin? Follow her journey here. Photo by Monica Hall

We were delighted to receive an email from Project SNOWstorm on November 28, 2020 titled A New Season Amid Unusual Challenges by Scott Weidensaul. Scrolling quickly through the blog we spotted a photo taken by Monica Hall of “Columbia” being banded and fitted with her transmitter by Gene Jacobs in our residence laundry room on January 28th, 2020.  

 The text read:

“We got full data uploads from Stella and Columbia, both of whom checked in for the first time within minutes of each other on Nov. 12. Columbia, you may recall, was an adult female tagged in January by Gene Jacobs at Madison (WI) Audubon’s Goose Pond Sanctuary. She headed north in April, following the western edge of Hudson Bay to the Melville Peninsula, crossing to Baffin Island, then veering west and eventually reaching Prince of Wales Island in the central Canadian Arctic of Nunavut by mid-June.

Gene Jacobs holds Columbia. Photo by Monica Hall

There’s no indication from the tracking data that Columbia nested, though as a two-and-a-half-year-old bird, she might still have been a little young to breed. (The age at which snowy owls usually become sexually mature is still unclear.) She had several areas where she spent weeks at a time, but never showed the singular focus on one spot for six or seven weeks that would indicate a nest.

Columbia began moving south in mid-September, again following the western coast of Hudson Bay to Cape Churchill, where she headed southwest across Manitoba. By Nov. 19 she was near Canora, in extreme southeastern Saskatchewan.”

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It is amazing to be sitting at a computer and being able to look at over 7,600 hourly locations of a snowy owl that was last held by Graham Steinhauer at Goose Pond on a cold winter night last January.

You can browse through an interactive map of Columbia’s journey here. Zoom in on the map to take a closer look at the many, many locations she visited on her journey. Screenshot from Project SNOWstorm

Mark could spend hours looking at the data and exploring more about Prince of Wales Island (Canada).  For Columbia to reach Prince of Wales Island she flew northwest from Goose Pond to eastern North Dakota then north.  A distance of about 2,500 miles, about the same distance across the United States, but Columbia does not fly in straight lines.  We wonder if a computer could calculate her miles in one year from her hourly locations?

Prince of Wales Island is Canada’s 10 largest and the 40th largest island in the world.  The island is about 12,870 square miles and 20% of the size of Wisconsin.  Wikipedia states there are no permanent residents.   

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Columbia’s summer vacation

She crossed the Gulf of Boothia on June 4 and 5th flying about 70 miles from Baffin Island and “summered” on Prince of Wales Island from June 14th to September 18th before heading south. 

Prince of Wales is a great place for an owl to spend the summer looking for arctic wildlife and enjoying the scenery. In mid-summer she was treated to 24 hours of daylight.  What a change from last winter at Goose Pond when she only experienced nine hours of daylight on the winter solstice.  

This map shows the approximate range of snowy owls throughout the year. Mark and Sue have annotated the map to show where Columbia spent her summer! Range map from Cornell Lab’s All About Birds

Other birds of Prince Wales Island

Earl Godfrey in The Birds of Canada reported 34 nesting species on Prince of Wales Island: Yellow-billed, arctic, and red-throated loons; brant; snow geese; long-tailed ducks; king eiders; rough-legged hawks; gyrfalcons; willow and rock ptarmigans; American golden and black-bellied plovers; ruddy turnstones; red knots; pectoral, white-rumped, Baird’s, and buff-breasted sandpipers; sanderlings, red phalaropes; Pomarine, parasitic, and long-tailed jaegers; glaucous, Thayer’s, and Sabine’s gulls; arctic terns; snowy owls; horned larks; common ravens; water pitits; Lapland longspurs; and snow buntings. It is interesting that common ravens nest about five miles north of Goose Pond and that horned larks are probably the most abundant bird nesting in Arlington Township.

Mammals of Prince Wales Island

The list of mammals is not long but very impressive with marine and upland mammals including arctic fox; arctic hares; arctic wolves (subspecies Canis lupus arctos); Baleen and beluga whales; caribou; lemmings; musk oxen; narwhals polar bears; and ringed seals.

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Columbia’s Fall Migration Highlights

On November 28th Columbia was sitting on the hard water of Morrison Lake in North Dakota within one mile of her March 30 stop. Columbia on  December 6th was 311 miles from Goose Pond near the small town of Vesta in western Minnesota and had been heading southeast.  Last year she was seen and photographed at the UW Arlington Agricultural Research Station on December 11th.  We hope to see her on the prairie this winter.  However, time will tell if she returns.  

Columbia, photographed in the fields near the UW Agricultural Research Station near Arlington that she loved to frequent. Photo by Rich Armstrong

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Read More About Columbia

Links below are the January 31, 2020 Friday Feature, November 28, 2020 blog and a link on the Project SNOWstorm website to Columbia.  When you click on the dots you will notice yellow for daylight locations, gray for the blue hours and black for night.  You will also see her flight speed, degree heading, and altitude (a resting location provides the land elevation and a flight location gives you an idea on her flying elevation.  One time she was flying 51.9 miles per hour, probably with a tail wind and at 240 feet high.

• “We Named Her Columbia” — January 31, 2020 Friday Feathered Feature

• “A New Season Amid Unusual Challenges” — Project SNOWstorm blog

• Columbia’s Project SNOWstorm profile page, where you can follow her journey

We hope you check out her winter travels along with other owls.  Due to the Covid-19 virus no owls will be trapped and transmitted in Wisconsin this winter.  

Arctic wildlife and people are greatly impacted by climate change.  We hope that everyone does what they can to reduce climate change impacts.  

Written by Mark Martin and Susan Foote-Martin, Goose Pond Sanctuary resident managers

Fun Facts about the Turkey (Vulture)

Turkey vulture photo by Mick Thompson

We know Thanksgiving usually centered around turkeys. But variety is the spice of life, right? So for your pre-Thanksgiving entertainment, here are a few fun facts about turkey vultures:

• A group of turkey vultures is called a committee, or a kettle if in flight, or a wake if they're feeding.

• The scientific name means "cleansing breeze."

• Turkey vultures can travel up to 200 miles in a day.

• Their feet are useless for killing prey, but beaks are strong enough to rip through cow hide.

• A bald head prevents a delicious meal of dead meat from getting stuck to their feathers.

• What an incredible sense of smell! The wafting aromas of dead animals can be picked up from over a mile away.

• They sometimes eat so much that they can't take off or fly until they digest some of their meal.

• Turkey vultures vomit when they feel threatened.

Ok, who's ready for a holiday dinner?!

Before you get too involved in decorating, cooking, and enjoying, please mark your calendars for Giving Tuesday on December 1. Think Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but better! You can donate to support Madison Audubon's work through our website, any amount, at madisonaudubon.org/gt

If you are thinking about holiday gifts, check out our store for some great ideas -- tshirts, bird-themed greeting cards, a gift membership, or bundles for adults and kids. More info and options at madisonaudubon.org/store

And, if you are already shopping on Amazon, could we ask that you set your Amazon Smile account to benefit Madison Audubon? They donate while you shop!

With that, we hope that your Thanksgiving celebration is fun, relaxing, and orders of magnitude more delectable than a turkey vulture dinner. Thank you for being a wonderful part of this organization!

With a grateful, cleansing breeze heart,

Brenna Marsicek
Madison Audubon director of communications and outreach

Ring-billed Gull

Goose Pond could have been called Gull Pond on November 2nd, when there were thousands of gulls on the pond and many more in adjoining fields that were being plowed by farmers. That morning, Mark met Brand and Sharon Smith who were enjoying a morning of bird watching. Mark asked if they could count the ring-billed gulls, thinking that this “screech” of gulls may be a new record for the pond.

Brand and Sharon counted 6,960 ring-billed gulls and filed the following eBird report:  “Brand & Sharon drove around Goose Pond to get this count. 4,000 birds were following a very large tractor plowing the field. This tractor was plowing a distance of approximately 1/4 mile. The entire length of the plowed field was full of gulls. 1,300 were on the south side of the east pond. 660 gulls were on the west pond & in the field south of the west pond. 1,000 gulls were along the north side of County K east of Hopkins Rd.  When the ground is white there are a lot of gulls.”

The previous high count at Goose Pond by Spike Millington on October 31, 2020 of 1,000 ring-bills was short-lived. The 6,690 ring-billed count is also a record count for Columbia County.  

Sam Robbins in 1991 wrote in Wisconsin Birdlife that ring-billed gulls are common migrants and are a common summer resident north and east. Their main habitat is the Great Lakes and inland lakes. Sam also wrote “until recently the Ring-bill was known as a non-breeding summer resident, mainly along Lakes Michigan and Superior, and only occasionally as a breeder.” 

Photo taken by Joshua Mayer in Door County 2013.

It was not until the 1970s that ring-bill numbers began increasing along the shoreline of Lake Superior when Sumner Matteson and Jim Harris found 20 nests on Gull Island in the Apostle Islands. In 2019 Sumner surveyed Gull Island and found a flock of 12 ring-bills and “Dismal production—the worst I have observed in 45 years —of herring gulls with only 12 young.”  Nick Anich, Breeding Bird Atlas Coordinator, recorded an interesting observation of 200 ring-bills, 101 nests and 316 eggs on the Eagle Forge building in Ashland.

Gull numbers also increased along Lake Michigan and In 1976 Tom Erdman found about 273 nests in northeast Wisconsin and a year later a new colony appeared in Kewaunee County with 1,292 nests. In the recently completed Breeding Bird Atlas II, Tom Presby counted 4,500 adults and young at the Cat Island wave barrier near Green Bay in 2018.

While exploring data closer to home, we were surprised to find that Dory Owen found 20 nesting ring-bills nesting on the roof of the Walgreens Distribution Center in Windsor in 2019 and 18 adults and 17 young nesting on the roof of the Department of Natural Resources (GEF II) building, a block from the Capitol in 2017.

While visiting the Oshkosh Correctional Institution in the mid 1990s on DNR business, Mark found a gull nest on the ground in the center courtyard of the facility. The pair must have thought that ground nesting predators would not breach the heavily fenced facility.

Photo by Richard Armstrong

The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology states, “After nearly succumbing to hunting and habitat loss, Ring-billed Gull populations increased in most areas between 1966 and 2014, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. The North American Waterbird Conservation Plan estimates a continental breeding population of 1.7 million birds... Their populations plummeted during the late nineteenth century, when humans encroached on the birds' nesting grounds and killed them for feathers to decorate hats. By the early 1900s many breeding sites were defunct. Protection under the 1917 Migratory Birds Convention Act (Canada) and 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (U.S.) helped bring the species back, and now this species once again thrives across the United States and southern Canada—so numerous in some places that they are considered pests. In the middle of the twentieth century, Ring-billed Gulls around Lake Ontario proved susceptible to the pesticide DDT and to PCB pollution. Environmental regulations in the 1970s helped reduce pollution levels. Humans have generally helped Ring-billed Gulls by providing extra foods, including introduced fish; insects and grain exposed on farm fields; and discarded food and refuse. The Ring-billed Gull continues to extend its breeding range—likely fueled in part by the edible garbage available at open landfills.”

Short- to medium-distance migrant. Many birds migrate along coasts, including the Great Lakes, and major rivers. Ring-billed Gulls spend the winter throughout the southern United States. Courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The gulls at Goose Pond were probably feeding in the newly exposed soil on earthworms and grubs. They were interesting to watch as they leap-frogged over others to get close to the tractor. At dusk, the gulls fly south about 14 miles to Lake Mendota to join other flocks, and return to the farm fields the next day until the field work is completed. We believe the reason gulls congregated in record numbers at Goose Pond is that there may have been high numbers on the Madison Lakes, that farmers north of Madison were not plowing their fields, and that the gulls had to travel further away to feed.

Mark is looking forward to counting ring-billed and herring gulls for his 40th Madison Christmas Bird Count at the Dane County Landfill.  Numbers vary due ice conditions on the Madison Lakes.  It is not uncommon to find over 1,000 gulls at the landfill.

Photo of ring-billed gulls taken at the Dane County Landfill by Mark Martin on December 19, 2015. The photo was printed and gulls were counted by circling each one and counting the circles.

Next time you visit Goose Pond during the gull season spend some time watching their feeding behavior. They are an interesting and adaptable species that takes advantage of food sources found away from water.

Written by Mark Martin and Susan Foote-Martin, Goose Pond Sanctuary resident managers  

Cover photo by Richard Armstrong