WCCO is going to air their segment about the great gray owl irruption Sunday night on the 10pm news--whoo hoo!!
Well, owls are still being seen in good numbers around Hinkley and I talked to Carrol Henderson from the MN DNR and he (yes he even though the first name is Carrol--it's a weird Minnesota thing, I don't get all the guys with female names up here either) he is speculating that many of the owls will stick around and breed here because the vole population is still no where near recovered in Canada and that owls aren't regular migrators but a tad nomadic and will start nesting where ever there is food. Still so much to learn about what is going on.
For all those that have come to Minnesota to see the owls, please don't forget to report your spending to the MOU. It's important to try and learn the economic impact these owls are having on the state. That's one of the best tools for conservation.
You know, I have never put any kind of warnings about some of the weirdness to be found in the bog. Some people live out in the middle of no where because they don't want to be around other people--and that is true in the bog. There are some places we try to avoid. If you visit Mike Hendrickson's home page and scroll down to the bottom, you see one of the homes we try to avoid. We do this for several reasons, one being that you don't know what would set someone off and start firing a gun and two, if they are unhappy people are visiting their area, they will take steps to remove whatever is drawing people to the area. I always make a point to avoid the yards that have signs up that say "no birdwatching" there are plenty of places to find good birds in the area without irritating people.
Sometimes you just find really odd unexplainable stuff. When we were up earlier this winter we were excited to see a fox on the side of the road...that is until we realized that it wasn't moving. We got out of the van to look at it we realized it was kinda dead, and could find no visible sign of what had killed the fox, but were shocked that someone took the time to try and pose it on the side of the road.
Was it teenagers with too much time on their hands or just some weirdo? Who knows, but it is all part of the fun and adventure of visiting Sax Zim Bog.