Longspurs
A splendid family, and a very special sighting.
Listen to the radio version of Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Part 1: My personal history with longspurs.
On September 4, 1975, during my first autumn as a birder, while Russ and I were visiting his parents in Port Wing, Wisconsin, we took a drive to the Apostle Islands National Seashore and made a stop at a lovely spot called Sand Point. A cool little American Redstart—the first one I ever found on my own rather than in my ornithology class that summer—flared its tail and I was utterly charmed. I’d seen my lifer Sanderlings on the Quarry Beach in Port Wing that very morning, and now here was another small flock of Sanderlings on a different lovely sandy beach.
And there was somebody else—a bird that I did not recognize, so I had to page through my field guide, my hands trembling a bit because I was always nervous that an exciting bird would fly away before I’d figured out who it was, which had happened a lot that spring with warblers.
But this time the lone little bird stayed nice and close as I went back and forth, looking at it through my trusty Bushnell 7x50s and poring through my trusty Golden Guide until I came to the very last page, where I finally found a match. This was my lifer Lapland Longspur.
At that time, longspurs were classified within what was then the largest family of North American birds, Fringillidae, which contained all our native grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, and buntings. Since then, birds in that family have been reclassified several times. For a while, the Snow Bunting and all four longspurs were placed in the family Emberizidae with our sparrows, but now they comprise their own family, Calcariidae. That name is related Calcarius, the generic name for the Lapland, Chestnut-collared, and Smith’s Longspurs, which comes from the Latin for “spurs.”
Before I started birding, I never imagined that anything could be called a longspur, but I could see in person how this bird got its name—the claw on its hind toe is unusually long for a songbird. Oddly enough, in all the 50 years since then, I’ve not seen that long claw very often, at least not with my eyes in person. I have several photos showing it, but they came about because I was shooting on burst mode, my camera capturing the subtle feature when my eyes could not.
My lifer was so wonderfully cooperative that the sight of that bird’s long claw is firmly embedded in my brain.
I’ve never been to Finland so have never been witness to the reason behind the rest of the Lapland Longspur’s name, but this hardy little songbird’s breeding grounds are hardly restricted to Lapland—it breeds across vast areas of the Arctic in northernmost North America and Eurasia.
Longspurs molt their feathers before migrating, so even though their breeding plumage is spectacular, virtually all the Lapland Longspurs I’ve ever seen have been in duller, more sparrow-like plumage. By April, the edges of their body feathers have worn away enough to start revealing the striking base pattern, but autumn and winter are when I usually see them. That deficiency ended in June 2022, when Russ and I went to Nome.
Not being a birder, I don’t think Russ had seen ANY Lapland Longspurs since that very first one in 1975, so his experiences with the species have been 100 percent high quality looks.
In 1979, long before I was taking bird photos, the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance (then called Madison Audubon) sent me to a National Audubon convention in Estes Park, Colorado, and I signed up for an all-day field trip to the spectacular Pawnee National Grasslands. That’s where I saw my next two lifer longspurs, both in stunning breeding plumage—the Thick-billed (then called McCown’s) and Chestnut-collared Longspurs. Since then, I’ve seen thick-bills in Duluth once—at Erie Pier in May 2000—and in Colorado, on a tour led by Kim Eckert in April during my Big Year in 2013. I got a couple of photos of the Colorado one in a snowstorm.
Based on the pictures in my field guides, something about the Chestnut-collared Longspur made it my favorite, but the only other time I ever saw one (until just this past weekend!) was on that Colorado trip in 2013. It was in breeding plumage, but too far away, in terrible weather, for me to appreciate its beauty or to get photos.
I got my lifer Smith’s Longspur in 2006 when my friend Paula Lozano and I spent January in Arkansas dreaming of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. We took time out from that mission to go to the Stuttgart Municipal Airport, which was one of the only places Smith’s Longspur could be reliably and easily found in winter. When we parked and walked into the airport building, a guy came up and asked if we were looking for “the bird.” He reminded us to get off the runway if we saw a plane coming in for a landing or getting ready to take off, told us good luck, and voilà!
Since then, I’ve seen Smith’s Longspur twice, in Duluth at the Old Stella Jones Pier in October 2017, and at the McQuade Small Boat Landing in September 2020. That was during the pandemic, barely a month after Walter was born while they were living with us, so I wore a mask and couldn’t get close to other birders, but that bird was exceptionally cooperative.
I’ve never seen a Smith’s Longspur in breeding plumage. This species is famous for being exuberantly promiscuous, each female mating with two or three males to produce her single clutch of eggs, while each male mates with two or more females. Some people think that suggests a kind of irresponsible wantonness, but not only does each female take responsibility for the care of her own eggs and chicks; the males apparently take equal responsibility, as many as three different males feeding the young in each nest.
Anyway, that’s my history with longspurs right up until three days ago, but that’s another story.
Part 2—A Chestnut-sided Longspur in Two Harbors!!!
Saturday was a very busy day for me. My daughter Katherine, grandson Walter, and I attended the No Kings protest at Duluth’s City Hall, and then we had to rush to the Castle Danger Brewery in Two Harbors, where my son-in-law was performing with the Lake Effect String Band. At 1:44 pm, my watch and phone alerted me to a message Jim Lind sent out:
Chestnut-collared Longspur in Two Harbors, in the gravel between the Edna G tugboat and the black steam engine display. Very approachable.
At that very moment, exactly where I was, had I looked in the right direction, I could have seen birders looking at and photographing my Most Wanted Bird for Minnesota. But I was on Walter duty, and somehow had neglected to bring my binoculars and camera that day despite the fact that so very many exciting rarities show up in October in Two Harbors, Jim Lind’s stomping grounds. Jim is not only great at finding good birds—he’s amazingly great at letting other birders know about them, so I should have anticipated the possibility of something good. But I didn’t, and 45 minutes later, when we were going to my car, parked extremely close to where the bird had been reported, I didn’t see any birders so figured it must have flown away.
I reckoned I’d be filing this in my “ones that got away” stories, but then, at 3:52 pm, Kim Eckert posted:
FYI the longspur was still present in the same spot when I left at 3:45.
I instantly grabbed my camera and binoculars and drove back.
I’d barely gotten out of my car when I came upon a small flock of White-crowned Sparrows with a couple of juncos and White-throated Sparrows. I didn’t expect the longspur to be in that flock, but I scrutinized them just in case. In the background, music from the Brewery was playing—Two Harbors is a happenin’ place in autumn. Because of the event at the Brewery and other fall events in town, lots of people were walking by.
While I was first circling through the area, some passersby called me over and told me they’d seen a whole bunch of birders there a little while before, all looking “the other way.” I thought the bird must have wandered into the gravelly patch just a bit further down, but then they said their binoculars were all pointed up toward the top of a stand of tall conifers. Those birders may have come there for the longspur, but they were certainly looking at something else up there—Chestnut-collared Longspurs are birds of grasslands, not at all likely to be high up in trees. I kept my focus on the weeds and gravel.
Then another birder, Tate Putman, arrived. He’d gotten the original message and driven all the way up from the Twin Cities. We briefly exchanged pleasantries and got back to searching, and in less than 5 minutes, he yelled out that he’d found it.
I was thrilled. Tate and I were quickly joined by another birder named Joshua. As we three watched the little guy, dozens of people walked past, some surprisingly close to the little bird, who didn’t seem bothered. I kept clicking away with my camera, but Tate tore himself away several times to explain to people what we were looking at in a very engaging way. I remember a time when most young birders were embarrassed to tell people that they were birders, much less to use a rarity as a teachable moment, but not Tate.
I took my first photos of the bird at 4:53 pm. and my last exactly 30 minutes later.
Oddly enough and to bring the episode full circle, Jim Lind was at the Castle Danger Brewery listening to music while I was looking at the bird, and being smart enough to keep his binoculars with him, he saw me, but when he stopped by, I’d already left. I was sorry to have missed “the founder of the feast.”
I was on Cloud Nine that whole drive home, elated that I’d finally seen this wonderful bird I’ve yearned to see in Minnesota since we moved here in 1981. The few times I’ve managed to get out to the prairie areas of western Minnesota, where they once bred in fairly good numbers, especially in the Felton Prairie area of Clay County, I’ve missed them, and now, along with most other grassland birds, they’re endangered in the state and declining over their entire range. One was reported in Duluth on May 7, 2004, but I didn’t find out about it until too late.
The two times I saw one of these beautiful birds in Colorado, they were at a long distance, a scope necessary to see them at all. Now I’d spent a full half hour with one, almost always within 10 meters and sometimes, according to my camera, barely 6 meters away. Its beautiful spring plumage was right there before my eyes but hidden away under the tips of its body feathers; time and winter will wear them away. I didn’t mind. Erik Bruhnke was kind enough to share his own photo of one in splendid plumage that he took in North Dakota.
One day I may be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time to see a Chestnut-collared Longspur in glorious breeding plumage, but meanwhile, just looking at the pictures I do have fills me with joy. This sweet little bird was a gift from Jim Lind, Tate Putman, and nature itself.
All I can say is: WOW!