By Tim Krohn
HENDERSON — Don Mitchell was fishing for hummingbirds over the weekend.
Like angling for fish, it took patience.
Mitchell sat at a picnic table in Dolores Hagen’s yard in Henderson, holding fishing line that was attached to a door on a cage about 40 feet away. When one of the dozens of hummingbirds flitting around the yard ventured inside the cage to get some nectar from a feeder, Mitchell pulled the line to close a trap door.
Mitchell, of the University of Minnesota Extension Service, would take each bird from the cage, place it in a small net bag and bring it back to the table to band, measure and weigh as a steady stream of onlookers watched and photographed his work.
“This is a squirmy one,” said Mitchell as he made his third attempt to attach a tiny metal band on one bird’s leg.
It was a juvenile male, not long out of the nest, he told the crowd. He could tell it was young by the grooving in the bill and knew it was a male by the shape of one of its feathers.
He wrapped it gingerly in a small square of mesh that hung from a scale.
“Three grams. A little more than (the weight of) a penny.”
When he was done recording the information, something he does with hundreds and sometimes thousands of hummingbirds each year, Mitchell gave 83-year-old Jean Jensen the thrill of her life.
Mitchell set the bird in Jensen’s opened hand and covered the bird with his hand to calm it. Then he pulled his hand away as the hummingbird darted off.
“It’s something I always wanted to do — touch one,” said Jensen, who came from Wayzata to take part in Henderson’s first Hummingbird Hurrah, a celebration of everything hummingbird. “I got to hold it. For about one-millionth of a second.”
But the brief encounter was enough.
“It felt so soft. Oh, that’s great. It’s a wonder, just a wonder.”
Henderson civic leaders sponsored the event to draw attention to the importance of the river valley to song birds, especially during this time of migration.
Mark Peterson, executive director of Audubon Minnesota, was one of the experts on hand to give presentations and answer visitors’ questions.
While the hummingbird is abundant and doing well, many other songbird species are not, Peterson said.
There are 324 species that regularly stay or stop off in Minnesota. Of those, the DNR has identified 97 species as being in some danger.
“So for about one-third of species there are concerns about their viability.”
He said good habitat — a variety of trees, cover and water — is vital to conserving song birds. That’s what makes the Minnesota River valley valuable. So valuable it is one of 35 areas in the state identified as an Important Bird Area.
“What you have in this area is a special confluence of events that are ideal for warblers coming through in migration,” Peterson said.
While the Mississippi is one of the world’s premier flyways for birds migrating between the north to Central and South America, tributaries such as the Minnesota are also vital in what Peterson describes as a super-highway system for birds.
“The byways like the Minnesota take part of that traffic coming down the Mississippi.”
Audubon and others work worldwide to improve the habitat for songbirds. He said individuals can do a lot with small and sometimes unlikely practices.
It can be as simple as buying shade-grown coffee from Central and South America. “That shade canopy (over the coffee plants) provides great cover for birds, as opposed to the sort of clear-cutting with other coffee.”
And he advises people to plant native trees and plants in their yards. “Native plants provide habitat for many more kinds of insects than non-native plants and most birds eat insects.”
