A Visit to Moose Bog, Northeast Kingdom, Vermont

Around the first of June, before summer’s sultry grip sends spring packing, I slipped away from the office to visit a faraway boreal spruce bog to listen to the myriad wood warblers in song and to hunt for the elusive boreal birds like Gray Jay and Spruce Grouse. To walk quietly in a forest of spruce and fir is a special experience that never grows old.

This year I visited Moose Bog, in Wenlock Wildlife Management Area, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, not very far from the Canadian border. This destination is 670 miles from my home in Bethesda, Maryland, and takes more than twelve hours to drive—a very long day in the car. But the warblers have departed Bethesda and are now in the north country. It’s worth following them.

Having survived the drive, I set up my tent in the last of the day’s light at Brighton State Park. I quickly cooked dinner in the dark on my two-burner stove set on the picnic table. I fell asleep listening to the loons singing on the lake.... Robins were singing and there was skylight by 5 AM the next morning. A few minutes later I was in Wenlock WMA, seeing a cow Moose crossing the road in the morning mist. Wilson’s Snipe were winnowing over the meadow and warblers were singing everywhere—Chestnut-sided, Magnolia, Canada, Black-throated Blue, American Redstart, Ovenbird, and Northern Waterthrush. An Alder Flycatcher was singing in the fen.

Fellow birder, Jared Keyes, arrived mid-morning from Massachusetts, and the two of us began discovering the details of Moose Bog and its environs. Much of the Nulhegan River basin has been heavily logged over the years, and most of the trails and roads we drove gave evidence of this disturbance. But Moose Bog and its main access trail have a pristine look and feel. This lovely trails cuts through mature spruce forest north of the bog, making a transect of a bit more than a mile. Side tracks drop down into the bog itself, and a boardwalk gives access to the edge of the bog’s picturesque central pond. This is perhaps the finest boreal spruce bog experience in the Northeast. We found tall, mature Red Spruce in the uplands that were bearing big sets of red-brown cones. A flock of Red Crossbills was foraging in these on our first morning out. Down in the wet bog itself, Black Spruce dominated, along with American Larch and Balsam Fir, popular with the Palm and Nashville Warblers.

The upland forest is fairly open, its forest floor cloaked in a thick carpet of yellow-green moss. Down in the bog, wet Sphagnum formed the ground cover with a mixed of shrubs—Rhodora, Labrador Tea, and others. Red-tinted pitcher plants were common out on the open bog mat.

We spent three days wandering the Nulhegan basin, but devoted most of our time to the spruce forests that ringed Moose Bog and that bordered route 105 just east of the bog—a spot called “Moose Alley.” This basin supports one of Vermont’s largest populations of Moose. We saw Moose daily, and that was a great treat. But, of course, we were there to hunt for boreal birds. The confiding Gray Jay came to find us in the forest on repeated occasions. Adults would approach us silently to within a few feet, perching at eye level beside the trail. Boreal Chickadees were harder to find because their vocalizations do not carry far and they are not as curious as the jays. The territorial-singing Olive-sided Flycatcher and Yellow-breasted Flycatcher were heard more than seen. Lincoln’s Sparrow gave its musical song just once—out at the verge of the open bog mat. Black-backed Woodpeckers foraged low in the spruces and took little notice of us even as we crowded closer and closer to them to get a better look at their glossy blue-black plumage, the male with his marvelous yellow crown-spot. Their distinctive rhythmic drumming is a wonderful boreal forest sound.

The high point of each morning is to be at the forest-edge at dawn to hear the swell of thrush, warbler, and vireo song. There is nothing quite like it, as one struggles to untangle the mix of vocalizations. Also, the abundance of many of the species is a surprise, especially of uncommon species like Canada and Blackburnian Warblers. Moreover, the songs of the thrushes—Hermit, Swainson’s, and Veery, are magnificent, coming at you from all directions.

Northern spruce bogs are infamous for their droves of biting insects: mosquitoes, black flies, and deer flies, primarily. One can let these pesky invertebrates drive you back into the car, or you can simply adjust to them, and accept them as part of the environment. They are never quite as bad as advertised and one can dress for them and apply bug repellent.

The featured bird of Moose Bog is the Spruce Grouse. We saw not a one. Apparently we were just too late in the season. The females were apparently sitting eggs and the males no longer doing their display flights. That said, their silent and hidden presence there gave us a sort of strange satisfaction and a reminder that there is no guarantee to see all the birds. We were thankful to feast heartily on what we did encounter—a rich brown Snowshoe Hare with its great feet propelling it across a forest road; a Wilson’s Warbler trilling in two tones in an alder thicket; a great Raven soaring right up the road above the car; a Hermit Thrush singing ethereally from a dark spruce thicket; a Common Loon high overhead, yodeling as it heads off to another wild pond. I thought about all of these and more as I made my way back to the heat of early June in Maryland.