Singing the Blues

Welcome to the birdiest issue of MCV in recent memory. Inside you’ll find two stories on hawks, a beautiful full-spread photo of pelicans, and a feature about sharptail hunting.

Working on this edition inspired me to pay extra attention to my feathery neighbors. This summer was great for birding, and in my small, lakeside town, I catalogued orioles, loons, warblers, green herons, wood ducks, and grosbeaks, to name a few highlights. But my favorite sighting came on a warm July morning when, near an open woodland, I saw a male eastern bluebird chilling on a fence post. It had been a few years since I’d spotted one of these colorful songsters in my area, and I couldn’t help but smile at the little guy and his outfit of royal blue and burnt sienna.

Long a symbol of peace and happiness, bluebirds suffered serious population declines in the mid-20th century, mainly due to habitat loss and competition from fellow cavity nesters like sparrows and starlings. MCV took note of these losses in a 1964 article, “Let’s Bring Back the Bluebird,” which began: “Many a Minnesota adult nostalgically remembers the day eastern bluebirds were a common sight in town and countryside. Here was a bird that was at once beautiful and beneficial, a voracious eater of insects, loved for its soft, ‘purling’ song.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, the bird did indeed make a comeback thanks to conservation efforts around the country. Minnesota’s recovery work has been especially successful due to the proliferation of “bluebird trails”—rows of nest boxes placed in suitable habitat.

With this resurgence came fresh information, including the discovery that bluebirds are not actually blue. “Red and yellow feathers get their color from actual pigments, called carotenoids, that are in the foods birds eat,” explained wildlife biologist Scott Sillett in a 2016 article on the Smithsonian Institution's website. “Blue is different—no bird species can make blue from pigments. The color blue that we see on a bird is created by the way light waves interact with the feathers and their arrangement of protein molecules, called keratin. In other words, blue is a structural color.” Crazy, right? 

To learn more about bluebirds in Minnesota, visit mndnr.gov/birds/easternbluebird.html. And after you read the rest of the bird-themed stories in this issue, visit MCV’s online archive, which contains hundreds of stories about the state’s avian residents. Happy birding!