Getting to Know You
By Adrienne Provenzano

What do you see through your windows on February 27th? Any feathered friends? Snap a photo and share it with the Friends of the Limberlost!

It's clear that Gene Stratton-Porter, nicknamed the Bird Woman, loved birds. In 1919, her book "Homing With The Birds" was published. In it she shares various insights about her feathered friends. In chapter 16,"How The Birds Know," she discusses migration. Gene notes as follows: "Birds of many species have such unerring knowledge of the workings of nature that they migrate when it is necessary and remain where they are when it is not. For example: during the bitter winter of 1917-1918 when extreme cold began in November and lasted in such prolonged form that we experienced killing frosts in June, there was not a robin in the swamps and gullies or deep woods surrounding Limberlost Cabin, north. In the unusually mild winter of 1918-1919 these birds never left us. In flocks of half a dozen, at any time during the winter, they could be found in the spice thicket back of the garage or in the sheltered ravines, and their appearance indicates that hey are living fatly upon dried berries, frozen fruits and vegetables, and food which they pick up in chicken-parks and around the farmers' back doors."

Limberlost cabin, north, is how Gene referred to what is now the Gene Stratton-Porter State Historic Site in Rome City, Indiana, on Sylvan Lake. That home is also called Wildflower Woods.

Gene enjoyed getting to know birds that made repeated annual trips to her Indiana homes, whether in Geneva or Rome City. One male robin visited Limberlost Cabin in Geneva several years in a row, and one year, on February 27th, she photographed him sitting on the back of an oaken bench on the porch just outside the large window in the library room where Gene had her desk. She included this photograph in "Homing With The Birds," and explained her photography session with the bird in her earlier books "What I Have Done With Birds," and "Friends in Feathers" as follows: "There sat that blessed bird, now of four long years' acquaintance...our guest three weeks before any of his kind had come; and the fence in front and the logs of he veranda railing were covered with three inches of snow, the ground with six. Surely that was a picture to materialize as well as to live in the heart. I polished the glass to the last degree inside and out, set a camera on the library table and focused on the bench back. The shutter was set at the bulb exposure, the long hose attached and the bulb laid on my desk, and time after time I made exposures of him. I had to work against strong light, for there was snow outside, and his face and breast were in the shadow, but I did my best. I had thought he remained motionless much longer than he did, when it actually came to counting off time in seconds. I couldn't get just as long an exposure as I wanted, ----he would turn his head, ruffle his feathers a bit or draw a foot out of the cold. But I got several good pictures that were precious to all of us, for there was the window-seat cushion for a foreground, the oak bench outside the glass for a perch and three inches of snow in the distance on railing a fence."

I hope readers of this blog will have the opportunity to visit Limberlost State Historic Site in Geneva and look through that same window when they tour Gene's house, and also enjoy seeing the bathroom and kitchen restorations where such photographs were developed, dried, and displayed! 

There is incredible beauty in winter at Limberlost. We hope you will enjoy the following photos taken in January and February 2019 by Kimberley Roll, Randy Lehman and Terri Gorney. 

Red-tailed hawk in flight. It is a year round resident at Limberlost. Photo by Kimberley Roll. 

The Loblolly Marsh has a quiet beauty in winter. Photo by Kimberley Roll. 

Wabash River at Rainbow Bottom. Photo by Terri Gorney.

The pair of bald eagles at the Loblolly Marsh. Photo by Kimberley Roll. 

White-tailed deer make their home at Limberlost. Photo by Randy Lehman. 

Shelf ice at the Loblolly Marsh. 

We have several native sparrows that make their home at Limberlost. This song sparrow photo was taken at the Loblolly Marsh by Randy Lehman. 

Late afternoon sun at the Loblolly Marsh. Photo by Terri Gorney.

Rabbit. Photo by Terri Gorney.

Photo of the Wabash River on the east side of Geneva. Gene Stratton-Porter called this place Paradise on the Wabash. Photo by Terri Gorney.

We hope you have enjoyed your winter hike around Limberlost. It is beautiful in all seasons.  

Wherein we relfect on the "butcherbird", studied by Mrs. Porter, but a Limberlost resident no more
By Curt Burnette

One of the birds that Gene Stratton-Porter studied, photographed, and wrote about was the loggerhead shrike. For her nature book "What I Have Done With Birds", she photographed a nest and the young birds in it at an oil lease east of Geneva, just east of the Wabash River. She was enamored with the five baby shrikes, calling them "darlings." They are striking birds in appearance, about the size of a robin with light grey bodies and some black and white on their wings and tails. Most noticeable is the black mask running through their eyes, and a hooked, hawk-like-beak. Although  they are members of the perching bird group, like robins, jays, sparrows, etc, they are much like hawks in their feeding habits.

Two species of shrikes in the U.S. are the loggerhead and the northern. Both types of shrike are known as "butcherbirds." Shrikes have a notch in their beak that allows them to grab prey by the nape of the neck and sever the spine. Often, they impale dead prey on large thorns or barbed wire, much like a butcher will hang the carcasses of cattle and hogs in a cooler, waiting to be processed later into cuts of meat to be eaten. Butcherbirds' impaled prey can also be eaten later. Although they eat a lot of insects, especially grasshoppers, they will also kill mice, voles, shrews, snakes, frogs, and even other birds as large as cardinals. 

Although the loggerhead shrike was nesting in the Limberlost area when Mrs. Porter lived here, we no longer have them around. The Limberlost would have been near the northern edge of the loggerhead's breeding territory, as they are more of a southern bird. The population of these birds is now in a steep decline, for unknown reasons. 

The northern shrike is a winter visitor to the Limberlost area. They breed much farther north in the summer. They are rarely seen around here, and are the cause of a bit of excitement when one shows up. In the Decembers of 2012 and 2013, I discovered impaled voles (meadow mice) in a small locust tree in the portion of the Limberlost Swamp Wetland Preserve (LSWP) just west of Geneva's ball fields. One year the dead vole was intact,  but the next year the impaled vole was headless. A gruesome find, but it told me a norhtern shrike was living in the area. Unfortunately, I was never able to see it. Then last Marsh, as I looked out a window of my yard, it was a northern shrike! This bird was very obliging in that it hung around my house for a number of days, allowing many excited birders to get good looks and photos. And just this past December, for a few weeks, a northern shrike was seen at the Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve. So, even though the loggerhead shrike is no longer found in the Limberlost, at least we are able to enjoy the occasional sighting of a northern shrike and thrill to the attractive but deadly butcherbird. 

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Note: This article was written by Curt Burnette for his Limberlost Notebook column in the Berne Witness in February 2018. In late 2018 and early 2019 Jesse Post and Kimberley Roll have seen northern shrikes at the Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve and the Limberlost Swamp Wetland Preserve. 

These two pictures of the northern shrike were taken by Kimberley Roll in March 2017. This is the bird that caused so much excitement and was regularly seen in and around Curt Burnette's home.