Why I Live in Duluth
How did a Chicago native end up in Duluth, Minnesota?
(Listen to the radio version here.)
When Russ finished his Ph.D. and some brief post-doc work in Madison, Wisconsin, and was ready to move on, he had a few job options. I lobbied heavily for the one in Duluth, Minnesota, for entirely selfish reasons. We were planning to have a baby soon and Russ’s parents lived little more than an hour from Duluth in Port Wing, Wisconsin, so I naturally used the “proximity to your parents and our future offspring’s grandparents” argument in Duluth’s favor. But the real reason I wanted so passionately to live in Duluth? This was a birding mecca! The Sax-Zim Bog wasn’t famous yet, but Hawk Ridge sure was. And Duluth was famous as a place I might see such yearned-for species as Boreal Chickadee, Harris’s Sparrow, Bohemian Waxwing, and Great Gray, Boreal, and Northern Hawk Owls, all which would have been lifers! What could have been better?
Chickadees being my favorite birds, as soon as I met Kim Eckert, I asked him where I could see a Boreal Chickadee, and on April 5, 1981, two weeks after moving in, Russ and I headed to Kane Lake Road, just north of Two Harbors in the Superior National Forest, where we found a pair exactly where Kim told us it would be. (Come our first winter here, one appeared at my peanut butter feeder for a few days.)
On September 23, two weeks before our first baby was born, Kim called to tell me there were a couple of Harris’s Sparrows at Park Point. I hopped in the car and sure enough, there they were, again exactly where Kim told me to look. Tragically, that’s one lifer I wish I hadn’t chased—when I got home and looked out the window, there was a Harris’s Sparrow on the ground beneath my feeder, the closest I’ve ever come to adding a lifer in my own yard.
Having a brand-new baby put a crimp on my birding, but on December 1, Kim called and said there were Bohemian Waxwings in the mountain ashes just a few blocks from me on Tioga Street. As soon as Russ got home from work to watch Joey, I walked over and voila! They appeared on my own block and in my own mountain ashes a couple of weeks later, too.
On January 30, 1982, when Joey was three and a half months old, again Kim called to tell me about a bird I wanted—a Great Gray Owl on Lester River Road barely north of town—and we made it a family affair. I can still remember taking baby Joey out of his car seat and holding him up to the window of our Chevy Citation so he could see this magnificent bird, perched on a fence not far from the road. His eyes lit up as he stared and stared, and the owl seeming to be looking straight into his eyes, too.
It took two years to see my first Northern Hawk Owl.
I didn’t see my lifer Boreal Owl until February 1, 1987. Oddly enough, just five days before that, I did my 100th “For the Birds” program, the topic being how badly I wanted to see a Boreal Owl. The week after I saw it, on February 9, I did another program about owls, mentioning that I’d finally seen this wondrous lifer.
Wherever we ended up, I’m sure we’d have been happy and I’d have seen lots of birds. In retrospect, though, having Russ’s parents so close for so long really was an amazing benefit for my whole family, perhaps most especially me, both from the birding standpoint and because I grew so close to both of them. Living in Duluth was everything I’d hoped it would be, and more.
