Journey Into Summer by Edwin Way Teale

Author:Edwin Way Teale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Occasionally swallows, too, darted close about us. Among the 253 species of birds that have been recorded in the vicinity of the river, five different kinds of swallows nest within the boundaries of the refuge. Only here, in the marshes of the Souris, is it possible to find the nests of all five American grebes—the red-necked, or Holboell’s; the pied-billed; the eared; the horned and the western. When we were there, for some reason, all grebes were scarce. We saw but few. But a multitude of other birds made up for it. One hundred and nineteen species—water birds, shore birds, songbirds, game birds—are regular summer residents. Here our first sharp-tailed grouse went whirring away, tilting or rocking from side to side in characteristic flight. And here we encountered our first Le Conte’s sparrow, flitting low over the grass tangles on the inland side of the dikes or pausing at intervals to repeat its thin and insectlike little song. On our first day at the Lower Souris Migratory Waterfowl Refuge we added twelve new birds to our summer record and three to our life lists.

We came upon the third of these life birds early in the afternoon when Donald V. Gray, the energetic and helpful Refuge Manager, showed us the immense variety of the sanctuary—the miles of riverbanks and dikes, the wooded bottomland, the sandhills and the rolling short-grass prairie. For more than twenty-five miles, the refuge follows the river northward until it reaches the Manitoba line. Once we came upon a badger—big, gray, low-slung—moving on short and powerful legs like a thick rug sliding over the ground. In several places, our companion steered around badger holes in the road. By preference, the animals frequently dig their burrows in the hard-packed earth of the wheel tracks. At times we surprised deer in their feeding. For some reason that, so far as I know, is not entirely clear, the white-tailed deer grow larger as you go west. In Minnesota they are slightly larger than in Michigan, and in North Dakota they are larger still. Here they reach their maximum size and weight.

Somewhere in the northern part of the refuge, Gray pointed out a stretch of virgin sod. Our road shimmered away into the distance, two tracks across the yellowing grassland, paralleling the flow of the river. We stopped at a gate and noticed, fifty or sixty feet beyond, an active flock of little birds feeding in the wheel tracks, beautiful birds we had never before seen in our lives.

The females were brownish, striped and sparrowlike. But the males, still resplendent in their breeding plumage, were black-capped and all black beneath, with a wide band of chestnut-red extending around the nape of the neck. They were those birds of the open plains, the chestnut-collared longspurs. We watched them hurry about over the packed earth, snapping up some small seed or insect, then hastening on. Most birds take a rest or siesta during the midday heat of summer, but not these longspurs. One of their characteristics is that they continue foraging all through the hottest hours.

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