Shrike!

"November at its best - with a sort of delightful menace in the air."

― Anne Bosworth Greene

It hit 70 degrees yesterday — in mid-November, no less. By this morning, the warmth had swung back to a more seasonal low-30s. Sue and I took advantage of the brief reprieve and drove up to Sauk County to wander a few of our favorite natural areas and see what was still out there.

Astonishingly, at least one Dainty Sulphur (Nathalis iole) was still fluttering around the beach at the Sauk City Canoe Launch. We've had some pretty cold nights, so seeing any butterflies this late was a surprise. A few small flies and grasshoppers were hanging on along the shoreline, but no tiger beetles.

Perhaps a little November insecting will help shorten the winter — if not on the calendar, then at least in the mind. 

 

Next stop, Sauk Prairie State Recreational Area ...

We were hoping to find a Northern Shrike, and we did.

The shrike was perched atop a tree a fair distance away, but I was still able to digiscope it. Not my best photograph of this species, but any shrike sighting is a good one. 

Our last stop was a short walk along the Roznos Meadow segment of the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin, where the green has fully slipped away and November settles in with its palette of tan, brown, and russet.

Bird-wise, it was pretty quiet — just a few American Tree Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos, their muted plumage perfectly echoing the November palette around them.

With the sun sinking in the west, there were some stunning views of the prairie.

By the time we called it a day, the wind had swung around from the north and the daylight was sliding away, but it still felt like the right kind of ending — a late-autumn day distilled to its essentials: muted colors, sparse birds, and the simple pleasure of being out there before winter really takes hold. And best of all, cold beer and hot food was waiting for us at Vintage — the perfect reward after a November outing.

All images © 2025 Mike McDowell

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Lake Superior © 2025 Mike McDowell

A Taste of Winter!

"I suppose we should not care much for natural history, as I have before said, or for the study of nature generally, if we did not in some way find ourselves there; that is, something that is akin to our own feelings, methods, and intelligence ... In fact, the problem of the essay-naturalist always is to make his subject interesting, and yet keep strictly within the bounds of truth."

— John Burroughs, Ways of Nature

Sunday morning. Twenty-six degrees. A thin layer of fresh snow has softened everything — rooftops, lawns, the last of the fallen leaves. It isn't much, barely an inch, but it's enough to change the light, to make the world look newly minted. The first snowfall of the season always feels like a quiet reset, a pause between the noise of autumn and the long stillness to come.

 

Longtime readers should know how I feel about supermoon hype by now. Still, I couldn't resist stepping outside with the camera for November's full 'Beaver Moon' — billed as the biggest supermoon of 2025. Could you tell? For amateur astronomers, the Moon is always an interesting celestial object to observe and photograph, whether it's a so-called "super" one or not. Though supermoons are, in truth, just regular full moons in slightly closer orbit, the power of being told this one is special is collective persuasion that gets people outside to look up, which, come to think of it, isn't such a bad thing. 

I haven't gone on many birding excursions lately, but it doesn't take much effort to know what's around. A quick walk through the prairie at work is usually enough — a few familiar calls, a flash of movement in the grass, maybe a photo or two to mark the day.

There are newly arrived American Tree Sparrows ...

A shy Fox Sparrow seen along a treeline ...

And quite a few White-crowned Sparrows ...

White-crowned Sparrows seem to be showing up more often in winter. Or maybe it's just that I've gotten better at noticing them over the years. In southern Wisconsin, they're mainly considered migrants, passing through in spring and fall, though a few hardy individuals do linger through the cold months. So perhaps it's not that there are suddenly more of them — just that I've learned to see what was always there.

Here's a WCSP range map with the intensity of blue indicating abundance:

Southern Wisconsin has decent winter representation, but most of them are to the south and west. 

Such a gorgeous songbird. I'm grateful to have them (and other winter birds) around, but I sure do miss tiger beetles already. Winter isn't so much a pause as a shift in tempo. Getting ready takes longer. It's not just a matter of throwing on grubby clothes, grabbing the backpack, and heading out the door. You have to think it through — layers, gloves, boots, hat, maybe a thermos of coffee. By the time you're zipped and bundled, the whole outing feels more like an expedition than a walk. Once you're out there, with the cold air biting and the prairie under a pale sky, it always feels worth it.

 

Winter is also a time to turn inward — to write, review photographs, process field notes, and revisit earlier posts with the perspective of another year's experiences. This fall turned out prettier than I expected, and that's always something to savor.

As surely as I'll take a last breath, there will come a final blog post. I don't know when that will be, or what small thing in Nature will earn those last few sentences — maybe a bird, a beetle, or the shape of the moon on a cold night. But until then, I'll keep writing them as I always have: to remember, to notice, and to share a little of what this world still offers to anyone willing to look.

 

All images © 2025 Mike McDowell

October Ends!

"I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers."

― Leif Enger

Alas, 2025's tiger beetle season has come to an end — none remained at the Sauk Canoe Launch last Sunday. Though my primary quarry is gone for the year, I'll continue making return trips through winter to visit favorite natural areas. Even when wildlife is sparse, it's always fascinating to observe how the landscape changes with the season — and to see how the creatures that stay, or migrate in, manage to endure.

The fall colors at Indian Lake Park have already slipped past their peak, a sharp contrast to the dazzling display at Paya Lake just weeks ago — when every hillside burned with gold and crimson, and the season felt at its height rather than its decline.

Here's a striking adult White-crowned Sparrow, its bold black-and-white crown contrasting beautifully with the soft gray of its plumage. White-throated Sparrows outnumbered the White-crowned and Fox Sparrows, though Yellow-rumped Warblers were the most abundant species overall.

Under the dramatic wooded canopy of Indian Lake Park.

This brings October to a close. From here on, life in the prairies and woods begins to quiet — insects vanish, leaves fall, and the pulse of the season slows. There's a touch of melancholy in watching it fade, yet a calm satisfaction in the stillness that follows. Though the days grow short, the walks will continue through winter. Even as the land seems to sleep, there are always birds to watch and quiet signs of life to remind us that Nature never truly rests.

All images © 2025 Mike McDowell

Oconto Fall Colors!

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

― John Donne

Fall color has been muted across southern Wisconsin this year, so Sue and I headed north to Paya Lake, where reports promised a brighter show. And those reports were right — the colors were absolutely brilliant, easily among the most stunning displays I've seen in years.

It was a short trip, so there wasn't a lot of time for exploring. Birds observed around the cabin were Common Ravens, American Crows, Blue Jays, Pileated Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Red-breasted Nuthatch, American Robin, Dark-eyed Juncos, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Double-crested Cormorants, Canada Geese, and Bald Eagle.

All images © 2025 Mike McDowell

The Demon-Haunted World

There it is — my personal copy of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. Purchased sometime in the mid 90s, it served as an introduction to skepticism, intellectual honesty, and freethought. Hungry for more, I started reading books by Michael Shermer, Martin Gardner, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and more.

More relevant now than when it was written. Sagan warned of a time when people would lose the ability to tell fact from fiction — when opinion, rumor, and ideology would eclipse reason. We're there. A post-truth age fueled by social media, warped by politics, and further blurred by AI. Ironically, the very people most hostile to critical thinking have adopted Sagan's own mantra with "I’m just asking questions." But theirs isn't skepticism; it's subversion. It's the performance of inquiry with none of the discipline, humility, or evidence that real questioning demands.

Here are a few favorite quotes:

"The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility — more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive."

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

"But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge."

"Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend — substantively and in depth." 

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

— Carl Sagan

Final Tiger Beetle Outing!

"How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days."

— John Burroughs

Saturday was one of those tranquil autumn days that seem to have loitered on purpose, unwilling to yield to the gray procession of November. Sue and I went again to the Wisconsin River near Sauk, drawn by a wish to see how the tiger beetles were abiding these shortening days. We love this place. Only a week past, at the Arena landing, we had come upon two Hairy-necked Tiger Beetles — the latest I have ever known them in southern Wisconsin. 

The river still lay low in its bed, revealing long reaches of tawny sand and the bleached limbs of driftwood where the water once ran deep. In the bordering trees, dozens upon dozens of Yellow-rumped Warblers busied themselves among the leaves, intent upon the invisible harvest of small winged insects. The afternoon light was of that tempered gold peculiar to October, and the whole day moved with such serene leisure that it seemed the year itself had paused to take a long, contented breath.

There were, perhaps, three or four Bronzed Tiger Beetles still abroad on the sand, coursing lightly over the beach in search of food.

Slowly, their shadows grew longer with the sinking sun ...

My last tiger beetle of the season? We'll see!

An Eastern Comma in terrific light!

And a single Dainty Sulphur fluttered low over the sand — a small, lemon-colored wanderer from the South, pausing here on its northward journey's edge. It's a migratory species in Wisconsin.

Here's a Familiar Bluet ...

It was the only damselfly observed during this outing—alas, insecting 2025 draws to a close.

A few Map Turtles basked upon an old log settled into the riverbed, its upper curve just breaking the surface. The water moved softly around it, lifting bits of sun and sky into shifting patterns along their shells. They belonged wholly to the quiet — the log, the turtles, the river — each resting in its place as though the day itself had paused to watch.

The bright restlessness of summer has gone. The birds are moving south, and the riverbank feels emptier for their passing. Only a few small lives still stir in the mild October sun, as if unwilling to admit the season's end.

All images © 2025 Mike McDowell