Red, White and Blue Birds

By Coggin Heeringa, Interpretive Naturalist, Crossroads at Big Creek, Inc.

Though  the Collins Learning Center will be closed on Independence Day, our trails (like always) will  be open all day, every day, so on Thursday, holiday hikers may see red, white and blue birds on each of our three Crossroads preserves.

Then July 5 at 5:30 pm, as is our tradition, Crossroads will sponsor a free First Friday Event and this month, we will be having a fire with smores at our Council Ring. Reservations are not needed to attend. Attendees can socialize, tell stories, and make s’mores.

On Thursday, July 11 at 5:30 pm, as part of Crossroad’s Resources for Landowner Series, Jason Barrack, one of Door County’s NRCS agents, will present “An Introduction to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.”  NRCS helps private landowners improve the health of their operations while protecting natural resources for the future. 

The natural resources of Door County would have been far different in 1776.  Our nation came into being near the end of the “Little Ice Age”—which was not really an ice age, but rather a 600-year cool period which caused extreme hardship, crop failure, famine and death in both Europe and North America.

So when Europeans first explored the Door Peninsula, they found a shore-to shore northern coniferous forest such as we might now find in Canada. Early explorers and surveyors wrote in their journals about trees and soil, but they rarely, if ever, mentioned birds and wildflowers. So we can only speculate whether we had red, white and blue birds here then.

Blue jays, though much maligned and arguably noisy birds, may be the reason we have deciduous trees in Door County.  Many ecologists credit blue jays (which bury acorns and nuts) with planting our oak and  beech trees.  And until we had mature oak trees, it is unlikely that scarlet tanagers (which my father insisted on calling “black-winged redbirds”) were nesting in the tree canopies.

Indigo buntings (which in sunlight really are as blue as the flag) nest in brushy areas and they apparently moved into this part of Wisconsin only after the forests were logged out and farms and rural development created the edge habitat they prefer.

According the extraordinarily well-researched book, “Wisconsin Birdlife” by Samuel Robbins, northern cardinals did not reach Door County until the 1940s. They too nest in low shrubs and trees in or near open areas (but do move into residential areas in the winter to take advance of bird feeding stations.)

And white? We’ve probably always had gulls, but our stunning white pelicans are recent arrivals to Door County, though for the last decade they have been fairly common.

We can’t really know what birds were here before 1776, but we do know that the climate has changed significantly since then. And knowing how to adapt to current and future conditions is an important part of restoration. So we hope landowners and managers and anyone interested in restoration, will take advantage of the natural resource professionals who will be presenting programs at Crossroads this summer.