"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Saturday was mostly cloudy, but the skies opened up after lunchtime. Sue and I headed to the prairie parcel at Pheasant Branch to look for sparrows, hoping especially for White-crowned. Bird activity overall was astonishingly low, but the east edge — sheltered from the wind behind the drumlin — seemed the most promising. Songbirds don't care much for a stiff breeze. Wind increases heat loss and energy expenditure, makes perching and foraging less efficient, interferes with hearing and communication, and leaves birds more exposed to predators while in motion. On windy days they don't vanish so much as retreat — tucking into leeward edges, shrubs, and terrain breaks, growing quiet and easy to miss.
And that's where they all were ...
I estimated around thirty White-crowned Sparrows, mostly juveniles, mixed in with Dark-eyed Juncos, American Tree Sparrows, Northern Cardinals, Black-capped Chickadees, and, of course, dozens of House Sparrows. Other birds during the hike included Merlin, American Kestrel, Red-tailed Hawk, and Mourning Doves.
On Sunday we returned to the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area to check in on the Northern Shrike we found there back in November. At 3,400 acres, it's an absurdly large landscape to search with any confidence, but optimism has a way of refusing to die for the experienced birder — at least until sundown.
This is very shrike-y habitat. We've had snow, but it keeps getting erased by cyclical warming trends where everything melts back to bare ground again. It's one of the strangest Januaries I can remember — winter present, then absent, then pretending it never showed up at all. It might hit 50 degrees this Tuesday, only to have single digit temperatures return for the weekend.
Ah ha! Shrike!
Some close-up portraits ...
For much of ornithological history, the Northern Shrike of North America was considered the same species as the Old World Great Grey Shrike, a conclusion based largely on visual similarity alone. Lanius excubitor was named by Linnaeus in 1758, and when Vieillot described the North American bird as Lanius borealis in 1808, that name later languished as a junior synonym once the two forms were lumped together. Working without genetics, bioacoustics, or broad comparative specimen series, early taxonomists saw a large gray shrike with a bold black mask and familiar predatory habits on both continents and assumed they were one and the same. Only in 2017, with the accumulation of careful morphological study and genetic evidence, was the North American bird formally split again, reviving Lanius borealis — the "northern butcher"— as a species distinct from Lanius excubitor, the European "watchful butcher."
About a half hour before sunset, high clouds moved in, rendering a solar
halo — a pale, nearly perfect ring etched into the sky. It's an
ice-crystal phenomenon, simple geometry at altitude, and easy to miss if
you're not already looking up. Nothing dramatic, just the atmosphere
quietly showing its hand before the sun dipped below the horizon.
All images © 2026 Mike McDowell