Last Minute Birding Trip to Frozen North

On Friday evening, we drove about 2:15 to Duluth.  We got a good start Saturday morning, showing up at the canal by about 8:15 to look at gulls.  Robert commented "I guess we're at the right spot" when we pulled up to the parking lot and saw perhaps 30 people standing around with binoculars/spotting scopes/giant cameras lined up looking at a stretch of the canal wall leading out to a lighthouse.  The canal wall was covered in gulls. 

(I had felt kind of funny about how crazy bundled up I looked in my stadium coat, fuzzy earflap hat, track pants, and short snow boots, but basically every single person was dressed in a variant of this outfit--and good thing because it was cold!  We spent a good amount of time standing around outside in single degree temperatures.)

The bird we came to see is an ivory gull, which winters 1500 miles north on the ice pack north of the Arctic Circle.  I find that gulls can be difficult birds to identify and distinguish from each other, but this one immediately jumped out from the pack because it was (1) smaller than all the other gulls by a considerable amount (it is about 17" long compared to 25" for the herring gulls, which most of the gulls were) and (2) it is bright white, as opposed to typical gulls that have a grey "mantle" (wings and back). 

As you might expect of a bird 1500 miles away from where he should be, the ivory gull was a young bird, so rather than being pure white all over (as the adults are), this gull had black flecks in the feathers around his bill and scattered on his body. 

I mounted my camera on Robert's tripod and, over the course of several periods in which I removed my hand from the glove/took photos/started to feel my hand freezing into a block of ice/put the glove back on, took 42 photographs of the gull.  At 260x zoom (and I didn't think at the time to use my phone as a remote shutter release), so...yeah, the photos did not turn out great, but the gull is at least identifiable!  A few people around me had been looking with curiosity/pity as I mounted my little camera but were visibly interested and boggled when I looked at the close up of the gull in my camera viewer.  I got a better view with my camera than with my binoculars.  A couple people peered over to my camera to get better views themselves.

The Crossley field guide notes that the ivory gull is "Often tame. Always a crowd-pleaser!"  That was definitely the case with this bird.  We visited the site 3 different times over the course of the day, and there were always dozens of people watching and talking excitedly about the bird.  The last time we left, we met a couple arriving in the parking lot.  The woman asked, "Did you see it?  Where was it?"  It was an unusual pleasure, where a gull is concerned, to be able to say, "It's very easy to see.  It'll jump out at you right away."

So here is my mediocre photo of this amazing bird.  A very nice life bird!

Ivory gull in Duluth, MN, 1-9-2016

There was also a greater black-backed gull, which is bigger than the typical gull (30") and has a distinctive dark black mantle.  That was new to our state bird list.

We had heard that glaucous gull [glaucous means having a light bluish-grey color] and Iceland gull were also being seen at the canal.  We'd seen a glaucous gull in the state before but Iceland gull would be a new bird for our life lists.  We had a bunch of confusion about these birds but ultimately figured out that we had seen both!  It became a lot easier to figure out when I found out from looking at the field guide in the car that the Iceland gull is smaller than a herring gull (22" to 25") while the glaucous gull is bigger (27").  Because there were so many herring gulls, the relative size of the birds was salient.  We had seen a smallish gull (smaller than a herring gull but bigger than the ivory gull) with white wing tips flying around.  That was an Iceland gull.  We had spent a while looking at a nearby young gull that was different from the young herring gulls around it because its face and throat was relatively pure cream--free of the darker speckling that was on the rest of its body and that the young herring gulls had on their throats.  Once we looked at our field guides it was clear that was a glaucous gull.

We then spent a LOT of time driving around a residential neighborhood and a park looking for a large flock of bohemian waxwings.  It turned out that we saw the very distinctive flock fly over us 3 times.  Or saw 3 different sub-flocks.  We kept hoping to get a closer view of the birds, but had to be satisfied with identifying the birds in flight.  (This was very easy to do.)  Although it was disappointing not to see a closeup of the bird, the scenery was actually very beautiful in that way that places are when everything is covered in snow.  So I do not have a waxwing flock photo to share, but I did take this photo of a tree flocked with snow.  Will that do?

We were also rewarded with our first sighting of a pileated woodpecker in the state...close enough that I could even take a photo of it!  He was working the hell out of that tree.

Pileated woodpecker in Duluth MN, 1-9-2016

In the afternoon, we drove over the bridge barely into Wisconsin and saw a juvenile gyrfalcon that has been hanging around a grain elevator on the breakwater.  (We have seen one gyrfalcon before, the one that showed up in Lubbock in 2002 and was a first record of the species in the state.)  So we actually added two birds to our Wisconsin list: gyrfalcon and the flock of rock doves that the gyrfalcon was chasing!

Other notable birds included boreal chickadee and pine grosbeak, which are always a pleasure to see. 

Trip totals:
Total species - 15
Life birds - 3
State birds - 4

Not bad for a trip that took almost exactly 24 hours!  (We got back to the apartment just short of 24 hours after we'd left.)

Appropriate Bird Shirt For Writing About our Trip--Sunday, 1/10/16

I was immediately attracted to the graphic T + pinstriped blazer + fun leopard shoes combo in this inspiration photo.

From fashionfairdust.com

Seems like a great opportunity to wear my LOVE dove top yet another way.  I'm kind of surprised by how often I want to reach for this shirt.  And put that together with blue leopard Oxfords and I'm in a happy workwear-meets-weekend place.

White/navy LOVE dove graphic T (Kohls), $2.29/wear
Navy pinstriped blazer (thrifted, the Limited), $1.25/wear
Bootcut jeans (thrifted, Kohls), $3.50/wear
Blue leopard Oxfords by C Label, $1.56/wear
Turquoise bead necklace by RB+

Outfit total: $8.60/wear

Another thing I love?  A jolt of turquoise with navy and denim.