Birders flock to Bemidji for rare ‘accidental’ sighting

BEMIDJI — Alex Burchard helped boost tourism near statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the past several days as enthusiastic birders flocked to see his rare find on Lake Bemidji.

He spotted a juvenile male Pacific common eider Friday afternoon along the south shore of the first lake on the Mississippi River. As of Monday, it was still there, still attracting dozens of birders from Duluth and the Twin Cities. The sea duck’s extended stay is highly unusual for Minnesota, so this is what birders call an “accidental sighting.” It’s not supposed to be here, and why it is here isn’t exactly clear.

“He should be eating mussels in the Arctic Ocean, but he’s landed on the Mississippi River eating zebra mussels,” said Burchard, 37, of Cass Lake, Minn.

The local birding expert immediately shared his uncommon sighting of the common eider online so birders could chase it.

“A couple people that were in the cities immediately stopped what they were doing and drove up. … Bird people are crazy,” he said, laughing.

This is the second “chaseable” common eider in the past 50 years, he said. One stuck around Duluth a few days in 2014, but it hadn’t been previously spotted in Minnesota since 1966, according to the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union. The state’s first sighting was recorded in 1953, and a handful after that were confirmed when hunters shot them.

Two students from the University of Minnesota Duluth who are in the school’s birding club made the trek Monday following Burchard’s lead.

Larry Hollar, 74, a bird photographer from Inver Grove Heights, met Burchard as he set up his tripod on the shore.

“Alex, way to go,” Hollar said. “How in the world did you know it was an eider and not a mottled duck or a black duck?”

Burchard told him he had found other eider species before and just knew, saying his “hands started shaking.”

Hollar said he gets email alerts about birds he’s never seen in Minnesota. “So I checked with my wife, jumped in the car, and here I am,” he said.

“It might save me a trip to Alaska,” Hollar added.

“Insane find by Alex Buchard,” Alex Sundvall wrote on the app.

Sundvall, 28, of Minneapolis was heading to Mexico over the weekend, where he is a bird guide, but his flight was postponed a day.

“Because of that I was able to see the bird,” Sundvall said in a message from Mexico. “Absolutely incredible bird.”

Katie Cothran, 26, is studying the eider in her master’s program at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where the duck breeds in arctic waters.

She heard from local birders about the sighting Monday. So she left work at the Headwaters Science Center, parked at Paul Bunyan Park and ran toward a small, passionate crowd on shore.

Burchard has been scouring lakes for 20 years searching for rare birds, and he’s found many. But the common eider is hard to top.

“I’d probably rank it No. 1 for what I found in the state,” he said.

He hopes it sticks around for the Christmas Bird Count so Bemidji can claim it, just like he did.