Northern dilemma..seems that winter as arrived

Heavy, snow-ladened clouds pressed down on the invisible Bitterroot Range. The light was dampened to levels similar to twilight. As I entered the Lee Metcalf National Refuge near Stevensville, the first bird I spotted was my first Rough-legged Hawk perched atop an utility pole (the usual spot). It was a typical plumaged individual with a whitish cowl. The diminutive nature of the Rough-legged Hawk’s features belay the predatory nature of the bird as it is the terror of the field’s voles and deer mouse. With passing truck underneath, it burst into flight and glided across the wetlands. This hawk will be the first of many, no doubt, but somehow it seems to be more important, more meaningful. The winter residents are the hopeful signs of life as the scenery decays into dormancy.

In the windrow near the old homestead, Black-capped Chickadees carried on as the well-hidden Great Horned Owl sat motionless in the midst of their vocal torment. A single flock of roughly 50 geese escape the shotgun blasts of some unseen hunter. No bird fell from the sky. I was relieved that on this day, they had remained safe and free. They wheeled around toward the south, and faded into the grayish, opaque sky as they picked up altitude and speed. I will await their return in April.

The ponds were filled with waterfowl with American Coot and American Wigeons composing the majority of the frantic, feeding mass. I had a perfect opportunity to observe the kleptoparasite of the American Wigeon or Baldpate (a romantic name of a bygone golden of natural history). The wigeon is the pirate of the waterfowl world in that it waits for the divers to bring its food to the surface where it is deftly snatched away by the pirate.

Here is a short video I took of the wigeon theft.

The snow become quite heavy as the light finally faded to dark, and I left Lee Metcalf for another day.

 

The day’s checklist