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If you'd like a peek into one of the world's most bizarre courtship rituals, there are places still available in viewing blinds in the grasslands of central Wisconsin, where glacial Lake Wisconsin left a vast sand plain.
"That large flat bowl in the middle of the state happens to be fabulous habitat for prairie chickens,'' says naturalist Amy Thorstenson of Golden Sands conservation council in Stevens Point. "It's the last stronghold on the east side of the Mississippi.''
During the council's annual Prairie Chicken Festival in April, there's viewing in blinds around Stevens Point and Wisconsin Rapids. So why should anyone get up at 4 a.m. and sit in the cold for three hours just to watch a bunch of chickens hop around in the grass? Because male prairie chickens are the goofballs of the bird world.
In Alma, birds of a feather flock together.
Bird-watchers, especially. On chilly days in late fall, hundreds of them crowd onto a wooden platform to see hundreds of swans, paddling around a slough of the Buffalo River called Rieck’s Lake.
For years, this lake has provided an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for tundra swans, a big bird that needs a lot of fuel for its flight from the Arctic Circle to the marshes of Chesapeake Bay. When ponds in southern Canada and North Dakota start to ice over in October, the swans fly down the Mississippi to Alma and feast on arrowhead tubers and wild celery until Rieck’s Lake ices over.
On Duluth's Hawk Ridge, a bird in the hand is worth at least two in the sky.
They're impressive when spotted overhead. But up close, it's easier to get to know a bird — say, the northern goshawk, a fierce predator whose image once adorned the helmet of Attila the Hun.
As she held a young goshawk by the legs, naturalist Willow Maser struggled to make herself heard above its high-pitched screeches.
In April, everything returns to the forest.
It's easy to see the ephemerals — false rue anemone, hepatica and trout lilies, swelling into a carpet of white — and the watercress that swirls in cold brooks. Tiny chartreuse leaves unfold from the tips of tree branches, and tightly furled fiddlehead ferns push up from the old brown fronds.
The spring breezes also bring in birds, but they're not as easy to see. Birds don't stay put, unlike flowers and trees, and they defy identification by amateurs. It's a good guess that a flash of yellow is a warbler, but which kind — chestnut-sided, Blackburnian, magnolia, Wilson's? And those tweets, twitters and trills — who's making them, and what do they mean?
For people who love nature, winter is a time of opportunity.
When it's cold enough, you can walk onto the Mississippi River. You can see bald eagles up close. You can explore sloughs and backwaters without being eaten alive by insects.
"Most of these places, you'd almost die in a few minutes in summer," says Scott Mehus, education specialist at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. "So now is a good time to get out there and see things."
Like most women who take care of small creatures, Karla Kinstler splits her life into two parts: Before Alice and After Alice.
Before Alice, Kinstler and her husband, Ken, could sleep late, go out on dates and travel whenever they felt like it.
But then little Alice came along. Alice wakes them up at the crack of dawn, sulks if they leave her and leaves messes all over the house. Alice is a spoiled brat, Karla Kinstler admits.
Benjamin Franklin was a wise man, but he was way off base when he proposed the turkey as a national symbol instead of the eagle.
Why? Because bald eagles are the perfect Americans. They're large, brash, opportunistic and easy to identify. And wherever they go, money follows.
Not long after the pesticide DDT was banned in 1972, bald eagle populations began to bounce back in the lower 48 states. Eagles were hard to spot in the summer, when they spread out over the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but in the winter, they'd gather to fish in the open water beneath dams or at the mouths of large rivers.
It's winter in Monticello, and the livin' is easy.
For trumpeter swans, the largest water bird in North America, the Mississippi River town is a virtual Club Med, thanks to balmy waters from the nuclear power-generating plant upstream and a daily all-you-can-eat spread of dried corn.
The first swans showed up in the winter of 1986, as Sheila Lawrence was feeding the ducks and geese in the yard of her riverside home. They appreciated her hospitality, and every year more came, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds.