KOOCHICHING COUNTY, Minn. — When it comes to spending time outdoors, it’s pretty tough to beat sitting by a campfire on a nice spring evening when the natural world is coming back to life after a long winter.
Such was the case late last month, when I met up with a friend at “The Shack,” the headquarters of his family’s deer camp in Koochiching County not far from the Big Fork River, for the weekend.
There was nothing on the agenda, other than “bombing around” the woods a bit to see what we could see (and hear what we could hear) and hanging out at the firepit surrounded by spruce and poplar trees.
It was glorious.
Earlier that Friday, before heading east to the Northwoods, I had attended the Glenn Allen Paur Lecture on the University of North Dakota campus in Grand Forks, which featured Marilyn Vetter, president and CEO of Pheasants Forever/Quail Forever and a 1988 UND grad, as keynote speaker. I sat next to Dave Lambeth, often referred to as “the dean of Grand Forks birders,” who asked me if I’d fired up my Merlin bird-identification app yet this spring.
As I told Lambeth, I hadn’t used the app to that point but hoped to use it as soon as later that evening.
Good plan, he said, as the weekend was shaping up as a good one for spring bird activity.
That evening as we sat by the campfire, a five-star sunset had dipped below the wall of trees, and darkness was descending when the show started. Somewhere back in the trees, a tiny saw-whet owl was calling. Some say the call is like the high-pitched sound of a saw being sharpened — or “whetted,” as they might have said in the old days — a repetitive “to-to-to” kind of sound.
One calling owl became two, then a third and then — somewhere in the distance on the other side of the road — a fourth.
The saw-whets definitely were chatty and putting on a show. A better serenade to a spring evening by the campfire would have been hard to imagine.
It was completely dark, save for the stars shining above us, when a different-sounding owl joined the show.
I fired up the Merlin app, which revealed the new bird was a barred owl, a common Minnesota owl with a hooting call the state Department of Natural Resources describes as “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all.”
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We couldn’t decide whether the barred owl was moving around or whether there was more than one because the sound would come from different places in the forest, but no more than one at a time. We’d hear an owl calling in one place, only to hear a call in a different part of the woods a few minutes later.
The saw-whets, perhaps intimidated by the larger owl, had gone quiet.
At one point, it sounded like a real ruckus was going on as the barred owl’s call changed from hooting to more of an eerie wail, or screeching sound. Like owls fighting, perhaps, or fending off a predator.
We could only imagine what was going on somewhere back there in the trees. In the dark.
It was kind of creepy, but in a good way.
On a March evening 10 years earlier, we’d been sitting at the same firepit surrounded by the same dark woods when we heard a creepy sound we never were able to identify.
In a column I wrote about the encounter, I described it as “kind of a ‘yeep!’ noise, a single call that overtook the chorus of coyotes that were howling on the other side of the road.
“It wasn’t a ‘whoop’ or a ‘yelp,’ and it definitely wasn’t a screech,” I wrote. “Just a single ‘yeep!’”
What the …?
Whether it was a bird, an animal or some kind of creature that goes “bump” in the night, we’ll never know, but I sure wish the Merlin app had been a thing back in those days. At the very least, I wish I’d have recorded the call to play it back for someone more knowledgeable than me.
On that Saturday night, after spending the afternoon bombing around the woods and hearing several ruffed grouse drumming, we took a hike to a swampy area on the other side of the road just before dark.
Chorus frogs — which make a sound like plucking the teeth of a comb — and leopard frogs (at least I think they were leopard frogs) were in full voice in a small wetland. We could hear them but couldn’t see them, other than occasional ripples on the surface of the water.
At times, the sound — “joyous” is the only word I can use to describe it — was almost deafening.
From owls one night to frogs the next, with drumming ruffed grouse in-between, the weekend served up a Northwoods symphony at its finest.
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