Many people have asked me to guide them for winter birding trips in northern Minnesota, including (perhaps mainly) Sax-Zim Bog.  This winter between February 5 and 8 I will facilitate winter birding in northern Minnesota.

Very important: My birding experience, facilitation and guiding comes at no charge … for free! I am taking zero money for facilitating this event! My love of birds and northern Minnesota’s wildlife is the basis of my gift to the attendees.

One needs to sign up / register now. The actual event which includes lodging and meals is being run by Duluth’s South Pier Inn (registration /information link given below), an excellent place of lodging on the Park Point side of the Aerial Bridge. Rooms look out directly upon the Duluth Ship Canal. I am a friend of the South Pier Inn’s general manager, and have agreed to facilitate the winter birding.

Each evening prior to the next day’s birding I will help plan outings at a hosted dinner. The first night will even include dinner at Duluth’s prestigious private club, the Kitchi Gammi Club. This private club was built by the lumber and mining barons in the early 1900’s.

• South Pier Inn’s Winter Birding Event
• Details / Sign Up / Register
• February 5 to 8, 2024

Space is limited. The South Pier Inn will start confirming registration requests on December 27 … two days after Christmas.

I had a great morning up in Sax-Zim Bog watching Great Gray Owls … many of them! In fact over the past two weeks I have seen quite a few Great Gray Owls throughout Northeastern Minnesota (not just Sax-Zim Bog). Yesterday over one hundred miles from the Bog I saw owls both in the morning and the early afternoon … with a break in between for church. About nine days earlier I saw some Great Grays in a totally different part of NE Minnesota. My point is our local owls seemed to have had a decent time this year raising owlets. I suspect a lot of the birds I am seeing right now are juveniles who are lousy hunters, and thus have to spend more time in search of prey.

Part of the reason for my success over the past two days in seeing owls is the weather had been ugly for many, many days which prevented Great Grays from successfully hunting. Normally I would never have looked for owls this morning. It was windy and very sunny which are NOT conditions which encourage owls to hunt, but if you are hungry …

Here is a picture of a Gray Jay / Canada Jay taken two days ago. Note how the bird is drenched. As noted the weather has been horrible.

As noted the sun finally returned this morning. Can you image having this experience??! I talked with the young couple and their car had an “open moon roof”. Perhaps the wife looked like a meadow vole!

Here are some more images from this morning. A good time was had by all (specially me, or at least me and the couple in the car).

Sometimes you get lucky! I was driving home yesterday from birding hear the Canadian border (good times … more later), and decided to swing by Sax-Zim Bog. I wanted to see if I could find the Northern Hawk Owl that has been haunting Hwy. 7. Northern Hawk Owls are notorious for using the same hunting territory, and when I arrived at my desired point shortly after lunch there was not a single car to be seen on Hwy 7 (not a good sign if you are hoping for an owl … other cars are indicative of an owl sighting).

I scanned the horizon with my binoculars and spotted the Hawk Owl over 2/3 of a mile distant. Oh well, I thought; many be it will move closer. I settled down to wait and then the owl disappeared. 30 seconds later it landed on a power pole right next to me!

Then the magic happened. With almost any other raptor I am able to tell when they will take off, with the Northern Hawk Owl I can not figure out when a take-off is imminent, and these owls are fast. Within a micro second they are out of your frame, and forget tracking.

As I said … I got lucky. The NHO took off and immediately turned back towards me while I was in the process of taking multiple pictures. Yippy!

Northern Hawk Owl Take-Off (if you can tell from the second image the owl is about to take off, you have a better understanding of these birds than me … it looks like the bird is about to take a snooze)

End Location … a RR Signal Pole right above me

A few more photos of my signature bird!