April 9th - Tell-tale tapping made my wife and I look up. High in the branches of a Box Elder tree, we spotted this Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker. Several times that day we spotted two or three of his companions in this same tree at the same time. Since then, however, we’ve only seen one Sapsucker at a time.
April 15th - On that same Box Elder tree, I spotted this guy, true to his name, creeping up the trunk. We’d never seen one before, so I flipped through the guidebooks and picked him out of the lineup: a Brown Creeper. The curved beak, the crouching posture and the curvature seen across his head and back helped us make a positive ID. His creeping and his crouch are so unlike that of many other birds that it is amusing to watch him move about.
Like the Sapsucker, this Creeper is passing through. It will spend the summer in the far northern portion of Wisconsin, though it is also found year-round at our western border with Minnesota and Iowa: the Mississippi River. His ilk will also year-round on the opposite side of the state, on the Door County Peninsula, a finger of land jutting into Lake Michigan near the city of Green Bay. If you squint at a map of Wisconsin, said peninsula can lend the Badger State a rather mitten-like shape.
April 17th - By chance I spotted this especially elusive migrator. He scrambled along the branches of what must be a preferred “oasis” for migrators in the neighborhood: the Box Elder tree on our lot line. It took inspection of numerous photos of this bird in different postures to see markings that suggest he is a Yellow-rumped Warbler. He, too, is headed to northern Wisconsin for the season.