More about winter birds

"Free as a bird." That's because a wild bird can do whatever it wants, right? When I lived in southern Minnesota I fed American goldfinches all winter. Here in extreme northern Minnesota I feed them all summer but they leave in the fall. They are one of the birds I am always anxious to see again in the spring. But this year there was one goldfinch that I kept seeing deep into fall, into early December. I didn't know if he had missed the bus or what. Then I didn't see it anymore. Now suddenly for the last few days I have been seeing three or four goldfinches at my thistle seed feeder with the red polls and pine siskins. Did some of the goldfinches stay all winter? Are some coming back already? We almost certainly have at least one and probably two months of winter to go. On the map in my bird book it shows northern Minnesota as their summer range and southern Minnesota as a winter range. According a book I've been reading (Winter world: the ingenuity of animal survival by Bernd Heinrich) bird irruptions to various territories most likely have to do with food supplies. I just heard yesterday that the great gray owl is the provincial bird of Manitoba. This year we have them down here in much greater numbers than usual. Must be a rodent shortage up north. Our son from International Falls called early this winter and told us that he had been seeing them regularly when working in the woods. Then on the Sunday after Christmas we saw one as we were driving east of here. It swooped across the highway in front of us and perched on a stump across the road. Up close it seemed huge. It reminded me of another day when a similar thing happened to us. We were driving to Roseau to talk to Frank at the Radio Shack about our malfunctioning satellite TV. (One of my sons once called me a "pseudo homesteader'). It was a white day. The fields were white. The highway was white. The sky was such a milky light gray that it might as well be called white. All of a sudden a piece of that whiteness lifted up on the right side of the road and flew across in front of our windshield and disappeared into the whiteness on our left. It was a snowy owl. It too was really large and it looked me right in the eyes. There is something about an owl looking right in your eyes that seems important. I noticed that with the little saw-whet owl too. It haunts you. In his blog, my son Matt mentioned seeing a crow in the Chicago area. I was just reading in the book mentioned above that crows have been making their winter communal roosts more and more often in downtown city areas and naturalists have been wondering why. The author watched some crows fly into Burlington, Vermont from surrounding countryside. They flew around and around in the city and finally crowded onto two small trees beside a restaurant. He thinks it may be because the crows greatest enemies are owls. They are big, somewhat clumsy, secretive, nocturnal birds. They aren't much trouble for the crows during the day. It's at night when you're trying to sleep that they come after you. But they stay away from cities. It kind of surprises me that the naturalists who study these things aren't sure of the answers. They can only speculate. The wild things are still mostly mystery. I like that.