Winter birding delivers sightings of snowy owls, eagles
Several great horned owls live in the woods near my home in Middleton. Many a winter evening, they sing me to sleep with their “whoohoo-o-o, whoo” calls, which are sometimes transliterated as “Who’s awake? Me too.”
I’ve never seen them, though, because they are usually nocturnal and hunt at night. But there are plenty of other birds flitting about in Wisconsin during the daylight hours from December through March, when hundreds of other feathered creatures have flown to warmer climes. There are also the migrants, such as the snowy owl, that come to Wisconsin from Canada.
The locals that stick around include pine siskins, goldfinches, tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers, chickadees, northern cardinals, blue jays, robins, screech owls and red-tailed hawks. There’s also the always popular bald eagles, which often congregate near Sauk City on the Wisconsin River or over on the Mississippi River below dams.
Carolyn Byers, education director for the Madison Audubon Society, called winter “a phenomenal time to bird because the character cast is reduced and the ones that stick around are very active.”
She said eagles are probably the most popular birds to observe because they are “big, charismatic and fun to watch, especially in the coldweather months.”
The eagles' main foods are fish, so they gather near open water. They also hang out near ice fishermen because anglers throw fish and gut piles on the ice.
Byers said Wisconsin is blessed with many great places to bird during the winter. Around Madison, she recommends Picnic Point on the University of Wisconsin campus, the Arboretum, Cherokee Marsh, Pheasant Branch Conservancy (where my great horned owls live), Devil’s Lake, Governor Dodge State Park and Horicon Marsh.
“Birding is a great reason to get out when the weather is chilly and you need some motivation,” said Byers, who noted that people can also find birds at their backyard feeders, bird baths, birdhouses or by simply looking through the front window into a shrub or tree.
In parks or out in the country, she said, some of the best places to see birds are the so-called “habitat transitions,” where a forest changes to prairie or at the edge of a farm field.
“You’ll see a lot more activity there than you would at the center of a wood lot or the middle of an open field,” she said.
This year — which marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — she said several snowy owls made it all the way down to the Madison Audubon Society’s Goose Pond Sanctuary near Arlington. These striking birds are more common during the winter in northern Wisconsin, but one remains at Goose Pond and its habits are being monitored as part of Project SNOWstorm (projectsnowstorm.org).
“The snowy owl is an irruptive species, so some years you won’t see any and others, you might see hundreds of them,” Byers said. “But this is an irruption year. Project SNOWstorm has people putting little electronic backpacks on the birds to monitor them. These backpacks talk with cellphone towers, track their location every hour or so and collect a lot of data.”
Byers said her favorite bird that winters in Wisconsin is the chickadee, which has a song that sounds like “hey, sweetie.” Chickadees captured her heart when she was a field technician working for the UW-Madison Zuckerberg lab in well below-freezing weather.
“I’d be sitting out in a wood lot at 8 degrees, waiting for birds to come by so I could catch and band them for tracking. When I’d hear that chickadee, it would be heartwarming because I would get to do something and not have to just sit in the cold anymore.”
In addition to the great horned owl, she said, the two other common owl species in southern Wisconsin are the barred owl and eastern screech owl. The barred call sounds a bit like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you allllllllll?” And the screech owl’s song is described as either a trill or whiny.
Now that it’s February, Byers said, cardinals are starting to sing to define their territory and attract mates. Come March, redwing blackbirds will return to Wisconsin, which Byers said makes them her harbingers of spring.
“A decade or so ago, they would have been coming north in April,” she said. “But with climate change, more are starting to stick around all winter.”
Byers said novices who’d like to go birding should check out the Madison Audubon Society website (madisonaud ubon.org) for a list of hikes and field trips. The organization hosts at least 30 a year, and Byers leads six of them.
Similarly, the Milwaukee Audubon Society (milwaukeeaudubon.org) offers outings and bimonthly Bird Club meetings at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, 1111 E. Brown Deer Road, Bayside.