After spending the night just north of Duluth, we decided to bird County Road 2, which runs north from Two Harbors. According to Kim Eckert’s A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota, Spruce Grouse can be found there north of the Sand River. When we got to the area, we started to drive slowly and watch carefully. We saw a couple of flocks of pine grosbeaks, but suddenly, some other birds flew up from the roadside. I didn’t get a good look at them, but Pole said they were a little chunky and had red in the tail. That means Spruce Grouse.

I was furious, of course, because I hadn’t seen anything all day except grosbeaks. I turned the car around, then around again. (It’s hard to find the same place going in the opposite direction.) Going very slowly, we saw another group of birds at the bottom of a hill (just north of mile 9862, for what it’s worth). Eckert says grouse like to eat the grit from the snowplows, and sure enough, these birds were pecking at the road. I pulled over as far as I could (fear of logging trucks), but we really couldn’t see much through our bins. And we didn’t want to drive any closer for fear of scaring them off. So I quietly climbed out of the car and set up the scope.

When I got a look, the birds were clearly SPRUCE GROUSE, seven or eight of them. While I was watching, I heard a loud HONK! The grouse heard it, too, and turned their heads. Fortunately, they stayed put. The noise came when Pole climbed out the driver’s side and accidentally hit the horn. We usually remember to let her out before I pull over, but we forgot this time. The passenger side opened out on deep snow atop a ridge, so she couldn’t exit that way. But she did get a fine look at them once she was out. We gave up once the first logging truck blew us by.

Next we went to Spruce Road, where we took a snowmobile path by foot. I took the scope, though Pole had suggested on an earlier walk that it might not be worth it. (These walks can be long.) A couple of hundred yards in, we heard a light tap-tap-tap coming from a burned-out stand of trees. Then I saw some movement with my bins. I quickly got the scope on the bird: it was clearly a THREE-TOED WOODPECKER. Pole got a quick glance, too, and saw it was a female. An extraordinary bird. A rare bird, too, and — like the grouse — a lifer for both of us. And again, like the grouse, we might not have been able to identify it without the scope. It was too far away for the binoculars, and we only had a quick look.

We then walked along Endless Waters Road, where two Gray Jays followed us the whole way, hoping for a handout. Pole aptly described them as oversized chickadees. One of our last stops was outside the Moose Ridge Motel in Isabella. Last year at this spot, tagging along with a first-rate Ohio birder and his crew, we saw a boreal chickadee. No such luck this time, but we did see some COMMON REDPOLLS.