Rock Wren, Little Missouri National Grasslands, North Dakota, September 2020
It has been two months already since we enjoyed the sighting of a Rock Wren, which was the first time ever that we saw this tiny bird. We had the remote Wannagan Campground, located just west of the border to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, for ourselves and it allowed me to walk around with camera and tripod wherever I wanted to and without disturbing other campers. Actually I was after some Mountain Bluebirds (Click HERE for a picture I took earlier that day) but when an unknown bird call sounded from some nearby rocks, my attention shifted immediately.
The Rock Wren lives in the western part of the US and southwest Canada and the location we found it is pretty much at the eastern border of its range. I just read that male Rock Wrens can have a large repertoire of more than 100 song types. I think that’s remarkable! This bird is not known to drink water, but gets the liquid it needs from food. Their diet consists insects and spiders and they hunt for them between and around rocks. Winters are pretty cold up in North Dakota and the Rock Wren migrates to the warmer regions in the southwest of the US and to Mexico.
Photographically not all wishes became true. The topography of this location did not allow to get closer with the tripod and so I applied a crop to both photos. The location itself was perfect. Having a Rock Wren on top of a rock, surrounded by some grass stems and sage brush, tells a great story about its habitat in the badlands of North Dakota.