The PhotoNaturalist

Part 1 of 3: Newfoundland in winter? Sparky are you crazy? Crazy like a fox! This easternmost land in North America is a birding Mecca in winter. Many European species can be found here, and often not just single individuals, but sometimes many.

I hire local “Super Guide” Jared Clarke of Bird the Rock (birdtherock.com) to help me out on my first two days…and we have a whale of a time (actually that story will be in Part 2). Jared helps get me on multiple ABA Lifers including Purple Sandpiper, Black Guillemot, Great Cormorant, Pink-footed Goose (at a University campus pond!), Eurasian Green-winged Teal and more.

We go to Cape Spear (first spot the sun touches each morning in North America) and find a flock of over 200(!) Purple Sandpipers, plus learn a bit about its WWII history.

Six days below zero and the birds of Sax-Zim are doing just fine! We visit Mary Lou’s feeders and find over 40 Evening Grosbeaks! Sparky shares his BRRRRdathon: World’s Coldest Birdathon experience as he birds northern Minnesota’s Superior National Forest and Grand Marais. Highlights include multiple flocks of Bohemian Waxwings eating Mountain-Ash fruits.

Temperatures during the Polar Vortex of late January 2026 hit as low as Minus-37ºF but the Northern Hawk Owl along CR47 is doing just fine!

We also walk the Bob Russell Boardwalk and install a plaque for one of our Bog Buddies. Then we are off to Yellow-bellied Bog for a walk on the snowshoe loop to look for Snowshoe Hares.

The Welcome Center feeders host plumpfy Canada Jays, Pine Grosbeaks and Redpolls.

An amazing coincidence occurs on Sparky’s first leg of his Newfoundland birding and bird photography trip. A flight delay and rerouting lands him in Quebec overnight. A quick Google of “Montreal Birds” reveals a very recent sighting of Canada’s first (4th(?) North American) sighting of European Robin! Sparky has never taken an Uber before, but he quickly downloads the app and calls for a ride. Will he find it?

Sparky also interviews Sabrina who shares how she discovered this bird.

In his annual exercise to find his favorite photos of the year, Sparky shares stories and images that he was especially proud of. Creative bird and wildlife photography is his main interest but he will share his best portraits as well. Creative wildlife photo categories include Dramatic Light, Opposite of Tack-Sharp, Foreground Blur, Animals in the Landscape, Owl-icious, Behavior is Better, Winging It, Flashy Fotos, Saved by the Silhouette, White & Black, High Key Highlights, Head-On, I’m Invisible, The Four-Leggeds, and Far Side Fodder.

Do you hate them? Love them? Which are your favorites?

Virtually Live 57 S6E2

Roll that beautiful owl footage! Sparky shares his favorite video clips of owls he found in early 2025. Highlights include a pirouetting Boreal, Great Gray pouncing. Between January and March 2025 an irruption of northern owls flooded into northern Minnesota; dozens of Boreal Owls, hundreds of Great Gray Owls and a couple Northern Hawk Owls were seen. The bulk of observations were from south of Duluth, Sax-Zim Bog, Two Harbors area, Lake County, Superior National Forest to Grand Marais.

Owen and Quentin Reiser are a couple of interesting dudes who did a U.S. Big Year of birding via Kia Minivan in 2024. If you haven’t seen their LISTERS movie, you must do it now! Over TWO MILLION people already have! And don’t forget to pick up Quentin’s hilarious book about their Big Year.

They first contacted me in late 2023 to do a Zoom call so they could ask me questions about birding and doing a Big Year. I got a taste of their unique world view when their last question was, “How many Canada Geese could you take in a fight if you only had a jean jacket.” Well, the obvious answer is six or seven!

But we ended up birding together in Minnesota’s Sax-Zim Bog twice, and once in Texas. They helped me find a Groove-billed Ani in San Benito…a bird I hadn’t seen in decades! I helped them find the Black-backed Woodpecker in Sax-Zim Bog.

Their resulting movie on YouTube (LISTERS: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching) has really struck a chord with millions of birders and NON-Birders. Let’s spend some time with these guys now out in the field and find out a little bit more about them.

July 4, 2025

My Great Grandfather Anders Stensaas came from the Melhus/Kvål area of central Norway in the early 1900s and settled near Vermillion, South Dakota. After a few years, he went back to Norway to marry the girl from the neighboring farm, Anna Rofstad. Anna’s father Ivar was distraught and angry that Anders had taken his daughter away. It is hard to fathom these days how far Norway and South Dakota really were in the early 1900s; no planes, no phones, only a slow boat from Oslo and a long train ride to the prairie. Letters were his only connection to his daughter.

In the early 1930s, Anders and Anna (now Americanized to “Andrew and Anne”), returned to Melhus and had a homecoming with her father. They all made peace, and he soon died at age 99.

Our connection to our Norwegian family has always been through Anna’s family, the Rofstad side. That’s just how it goes sometimes…Connections shift from maternal to paternal and back and forth over time.

My father was stationed in Germany in 1957-58 with the highly prestigious “U.S. Army Accounting Corp,” a fearsome, highly-trained….okay, okay, I’ll stop now. Dad was drafted after graduating from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and his main interest while stationed overseas was to see as much of the European continent as he could on Uncle Sam’s dime.

He made trips to Paris (Eiffel Tower, Louvre), London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Holland, a cruise down the Rhine River, skiing in the Swiss Alps, and even attended the World’s Fair in Brussels. And then he contacted his second cousin Gudrun (Rofstad) Moum in Vikhamar near Trondheim to see if he could visit. He had a great time with Gudrun and Hermann, and they visited the Rofstad family dairy farm (see photos).

Fast forward to 2025, and I thought it would be neat if the boys could see the ancestral homeland. I had been there multiple times in the past, Bridget and I even visited on our Honeymoon, so I told Jan that we’d just have a short “stand-up” visit. Well, that is nearly impossible when visiting relatives in Norway!

The short “stand-up” visit went out the window when the phrase, “Why don’t we go in and have some coffee,” was offered. And the photo albums came out, and then here came the cakes. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it!

But almost none of the farm Rofstad relatives spoke English very well, but thankfully Jan, Liv and Anders did a lot of translating for us. Did I mention that there was cake(!) and more coffee, and lots of stories. Good fun! But my Bjorn was so tired that he fell asleep on Bridget’s shoulder.

Eventually the gathering migrated to the local Lutheran Church in Melhus where I thought we might see the gravestones of our common ancestor Ivar Rofstad (both Jan’s and My Great Great Grandfather). I had seen the grave marker on a trip in the 1980s and wanted to find it again. But I was told that after a gravestone had been in place for 20 years, the family must pay a maintenance fee for it to remain in the cemetery. And if they don’t pay, another, newer, gravestone is put in its place. This seems downright crazy to me, but then again, in the U.S. we don’t have many centuries of dead people in graveyards, and we have lots of space to make cemeteries bigger and bigger.

Long story, short…we couldn’t find his grave. But I did see the marker for Ingebrigt Rofstad. Such a nice man! I had met him here in 1986 I believe.

The current church itself dates to 1892 and is an impressive and imposing stone house of worship that holds 500 congregants. I could hear organ music coming from inside but did not go in.

Historically on this spot was the Medieval Church completed in 1190AD. It was torn down by Royal decree in the late 1800s to make room for the new church. But they did re-use some parts, including the portal. And in 1999 restorers found actual runic carvings in the portal. The best interpretation is “sea priest” or “male goat priest” or “Hafr (the) priest.” The Runic alphabet basically went extinct by the 1400s, so this inscription predates that time.

Next—Off to the Viking capitol, TRONDHEIM

In Part 1 from Churchill on Hudson Bay…

My wife Bridget gave me some money for Father’s Day a few years ago to finally go see a Polar Bear. I think she was sick of my whining that I’d never seen one on my June trips to photograph birds up in Churchill.

But it wasn’t enough money.

So I saved up and went in mid September 2025. 

I went just on my own, rented a truck and drove around the limited road network outside of Churchill Manitoba on Hudson Bay.

You see the Polar Bears congregate here to wait for the sea ice to freeze so they can get on with doing what they love…Hunt seals from the ice! 

Well, it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. But soon after foolishly getting stuck in the sand right in the middle of a known Polar Bear area, I did actually spot a speck of white that was NOT a pale-colored rock or old mattress,  It actually had fur!

This was the first of four Polar Bear sightings…one each day. And I think they were all the same bear! I named him Larry. Larry the Polar Bear.

One encounter stood out above the rest; mainly because he came to me! And quite close!

With binoculars and camera, Sparky heads off to beautiful Box Canyon in southeast Arizona. Only a few miles from the world-famous Madera Canyon, Box Canyon hosts some dry hillside species that are rare in most of this area. In fact, a cooperative and bold Five-striped Sparrow perches nicely for Sparky right off the rugged road that traverses Box Canyon.

Sparky also finds a nest of a pair of animated Thick-billed Kingbirds, but one of the babies is not quite ready to fledge.

Walking a random wash in the canyon leads to a close-up encounter with a Varied Bunting. Multiple evenings were spent with new friends listening for the CODE 3 Buff-collared Nightjar. This would be a Lifer…but did Sparky hear it? You’ll have to watch to see.

One stormy night yields a friendly Tarantula, and a 3-foot Black-tailed Rattlesnake sporting its lovely green scales.