The Sound of Summer – The Timberjay

Marshall Helmberger

I was walking near Junction Road between Tower and Soudan the other day when the languid song of a bird rare in our area took me back to my youth. It was the song of an Indigo Finch, which speaks to its world through a series of paired notes that it sings without any particular haste. I have seen various mnemonics that typically describe the song as “what-what, where-where, see-it-see-it.” It is a little raspy and a little tuneful, but is usually sung with confidence.
It was etched in my mind during my teenage years on so many summer hikes along Nine Mile Creek, which flows through downtown Bloomington and empties into the Minnesota River. We lived on the edge of the creek valley, which was heavily wooded and mostly an undeveloped public park. I had a few rarely used trails that led from the road by our house into the creek valley, but I often took the winding driveway that connected a house seemingly ripped from a fairy tale to the outside world. It was an older house, two stories, but relatively small inside. It was the home of the Bugensteins, friends of the family, so they didn’t mind if I walked through their property on my almost daily trips to the woods. They were resisters of the city’s desire to acquire their property to cement its claim to the park. I understood the Bugensteins’ tenacity completely. Their small house and surrounding property sat along the creek, on the site of an old mill that had long since disappeared by the 1970s. It was set in a steep depression, and all around it were densely wooded hills, and the sounds of the surrounding suburbs had virtually disappeared, except for the occasional Northwest 707 arriving at or taking off from MSP’s southwest runway.
The hills around them were alive with the song of many species of birds in summer, but the song of the Indigo Bunting was one of the most memorable for me. Their languid song embodied summer in my young mind, and their return to “my” woods year after year was a constant in my life.
When I heard those familiar sounds the other day, they immediately caught my attention. I had taken my camera out to look for butterflies for an upcoming outdoor page, but the best thing about nature photography is that you never know what you’re going to find on any given day. Most of the time, it’s not what you expect. An Indigo Finches was the last thing on my mind that afternoon.
Although I have encountered indigo finches here in the north country several times over the years, we are on the northern edge of their breeding range, so I would classify them as rare here. The males are easy to spot at first glance, as they are the only completely blue birds you are likely to find in Minnesota. The eastern bluebird is about the same size (both are the size of a large sparrow), but they have rusty-orange breasts and a white belly. The male mountain bluebird is almost completely blue, but it is a lighter shade and it is usually found in the Rocky Mountains, not our region.
While the male Indigo Finch is visually striking, the female is one of the most unremarkable birds found in Minnesota: a drab brown with no distinctive markings. It could easily be mistaken for a sparrow, although even sparrows are usually more colorful. In fact, it is so drab that this alone is its most reliable field characteristic.
Indigo finches typically inhabit bushy areas, especially on field edges or other margins. The edge of an overgrown, abandoned field is their preferred habitat, and that’s where I found the bird pictured here. In this overgrown field, covered in daisies, hawkweed, and buttercups, I had hoped to find the butterflies I wanted to photograph. In the end, there was an indigo finch and swarms of midges, but not a single butterfly. Let’s call it a successful outing, though.