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Autumn brings a new wave of ‘short-distance’ migrants

Northwoods Notebook

A male wood duck and a painted turtle soak up some of the late summer sun at Six Mile Lake in northern Dickinson County. Both still should have some time before conditions turn cold enough to drive the duck south and the turtle to tuck away into the mud for the winter. (Betsy Bloom/Daily News photo)

The official arrival of autumn on Wednesday also seems to roughly coincide with migration moving into the next major wave.

Gone from Six Mile Lake are most of the summer yardbirds — the eastern phoebes that nested twice, the ruby-throated hummingbirds that earlier in the month swarmed the feeders, draining them almost daily. Warblers, flycatchers, swallows all have departed. Even the northern flicker woodpeckers, for a while more numerous than robins in foraging on the lawn, are down to a few individuals.

Ryan Brady, Natural Heritage Conservation Program biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, noted the same shift in the past couple of weeks, as the long-distance neotropical migrants head out.

They’ll be soon replaced, he said, by sparrows and other “short-distance migrants” that tend to spend the winter in other states rather than other countries or even other continents.

Many of the sparrows — tree, song, fox, white-throated and white-crowned, to name a few known to come to feeders — nest far to the north, even on the edge of the tundra, so the cooler conditions don’t faze them and they may even stick around even after the snow flies, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website, www.allaboutbirds.org.

The other new arrivals tend to be on the water — ducks, geese and grebes, perhaps even tundra swans, though they tend to follow the Mississippi River route; swans seen here more often are the year-round-resident trumpeter swans.

Usually waterfowl are in less of a hurry when heading south in the fall, sometimes lingering as long as conditions allow for feeding.

It’s a good time to keep an eye on the skies as well, as some of the duck species more known for favoring seas or other larger bodies of water will occasionally wing over enroute to Lake Michigan or beyond. A string of about 40 or more long-tailed ducks, a sturdy diving variety that normally favors northern ocean coasts, made such a flyover at Six Mile Lake a couple years ago.

In short, it’s still a great time to get out and look for birds along with taking in the turning fall foliage.

Betsy Bloom can be reached at 906-774-2772, ext. 240, or bbloom@ironmountaindailynews.com.

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