Tennessee got a visit from a new bird in late November when an ancient murrelet showed up at Chickamauga Dam near Chattanooga. As I’m fond of noting, birds have wings and can use those wings to show up in the most unexpected places.

A bird of the Pacific Northwest, ancient murrelets typically winter off the Pacific Coast, not on a lake in landlocked Tennessee. It’s little surprise that this bird represents the first-ever record of the species for the Volunteer State.

According to the website “All About Birds,” ancient murrelets are sea-going birds that nest in colonies on land, although usually within 1,000 feet of the shoreline.

The website also notes that ancient murrelets construct earthen burrows for nesting but also use existing cavities under logs or tree roots, crevices in rocky areas or gaps between grass tussocks. They’re also adaptable and readily use wooden nest boxes and sometimes even nest in walls or huts.

Readers may remember that I wrote about Tom and Cathy McNeil chasing after some hurricane-driven American flamingos in North Carolina and Tennessee back in August. Turns out, they went after the ancient murrelet, too, again with success, I am pleased to note.

Upon arrival at the Chickamauga Dam Day Use Area, Allan Trently, an East Tennessee State University graduate and a former East Tennessee resident, had a spotting scope already focused on the murrelet. How’s that for convenience?

The reports of the murrelet made me think back to my childhood reading of the books in the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As it turns out, the Ingalls family members were good amateur naturalists.

Wilder, writing as an adult, wrote about birds and other wildlife. She wrote in a time when birds like prairie chickens were still common on the vast grasslands of states like Kansas, Minnesota and North and South Dakota.

An interesting couple of chapters in her book “The Long Winter” offer details of a strange water bird that literally drops out of the sky into a bale of hay on the family farm near Silver Lake in De Smet, South Dakota.

The family consults a book titled “The Wonders of the Animal World” and conclude that the bird looks like a miniature version of the great auk.

The bird was definitely not a great auk, which went extinct in 1844. But there are some tantalizing clues that the bird might have been an ancient murrelet or a dovekie.

Laura Erickson, author of the blog “For the Birds,” dedicated one of her posts to the mysterious bird found by the Ingalls family. Erickson did her research and discovered records of ancient murrelet in South Dakota from November 1993. South Dakota has no records of murrelets, but neighboring Wisconsin had a few. One visiting ancient murrelet was shot by two boys hunting along Lake Michigan in 1908, and another was found dead under some Tomah power lines in 1949.

And then, along comes Steve Kolbe, who found an ancient murrelet at Stoney Point up the shore between Duluth and Two Harbors in January of 2021.

It was an opportunity too good to miss, and Erickson made the trip to see the rare visitor.

She noted in her blog that she immediately thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder when she learned about the bird. Erickson did get to see the bird, and she wrote that the sighting provided her with “a sense of connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder herself, the woman whose books so enriched my childhood and were so enjoyable to read aloud to my own children.”

The “Little House” books are a treasure trove to a time of abundance for birds. Wilder writes often of awe as she observed birds as the family ventured into new territory. Near Silver Lake, she saw great migrating flocks of geese, ducks, cranes, herons, swans, pelicans and hell-divers (grebes) and mud-hens (coots).

A mournful Charles Ingalls even brought back a swan, shot by accident. He tells the family he had never seen one in flight.

He also shot a pelican so the family could see one up close, but the smell made their examination very quick. If you’ve ever wondered, pelicans are not worth eating, according to Wilder. She wrote that their feathers reek of fish, making them unfit for even the stuffing of pillows.

Wilder also described all the sorts of ducks that migrated across the vast prairies, including mallards, redheads, canvasbacks, teals and bluebills. I’m guessing that the bluebills were scaups, a species of diving duck. In an almost poetic passage, she described “golden autumn days” when “the sky was full of wings.

Another birding story from the books, both humorous and serious in tone, involves an invasion of blackbirds that decimated a crop of corn and oats that Charles Ingalls was trying to raise.

The flocks of blackbirds defeat all their efforts to defend the crops, but there is a “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade” moment when Wilder writes, “For dinner, there is blackbird pie — even better than chicken pie. In addition, there is more bounty from the garden: new potatoes, peas, cucumbers and carrots. There is even cottage cheese and more tomatoes with sugar and cream.”

As Pa Ingalls declared at the end of the chapter, “a flock of pesky blackbirds can’t stop us.”

Considering their location in South Dakota, the blackbirds could have consisted of several species: red-winged blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds, grackles or cowbirds. It’s a little disappointing Wilder didn’t prove as descriptive in her account of the blackbirds as she did when writing of the waterfowl.

It’s nice to be able to bird vicariously through the exploits of the McNeils, as well as the long-ago stories from the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I do need to get out more and look for my own birds.

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To ask a question, share a sighting or make a comment, email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com.