July: The picture-perfect heart of summer

Questions, comments, compliments, complaints, contributions (especially contributions!)? Newsletter editor Pamela Miller can be reached at

                July 1, 2024

            July: The picture-perfect heart of summer

            Frontenac State Park Association newsletter
July 2024 (Vol. 2, No. 7)
Questions, comments, compliments, complaints, contributions (especially contributions!)? Newsletter editor Pamela Miller can be reached at pamelamarianmiller@gmail.com.

We’re not surprised that many of the artists who participated in Red Wing’s June Plein Air art celebration high-tailed it to Frontenac State Park to capture its beautiful vistas. Here’s just one artist who painted from our favorite state park’s iconic overlook.  / Photo by Steve Dietz

July: The picture-perfect heart of summer

Oh my, it’s July! The beautiful, blazing, beating heart of summer, and what a summer we’re having! After three years of merciless drought, copious rain has drenched Frontenac State Park, creating an intricate palette of every kind of green imaginable, and countless other hues. We hope you’re visiting the park as often as you can to enjoy that amazing spectacle.

And yet, we must say, all this rain, which we giddily dubbed “glorious” in our June newsletter, is not all good. North to south, Minnesotans are grappling with serious flooding, including some of the park’s good neighbors in Old Frontenac. Gardeners are wincing at soggy ground and occasional root rot, and we’ve noticed mold on wild grapes and berries, plants that do best in drier weather.

Augh, must every change of weather be so dramatic? We’ll spare you our patented lament about extremes of weather caused by climate change (yes, friends, it’s painful, but science has shown us it’s so), but we’d be remiss if we didn’t write about the recent rains that fell on our park’s broad flood plain …

From drought to deluge: Ah, but the birds sing on
Frontenac State Park’s Sand Point Trail, a part of the park you can’t easily walk to from the main park entry area but can quickly drive to and then park at the intersection of Hwy. 61 and Goodhue County Road 2, is especially beloved by bird watchers, who marvel through the year at its rich variety of woodland and shore birds. We’re used to this sprawling natural flood plain doing its thing in early spring, but this year, it didn’t. Instead … it’s saturated now, as July arrives, after incessant June rains.
On a recent languid evening, your newsletter editor walked its two forks, both of which quickly turned into inaccessible muddy lakes. And yet, on those short walks, here’s what my phone’s Merlin bird ID app recorded, most of which I then was able to spot in the green-as-Ireland canopy high above: American Goldfinch, American Redstart, American Robin, Baltimore Oriole, Cedar Waxwing, Common Yellowthroat, Eastern Wood-Pewee, House Wren, Indigo Bunting, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Red-eyed Vireo, Red-winged Blackbird, Sedge Wren, Song Sparrow, Warbling Vireo, Wood Thrush (its startling song was my favorite), Yellow Warbler. 
These are our treasures on Earth. If for any reason you’re feeling unsettled, come walk in our beautiful park, perhaps with your phone turned off … except for that awesome free Merlin bird app. We feel sure you will feel calmer and better, as we have in similar moments. Peace to you, fellow lovers of Frontenac State Park!

Your hard-working Frontenac State Park staff recently rebuilt the boardwalk along the Sand Point Trail. It’s still strong, but it’s … flooded. It’s good to remember that this area is historically a flood plain, and that the giant cottonwoods and silver maples and other foliage there are quite accustomed to floods, and able to weather them well. Us? Well, we’ll have to wait out messy floods, then clean up the human-generated debris that floats in with them. And so we will. / Photo by Pamela Miller
The north fork of the Sand Point Trail, which snakes through a floodplain/meadow area, is also flooded. It’s ever startling to see a trail that has turned into a creek. / Photo by Pamela Miller
A July and August full of captivating events
Your Frontenac State Park Association friends kept busy in June, and will do the same in July. You’re invited to all of these events!
Saturday, July 6, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist and FSPA member Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, July 6, 7 p.m.: “Starry, Starry Night” program with the Rochester Astronomy Club, beginning with a 45-minute presentation— cloudy or clear—at the picnic shelter before star viewing from the main parking lot.
Tuesday, July 9, 10-11 a.m.: “Nature Explorers: Insects!” For preschoolers 3-6, with interpretive naturalist Sara Holger, main picnic shelter. (Note: Our June Nature Explorers session on wildflowers was well attended and great fun for all—the kids, their accompanying parents or grandparents, and we FSPA helpers! Hope to see even more of you at this one.) Our handy flier …

Saturday, July 13, 9-11 a.m.: Guided bird walk with FSPA members/Master Naturalists Janet Malotky and Steve Dietz, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, July 13, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist and FSPA member Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, July 20, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist and FSPA member Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, July 27, 9-11 a.m.: Guided bird walk with FSPA members/Master Naturalists Janet Malotky and Steve Dietz, Sand Point Trail. Meet at the Sand Point Trail parking lot.
Saturday, July 27, 1-2 p.m.: Learn why freshwater mussels are key to healthy streams and lakes in Minnesota, and what the state Department of Natural Resources is doing to restore freshwater mussel populations. A program offered by the park and the Lake City Mussel Lab. Meet at the picnic shelter.
Saturday, Aug. 3, 9-11 a.m.: Ranger Jake Gaster leads a talk-and-walk on native plants, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 3, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 10, 9-11 a.m.: Guided bird walk with FSPA members Janet Malotky and Steve Dietz, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 10, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug.10, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Explore Frontenac State Park with local pollinator conservation coordinator, Christina Locke (MN Department of Natural Resources). Participants will learn about vital insect pollinators, their host plants and how these species play a role in building and maintaining healthy watersheds. In collaboration with Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance
Tuesday, Aug. 13, 10-11 a.m.: Nature Explorers: Wildlife, for preschoolers, with interpretive naturalist Sara Holger, main picnic shelter.
Thursday, Aug. 15, 3-4:30 p.m.: FSPA quarterly meeting, main picnic shelter.
Saturday, Aug. 17, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 24, 9-11 a.m.: Guided bird walk with FSPA members Janet Malotky and Steve Dietz along Prairie Loop Trail, leaves from park headquarters.
Saturday, Aug. 24, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 31, 10-11 a.m.: Nature walk with interpretive naturalist Bruce Ause, leaving from campground kiosk.
Saturday, Aug. 31, 7 p.m.: Starry, Starry Night program with the Rochester Astronomy Club, beginning with a 45-minute presentation at the picnic shelter before star viewing from the main parking lot.
A yearling buck in velvet. Ah, young deer, enjoy this lovely summer … who knows what lies ahead for you in the fall? / Photo by Bruce Ause
Dear readers: Do you know what this thing is??

Wally Siewert, a bedrock Frontenac State Park Association member and retired park employee who lives across County Road 2 Blvd. from a stretch of the park, recently photographed this little fellow on one of his windows during a rainstorm. Do you know what this wee creature is? Send your knowledge and/or best guesses to us at pamelamarianmiller@gmail.com. We’ll include the right ones in our August newsletter! (For lots of fascinating information about frogs and toads in and around Frontenac State Park, see our August 2023 newsletter.)

An Indigo Bunting sings the blues from a branch in the park. If you’re relatively new to birding, your phone’s Merlin birdsong app to locate them, then scan the treetops for them. They’re so beautiful! / Photo by Steve Dietz
What a summer for fungi!
By Pamela Miller, Minnesota Master Naturalist volunteer
Nature offers us bumbling humans so many entry points–things about which we become curious, then fascinated, then wise. For many of you dear folks, it’s birds or wildflowers. For a few of us, it’s fungi.
Finding and learning about mushrooms is captivating, and that knowledge then becomes an alluring window into wider wisdom—what about trees? And soil? And human influences? And weather and climate? From one thing, we lurch to another, and learn yet more.
Here are a few fungi you can find in Frontenac State Park in July.
Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) are high cuisine, and such a joy to find. They mostly checked out during last year’s drought, but now are back in abundance. Where to look for them? Anywhere you see a lot of oak trees, especially if said oaks are close to pines or spruces. If you glance down as you walk a trail and see a line of circles that look like bright egg yolks, you’ve found some chanterelles. Lucky you! We found a few in late June, but were concerned to discover that they were quickly sodden and bug-ridden in our relentless rains. Here’s hoping July will dry up a bit. Chanterelles grow well into July, sometimes even into August. Here’s hoping you find a few to turn a dinner or two into delightful haute cuisine! / Photo by Pamela Miller
Bright and as beautifully designed as flowers or coral, chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus or cincinnatus) fungi are hard to miss. They grow on dying trees and downed logs. If you want to saute and eat them (and we recommend that—they DO taste like chicken!), you’ll want to harvest them in the day or three in which they’ve appeared and are rapidly growing exponentially bigger; after that, they’re tough and buggy. Watch for them in our park’s tangled, darker, damper woods. / Photo by Pamela Miller
Beautiful coral-like mushrooms are growing in abundance this damp summer. Don’t eat them, but do admire their intricate beauty. They grow mostly on downed and rotting trees. A reminder that the messier our woods are, the richer habitat they are for fungi, birds and other creatures of the woods. / Photo by Pamela Miller
Bird note: I found a baby bird!
By Janet Malotky, Minnesota Master Naturalist volunteer
A couple of weeks ago, we got a call from The Raptor Center in Minneapolis, where we volunteer. Could we head out to Mazeppa, Minn., where a farmer had found a hawk-like baby bird alone on the ground? We headed there, where the concerned farmer led us to the base of a clump of trees.
There he had tucked a hatchling American Kestrel to protect it from his four boisterous dogs after finding it on the ground in his barn doorway. The bird, covered with white fuzz, looked up at us with its big, black, forlorn, baby eyes. Its anxious parents circled overhead, calling.
Fuzzy American Kestrel overboard! / Photo by Steve Dietz
The Raptor Center doctors talked us through a basic physical exam, which revealed that the chick was not visibly injured. If it had been, our job would have been to keep it warm while getting it to TRC for care. As it was, we needed to find its nest if possible and get the chick back home. It was out of the nest way too early and would not survive on its own.
Fortunately, we did find the nest under the eaves of the barn - about 30’ high - near where the chick was found on the ground. We slipped it back in among its siblings and thanked the farmer for his kind concern and actions. He did all the right things in this situation: protected the baby from his dogs and other predators and called TRC for help. 
As I was writing this Bird Note, TRC called again, this time with a report of a hawk on the ground, possibly for more than two days, and not very shy of people. When we arrived, we identified a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk. This full-size “baby” was sitting on a boat trailer and did not fly away when we approached to take a couple of pictures for the Raptor Center.
Just look at that bulging crop, probably containing a rodent of some kind. / Photo by Steve Dietz
We watched the bird for a while to see if its body moved normally and rested symmetrically, which it did. We scanned the sky and trees for adult birds and though we didn’t find any parents, we did spot a large empty nest up the bluff not far away. From the pictures, TRC staff identified a full crop on the bird. A crop is a muscular pouch located on the front of a bird’s neck. It’s used to store food for later digestion. The full crop indicated that this youngster had recently been fed. TRC advised that this was likely a fledgling  (a youngster that has recently left the nest on purpose), and was still being fed by its parents. They said it is not unusual for a Red-tailed Hawk to be on the ground for a couple weeks as it learns to fly and take care of itself.
It’s not always easy to tell what to do when you see a baby bird out of the nest. And at this time of year, fledglings are everywhere. Newly fledged birds, although already full-sized, can look a little helpless—generally flying poorly if at all, with a bit of fuzzy down still sticking out here and there, and hopping about while calling piteously to their parents. All of this is quite normal for fledglings. Their parents will continue to care for them outside of the nest until they are ready to fend for themselves. Thus, if the baby bird has most of its feathers, even if its actions are a bit bumbling and its cries are breaking your heart, it is best to leave its care to the parents, who are no doubt nearby, rustling up dinner. 
If you find a baby bird that is naked and pink, however, or covered with fuzzy down, it’s best to return it to its nest. If that’s not possible, set the chick up in a safe spot where its parent can care for it until it’s old enough to fledge. It’s rarely successful, and actually illegal, to try to raise a wild bird in your home without a license.
Here’s a decision tree from Mass Audubon that can help guide your actions if you come across a solitary baby bird in the wild. Happy birding!

Notes from the field: American Kestrel
By Steve Dietz, Minnesota Master Naturalist volunteer
The American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), North America’s smallest—and cutest—falcon, is also its most numerous. But like almost all grassland species of birds, its numbers have drastically decreased over the past two decades. Kestrels are “obligate” secondary cavity nesters, meaning that they nest only in cavities made by another bird—woodpeckers, for example—or ones that naturally occur due to lightning, rot, broken limbs or other causes.
One way to mitigate their decline? Provide nest boxes.
We knew from past years that American Kestrels were frequently sighted at the Frontenac State Park in the spring hunting from telephone wires and poles (left). FSPA sought permission to build and maintain a nest box in the park surrounded by acres of prairie with convenient perching trees close by, about a half mile, as the kestrel flies, from the park entrance. Constructed using plans from the American Kestrel Project, it was installed on March 7, 2024 (right: Janet Malotky and Wally Siewert after installation).
A couple of months later, on May 3, I was scoping the nest box from a distance and thought I saw something in the entrance. A few minutes later, a bird landed at the entrance and slipped inside. From that distance I couldn’t be sure what it was, but on May 6, I brought a ladder, climbed up to the 12-foot nest box, and was thrilled to see five speckled brown kestrel eggs! (center) Kestrels do not build their own nests within a cavity, so we included a bed of wood shavings. This keeps eggs from rolling around and gives them a little insulation. Most of the time, the adults were not on the nest when I checked on it, but on May 9 (right), the adult female was on the eggs. She differs from the male in the even barring on her tail and her rufous (red-ish) wings. Males have one wide black band near the end of their tail and blue-ish wings. Both parents will brood the eggs, although it is mostly done by the female.
Kestrels usually lay each egg one day apart, so the first egg was likely laid no later than April 28. Incubation takes approximately 30 days in the wild, so we were thinking May 28 might be a hatch date. On May 27, OMG, hatchlings!  The previous visit was on May 25 at 11 a.m., so the chicks were born sometime after that. Hatchlings have dark bluish-black eyes, which are partially open by the first or second day. You can make this out on the left-most chick. There are only three hatchlings visible in this photo, but a clutch of five eggs can take two to three days to hatch, so the female may still be brooding two eggs, although cannibalism of younger nestlings is not uncommon …

On the May 30 visit (left), the female was feeding something juicy to the hatchlings. By June 2nd (right), at around eight days old, their skin was turning bluish on their wings, shoulders, backs and crowns.

June 10 (left), pin feathers were visible poking through the fluff. By June 14 (right), juvenile feathers had erupted all over their bodies, emerging from sheaths on their backs, breasts, wings and crowns. And you could make out five chicks!

By June 19, the chicks were at least 25 days old. The three with blue-ish wings are males and the two with brown wings are females. You can also distinguish the different tail barring in the top right two nestlings. Kestrels will typically depart from the nest between 28 and 31 days old, so after this visit, I stayed at a distance from the nest box. 

On June 22, a nestling was peering out the entrance while its mother called from a nearby tree. Should I or shouldn’t I?

On June 24, the nest box was empty. Kestrels are not known for their tidiness. Nestlings back up, raise their tail end and then squirt their feces on the walls. And they don’t always dispose of leftovers like the bird legs or dragonfly wings in the picture at above left. No matter; this young female is enjoying her tree branch in the great outdoors. For the next 14 days she will still be taken care of by her parents, until she is able to hunt, mostly for large insects and small mammals, completely on her own. 
Factual information is taken from Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birds of the World encyclopedia. All photos and any misinterpretations by Steve Dietz. Thanks to FSPA and FSP for supporting this work. Special thanks to Kirk Payne for advice and comments.
Poem of the month
“LIVING”
By Denise Levertov (American; 1923-1997)
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
A summer evening along the Sand Point Trail beach. (This photo was taken before this year’s floods, but captures well Lake Pepin’s serene evening beauty.) / Photo by Steve Dietz

Interested in joining the FSPA?
We’d be honored to have your support. Dues are $25 per year for an individual, $35 for dual/family membership. Here’s a link with signup information.
A reminder that  joining us occasionally to help the park out with volunteer efforts is awesome too, even if you’re not a member. The FSPA’s goal is simply to share our love of Frontenac State Park with as many people as possible.
To sign up to regularly receive this free and gloriously spam-free monthly newsletter, click on “Subscribe” below. Feel free to send questions or comments to your newsletter editor at pamelamarianmiller@gmail.com. Questions about the FSPA? You can reach our affable FSPA chair Steve Dietz at stevedietz@duck.com.

A Yellow Warbler sings his heart out. / Photo by Janet Malotky

Handy links for more information and education
Frontenac State Park website
Frontenac State Park Association website
If you take pictures in the park, tag us on Instagram
Frontenac State Park bird checklist
Frontenac State Park on iNaturalist
Parks & Trails Council
Website for our township, Florence Township
Minnesota Master Naturalist program
Red Wing Environmental Learning Center
Lake City Environmental Learning Program on FB
Visit Lake City
Buckthorn-pulverizing goats are among the park’s most effective summer workers. Look at these guys go! They’re at work on blufftops near Rattlesnake Bluff. / Photo by Steve Dietz

Frontenac State Park staff
Jake Gaster, park manager; Amy Jay, assistant park manager; Amy Poss, lead field worker
July is traditionally Butterfly Month, and no wonder – you can see them in abundance in our park and its environs. Here’s a beautiful Great Spangled Fritillary. Say! Send us your butterfly photos from the park pamelamarianmiller@gmail.com! We’d love to publish some through this summer and fall. / Photo by Steve Dietz

Parting shots

Park visitors Ruby Tam and Lewis Leung of St. Louis Park, Minn., were thrilled when they found some chanterelle mushrooms along a park trail two summers ago. The chants are popping again this summer—go find you some! / Photo by Pamela Miller
Aren’t oak trees beautiful, with their branches reaching out like welcoming hands (with perhaps arthritic fingers)? The park is rich with them. Many line the upper part of the trail that heads up the bluff from Hill Avenue’s park maintenance building (Point A)  to park trail points B and C. / Photo by Pamela Miller
A male goldfinch. So frequently spotted, and yet always such a joy to see. / Photo by Bruce Ause
Thank you, readers and park visitors!

This is Volume 2, No. 7 of the Frontenac State Park Association newsletter, which was launched in April 2023.
Here’s where to browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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