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A North Dakota State of Mind

Birds love North Dakota’s potholes and prairies and once you visit, you will, too.

When bird watchers die (or, as my dad would say, shoot through), they must go to North Dakota in June. Heaven just wouldn’t measure up. Consider: It’s beautiful, waving with grasses, studded with countless wetlands, overarched by majestic skyscapes. It’s crammed seemingly past capacity with birds, many hard to see elsewhere, all breeding. The air vibrates with the joyous burble of western meadowlarks and the eerie ululations of winnowing snipe. The roads are perfectly straight, the corners square, so it’s hard to get lost. There’s nobody else around, so you can crawl along at 10 miles per hour, casting your glance across the landscape, and pull over in a heartbeat when a ferruginous hawk sails into view. It stays light until 10:30 at night, low, buttery light bathing ducks and shorebirds in gold. And almost every little town has a terrific roadside café, sweetly fragrant with fresh coffee and homemade pies. Could a birder ask for anything more? Let me paint another picture. You stop your car in front of a little pothole, maybe the size of your front yard. There are eight species of ducks floating around, some trailed by peeping broods of ducklings. Pintail, blue and green-winged teal, shoveler, mallard, lesser scaup, gadwall, and ruddy ducks. Or canvasbacks, redheads, ringnecks. Take your choice. Wilson’s phalaropes spin and pick at the water’s surface; black terns, in colors of cast iron and pewter, dip and dive for minnows. Western and eastern kingbirds sit side-by-side on a low wire fence. Red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds konk and bray on the fringes. All around, grasshopper, vesper, and Savannah sparrows lisp and buzz. Bobolinks broadcast their shortwave bird radio. You step out of your car to take it all in, and an American avocet streaks toward you, complaining, as its apricot-fuzzed chicks hurry into the cattails.

In an all-out effort to bring its incredible wealth of birds to greater prominence, a group of volunteer birders and businesspeople from the prairie pothole region of central North Dakota formed Birding Drives Dakota. The communities of Jamestown, Carrington, and Steele anchor the driving routes, which incorporate pastureland, seeded and virgin prairie, and innumerable lakes and wetlands, small and large. These communities cooperated with the state and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to launch the first Potholes and Prairie Festival on the weekend of June 13, 2003. Around 300 people - mostly North Dakotans, with a smattering of attendees from Minnesota and South Dakota - flocked to the festival, far exceeding organizers’ expectations. My husband Bill and I were asked to provide some seminars and evening entertainment. We leapt at the chance to visit. Had we had any idea what bliss awaited us, we’d never have waited to be asked.

Bill and I rented a car at the Fargo/Moorhead airport and headed west. It was a late-model Mercury, and it had lots of bells and whistles, too many for our tastes. A bell dinged incessantly if Bill didn’t buckle up immediately after taking his seat. On the deserted gravel roads, crawling from pothole to pothole, he began to feel a bit put upon by this feature. When our speed hit 10 miles per hour, all the doors would automatically lock with a loud, startling zzziiiiich, which soon proved annoying, because our birding speed averaged around 15 miles per hour and we stopped dozens of times a day. The Mercury seemed to want to thwart us, and was always shrilling and admonishing. Driving through the tiny hamlet of Gackle, North Dakota, we decided to borrow its name for our imperious, noisy car. Gackle. It seemed to fit.

Central North Dakota boasts the Missouri Coteau region (French for hill), which bears the beautiful scars of an ancient glacier. For refugees from unglaciated southern Ohio, where the few lakes we have are human-made, the Coteau is a vision of paradise. Every gravel road holds a different geological surprise—high ridges or conical eskers and drumlins - gravel deposits left by the receding ice sheet, now clothed in soil and soft, waving prairie grasses and wildflowers. Unexpected secret gardens hide beneath the grass tops - wooly blue squawroot, cheery gaillardia, purple peas and vetches, scarlet globe mallow, white penstemon and anemone, blue harebell. Purple prairie smoke wafts its feathery seedheads on stiff stems. Tiny Mammilaria cacti open umbrellas of fragrant orchid-pink flowers, three to a plant. Silvery and Melissa blue butterflies, inornate ringlets, bronze coppers, and monarchs dance low over the flowers. The two constants in the ever-changing landscape are grass and water - water everywhere, in pools, potholes, and large, shallow lakes.

Wet summers for the past decade have brought many lakes outside their traditional banks, and stands of drowned cottonwoods provide ideal nesting platforms for double-crested cormorants and black-crowned night-herons, whose populations are expanding in the region. Every single pothole, no matter how small, has birds on it: pied-billed, eared and western grebes, a dozen species of ducks, Wilson’s phalarope, marbled godwit, willet, snipe, American avocets, white pelicans. The world’s largest nesting colony of white pelicans, more than 16,000 pairs, stinks up Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge, and the majestic birds are almost always visible overhead, spiraling in stately squadrons against towering clouds. Musing on why I was in a state of suspended rapture for the five days we were in the Coteau, I realized that any one of the species listed here would cause me to slam on my brakes at home in Ohio. Not only that, but the region holds some true specialties, birds that make holes on most birders’ life lists.

However you feel about sparrows, arriving in a region that harbors 18 species will endear them to you. It’s a delight to become conversant with the songs and habits of species like vesper, grasshopper, clay-colored, and Savannah sparrows. They sing on wires and fenceposts, exhibits A through D in Sparrows 101. But the real treasures are harder to come by. Le Conte’s, Nelson’s sharp-tailed, and Baird’s sparrows are the three limited-range, “gotta have” species in the Coteau. Though we were told that in some years, Le Conte’s are “everywhere,” we were skunked.

On the last day of the festival we still hadn’t seen the other two, either. Bill was beginning for the first time to feel a little glum. We were on our way to the festival’s farewell picnic luncheon at Chase Lake NWR when we encountered Steve Gross, a delightful, softspoken retired Air Force colonel and BWD subscriber who was seeking Baird’s sparrow for his eye-popping North American life list, more than 100 species bigger than mine. He’d been told by a local birder that the shortgrass hilltops near Chase Lake’s refuge sign were a good bet. We thanked him for the information and went on. Coming to the third cattle guard, we pulled off and hopped out to listen. A strange sparrow song - soft and musical, with four introductory notes and a slow trill, sifted over the hill. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I’d never heard it before. It was time to find this bird. I took off at a lope through the grass. In the distance, we could see Steve’s car, and I saw him focus his binoculars on me. I gave him the thumbs-up and he started walking toward us.

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