![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
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?
Half a century ago, a Minnesota logger who lived in a forest full of hungry bears decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
By the time he died at age 86, Vince Shute had fed generations of black bears, become best friends with a bear named Brownie and inspired bear-lovers all over the world.
Shute wasn't a sophisticated man, but he had a heart.
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."
By April, the harbingers of spring are on the move.
"The spring migration is well underway!'' comes the report from Crex Meadows refuge, in northwest Wisconsin near Grantsburg. "Eagles and swans, Canada geese, robins, sparrows, sandhills cranes have arrived!''
Where there are birds, there are birders — and bird festivals. Those are especially nice for beginners, who don’t yet have the skills to find and identify birds. If there’s a bird-banding demonstration, don’t miss it; it’s a good chance to see identifying markings of a bird close-up.
On a spring morning in east-central Wisconsin, two geese suddenly shattered the stillness, honking urgently. Yellow warblers zoomed down from trees and out of sight. Redwing blackbirds clung to cattails, swaying in the stiffening wind.
It was only 6:30 a.m., but it was rush hour on the Horicon Marsh.
A human here feels oddly out of place, a lumbering interloper on a fast-moving avian freeway. Birds own this marsh, and they aren't shy about saying so, rending the air with trills and tweets as they go about their business.
Along the Mississippi River, the fortunes of Wabasha have risen right along with the once-endangered bald eagle.
Eagles reappeared slowly after DDT was banned in 1972, and one of the first places they could be seen was in this Minnesota town, just downriver from the mouth of the Chippewa River, which kept water open in winter so eagles could fish.
The city built a deck downtown and staffed it with spotting scopes and volunteers from November through March. Then it started a makeshift eagle center behind an empty storefront. In 2007, it opened the National Eagle Center in a handsome brick building on the river banks.
It's a cold dawn on a Wisconsin marsh, but to a bunch of prairie chickens, it's a hot Saturday night on the town.
They've come to see and be seen, and hormones are in charge. It's serious business, perpetuating a dwindling species.
But to humans watching from a blind, it's high comedy. Whenever a girl chicken is nearby, the boys inflate neon-orange sacs under their throats, drum their feet and start scurrying around like, well, chickens with their heads cut off.
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.
Everyone loves a teddy bear, especially one called Ted.
He's likely the world's largest black bear, at 850 pounds, but he doesn't throw his weight around.
When his fellow bear Honey doesn't want to play, which is often, he merely whines, "like a foghorn,'' says curator Donna Phelan. And when he wants to make friends, which is all the time, he makes a "wonderful amiable sound, an umph-umph-umph.''
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.
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.
Not far west of the Twin Cities, the Mississippi River town of Monticello is known for two things.
Passersby on I-94 can't fail to notice the nuclear-power reactor that marks the town. In winter, it's the power plant that attracts a flock of trumpeter swans, which thinks the plant's warm discharge waters are a little spa just for them (See Snow birds).
Of course, the flock of swans draws a flock of swan-watchers. One January, my husband and I were among them, standing along the shore of the river and marveling at the raucous crowd of hundreds of birds, jostling for food and attention.
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.
If you want to find eagles, the most important thing to know is they work only as hard as they have to.
When lakes up north start to freeze, eagles will head for the nearest open patch of water. In December, that's often on the northern stretches of the Mississippi River flyway, between Red Wing and Wabasha, Minn.
"They're still trying to decide where to spend the winter," says Pat Manthey of the Wisconsin DNR. "We call them indeterminate migrators. They're not like the swallows of Capistrano that come back every year. Eagles only go as far as they need to go to find what they need."
In the sloughs around Alma, birds of a feather flock together.
Bird-watchers, especially. On chilly days in late fall, they crowd onto a wooden platform to watch tundra swans paddling around a slough of the Buffalo River called Rieck’s Lake.
For years, this lake 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.
It's almost Christmas, so it's time to count birds.
You won't see three French hens, two turtledoves or a partridge in a pear tree, but chances are good for swans a-swimming, geese (though not a-laying) and many more than four calling birds. The National Audubon Society's annual Christmas Bird Count is coming up, and local bird clubs can use help.
Between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5, birders spend a day in the field at thousands of locations across the Americas, compiling numbers that will be used to monitor the status of bird populations and identify potential threats. For beginners, it's a good way to contribute and also learn from more experienced birders.
