Mission Accomplished!

I didn't realize how badly I wanted to see a Fieldfare until I saw it.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Blue Jay looking down on Fieldfare, wondering what all the fuss is about.

On Wednesday, February 21, Erik Bruhnke, Sarah Wood, and I left Duluth about 5:40 AM, headed to Prentice Park in Ashland to try again for the elusive Fieldfare. This extraordinarily rare vagrant thrush from Eurasia—this is only the second record ever anywhere in the entire Midwest—was first spotted by Tim Oksiuta on Thursday, February 15, and then relocated by Tim on Sunday morning. When Erik Bruhnke and I learned it was still there, we headed right over but arrived too late in the day—no one saw it after 9 am. It reappeared on Monday and Tuesday morning, again between 7:30 and 9:00 or so.

I was scared the bird would disappear for good by the time I could get away again on Wednesday, but we gave it the old college try. We arrived about 7:10, technically a few minutes after sunrise but still in low light. The eastern sky finally let a few rays of sun peek through a few minutes after we got there, but the sky quickly grew overcast again and a few snowflakes swirled around just in case anyone forgot that it’s still the dead of winter.

A couple dozen birders were already there, listening intently and scanning every treetop. Every time this Fieldfare has been found, it’s been associating with Blue Jays, but jays seem to sleep in on dark mornings. We didn’t detect any serious Blue Jay action until after 8:00. At 8:20 or so, someone in the crowd—it was hard to tell who—found it way, way across a field on private land, and about half the crowd, including me, ran through some underbrush and a line of trees to get a slightly closer and less obstructed view.

Tim Oksiuta, “Founder of the Feast.” He first discovered the Fieldfare last Thursday and made sure the birding community got to see it, too.

I got a marginal but reasonable look through my 8x binocs, focusing especially on the soft gray head, lower back, and tail; the warm brown wings; and the robin shape, but it was too far and the light too bad for me to get even marginal photos.

The bird came in and out of view a few times but mostly lurked behind too many branches for satisfying looks or focused photos.

There are quite a few birds on the Wisconsin and Minnesota checklists that I’ve still never seen, but as soon as I got both state lists over 300, I’ve not wasted energy yearning for more. Yet somehow, I must have felt a lingering twinge of sorrow at missing the Grand Marais Fieldfare in 1991—so near and yet so far when I was stuck at home with our small kids while Russ was at a meeting out of town. It’s the kind of accommodation everyone makes for family, and at the time, I was still seeing lots of new birds in the state, so I thought I’d put it all behind as just another “one that got away.” But I must have had it on my subconscious bucket list—I was surprised at just how elated I felt when I saw it.

Unbeknownst to me, the whole group of us who went beyond the road for the better views were trespassing on private land. A couple of people suggested crossing the field to get better looks, but we all knew that was private land. Even though we hadn’t gone very far into it, I felt bad when I found out we weren’t supposed to be where we were.

Erik, who spent a lot of time at Prentice Park when he was at Northland College, did realize that the road was the boundary of public land there and quietly stayed where we belonged, getting only a brief, extremely unsatisfactory glimpse. He of course needed a better view to be comfortable counting Fieldfare on his life list. Hope springs eternal in the birder’s heart, so he, Sarah, and I stuck around for two hours after the time the bird has usually disappeared.

Lingering was the right decision. On an abandoned, overgrown snowmobile trail that forms the boundary between Ashland and Bayfield Counties, finally some Blue Jays started gathering near some buckthorn, a robin started singing his spring song (yep—on February 21!), a Red-winged Blackbird popped up for a moment, and people got brief glimpses of a couple of finches. And Erik and I picked up on some dry, staccato notes coming from the Ashland County side of the trail—the Fieldfare!

And suddenly there it was, flying with some Blue Jays across a power line cut on the Bayfield County side. It popped up in a tree almost as far away as it had been across the field first time around. This time Erik got a satisfying look with his spotting scope.

Within a minute or two, the Fieldfare dropped back down into the vegetation. People got one or two more glimpses of it, and then it was time for us to head to a coffee shop for a lovely celebratory lunch and back to Duluth. Mission Accomplished!!