Crex Meadows

We finally made it out of town to look at birds yesterday. Our destination was Crex Meadows Wildlife Area, a marsh in Wisconsin 70 miles northeast of the Twin Cities. The day was bright and crisp when we set out, with high clouds coming in that gradually covered the sky. The fall colors were muted, which makes sense in November. A lot of trees have lost their leaves. Others are still green. The oaks are turning, and I was trying to describe their colors to myself as we drove to Wisconsin. Brown, deep red, dull orange, a kind of yellow brown, and a silvery brown. I don't know if the different colors indicate different kinds of oak.

Crex Meadows itself is a mixture of marsh, open water and oak savannah. This time of year the sandhill cranes are migrating through. During the day, they are off at neighboring farms, eating in the harvested corn fields. But we saw over a hundred feeding in in the wildlife area and a fair number of sandhill cranes in flight in small groups.

In addition, we saw two pairs of trumpeter swans and four tundra swans in a group, two adults and two immature birds, a male marsh hawk and three flying birds, too distant to identify for certain, but the way they were flying suggested they were rough-legged hawks. Oh, and an adult bald eagle, which flew up from a tree as we were leaving Crex Meadows.

There were little, black and white birds along the road in the wildlife area, which I had not been able to identify yet.

All in all, a satisfying day, though we were both tired after six hours in the car.