October 22, 2024
As I was walking through one of my favorite birding spots, the Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery, I was thinking about the four survivors; birds I have photographed many, many times over the years who have overcome challenges of one sort or another. I’ve spent so much time photographing these four that I feel a particular kinship with them.
One of those birds, a female Blue-winged Teal, is a year-round resident at the fish hatchery, but shouldn’t be. I see her at the hatchery almost every time I visit and have pictures of her throughout the four seasons. She has become so familiar to me that I named her Betty.
When I realized that I had pictures of her for every single month of the year, I wondered why she had never gone south for the winter. Blue-winged Teals aren’t supposed to stay in Michigan throughout the winter months. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they “…are not able to endure the cold weather and are some of the first to migrate south in the fall and the last to head back north in the spring.” When I posted my quandary about Betty on Facebook, a birding friend replied, “Betty has a wing injury that prevents her from doing long distance flights. She is willing to fly very short distances to relocate to a different pond now and then.” That explained everything! She had no choice. But, given the missive from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the inability of these birds to survive the cold, I had a whole new sense of admiration for Betty and her ability to make the best of a bad situation. She’s a true survivor!
The other bird I always look for at the fish hatchery is the Great Blue Heron. I haven’t named him and I don’t see him as often as I do Betty, but I think he’s the same blue heron I’ve been seeing for many years at the hatchery. When I first started taking his picture, it looked as if he had sustained an injury to his neck at some point in his life. Maybe a predator tried to catch him when he was young, or maybe he got tangled up in a fishing line. There’s no way to know, but he obviously survived ! Whenever I visit the fish hatchery, I look for him in all of his favorite places. Sometimes he’s standing on a log at the edge of one of the ponds. Sometimes he’s perched in a tree or scouting the edges of the water looking for a fish. In the wintertime, I’ve even found him out on the ice! Wherever I happen to find him, it feels like my lucky day, and I always take a picture!
The WMU Business Technology and Research Park next door to where we live is another one of my favorite places to walk and take pictures. There are mowed trails meandering through acres of wildflowers, tall grasses, and trees. No matter what the season, I always find something to photograph: songbirds, wild turkeys, butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantids, white-tailed deer, and an abundance of chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits. In addition to all the inviting grassy trails, there are three small ponds that provide refuge for mallards, swans, geese, green herons, turtles, frogs, and a few migrating ducks.
It’s also the place where I look for my Red-tailed Hawk. I scan the skies looking for him, and I search the tops of lampposts and trees hoping to get a glimpse. It’s a fun game trying to find him, but I don’t always win. Sometimes, he finds me!!
On the one eventful day that he found me, I was standing on a small footbridge taking pictures of mallards swimming in the pond and keeping my eye out for the green heron that sometimes perches on a branch along the edge. All of a sudden, that hawk flew in out of nowhere and landed on the railing of the footbridge less than 20 feet from where I was standing! He took my breath away!! But I slowly turned my camera in his direction, hoping my movements wouldn’t scare him. At the same time, he turned his head in my direction and we locked eyes through the lens of my camera. Before that magical moment passed, I quickly snapped a few pictures, and a millisecond later he was gone!
What I’ve learned about Red-tailed Hawks over time is their amazing ability to not only survive but to thrive! They have achieved this success due to their adaptability, especially when it comes to food. Red-tailed hawks will eat almost anything, including rats, mice, squirrels, voles, rabbits, snakes, birds, bats, frogs, toads, insects, and even carrion. They are considered ‘generalist predators,’ a trait that has significantly contributed to their overall success and their widespread distribution. They are survivors!
The last of my four survivors is the Carolina Wren that has been visiting the feeders on our back deck for many winters. Like the other survivors, I feel a kinship to this bird and consider him to be my Carolina wren because he keeps coming back and I keep feeding him—or perhaps more accurately, he keeps coming back because I keep feeding him!
He likes the black-oiled sunflower seeds I leave in our platform feeder and carefully picks them out one by one, flutters down to the nearby doormat, tucks the seed into a crevice of the mat to stabilize it, and then cracks it open. The mat is just the other side of our sliding glass door, a few feet away from where sit. It’s such a treasure to see him return every year when the cold weather sets in.
It never ceases to amaze me that this tiny bird, or any bird for that matter, can survive the harsh winter months with just a handful of feathers to keep them warm, while I have to bundle up in layers upon layers of warm clothes, stuff hand-warmers into my pockets, and sometimes wear heated socks just to go out and take pictures! How do those little birds manage??
There are so many wild animals out there that we never see struggling to survive through all kinds of weather and all kinds of circumstances. They have the marvelous ability to adapt and sometimes even thrive. But I continue to worry about how many of them we will lose over time due to our carelessness as human beings in our role as stewards of planet earth. We’ve already lost too many.
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” ~ Robert Swan British explorer and environmental activist
Thanks for sharing your love and concern for these beautiful birds!
very interesting!!!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Hope you continue to see “your” survivors for many years to come. Love the pictures & information Jeanne.
Loved your story of survivors. Beautifully done and so full of feeling and love for these creatures–and all creatures. I may have had lunch with your Red tailed Hawk at Martells in the middle of September. He was sitting quite close by in the trees by the road. He had one small snack as we watched him, but he was still there when we left–still hungry I guess.
Bonnie