The Sax-Zim Bog—A Birder's Paradise

I first visited Minnesota when I was nine. We stayed at my great uncle's modest home on a northern lake near the Iron Range. It was here that I had my first sauna, an affliction I've proudly never lost.

When I started my career job search, I was told that the Twin Cities was a great place to find a job. I didn't need more convincing. Eventually, my wife and I relocated north to Duluth, Minnesota. I still like northern Minnesota like nowhere else.

The winter of 2004-2005 brought an extraordinary northern-owl irruption. The owls were driven south by a food failure, probably helped by a near-collapse of vole populations in boreal Canada. This forced Northern Hawk and Great Gray Owls south into Minnesota in search of prey.

I read about this in the local papers, and twice set out in search of these owls. They mentioned the Sax-Zim Bog. I had never heard of it.

I was shocked! The Sax-Zim Bog is this flat, eerie and desolate bog of tamaracks and black spruce trees, as uninviting as a place can be—except for one thing. And that is owls. Huge owls. Great Gray Owls that sit quietly high on a barren tree limb, looking at you, a scene right out of Harry Potter. I've been an amateur birder since college but I had never seen anything like this.

I've been to the Sax-Zim Bog multiple times, and I’m never disappointed. Sax-Zim Bog is not a nature preserve or park system set-aside. Loosely, it's a roughly 300-square-mile expanse of land that includes the ghost towns of Sax and Zim, Minnesota, total population of about fifty.

About half of the land is county or state land, including several state Wildlife Management Areas and State Forests, a patchwork of governmental organizations that have recognized this area as significant for wildlife and nature. About a quarter of it is private land. The land also includes several rivers and lakes.

But its real distinction is that it is a unique birding area, one of the easiest places in the country to find boreal birds, such as hawks and owls, without traveling hundreds of miles into Canada.

Not to make this more unusual, the best birding is not in the spring or summer when it’s comfortable to be outside, but rather in late fall and winter when temperatures can easily drop below zero.

There are miles of roads to explore in search of birds, some unpassable in winter. Sitting in your car is probably the easiest way to find them. Along the roads, you will see remnants of these old towns—abandoned homes, farms, trailers and cars, an above-ground swimming pool that hasn’t been used in decades, and occasionally a working farm or a seasonal cabin. And then out of nowhere, you'll drive by a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses.

And you’ll see birds.

And you'll be warned to "please avoid birding the very north end of Stickney Road... this is not a birder-friendly location." 

There are bird feeders that attract birds, making it easier for you to find them. There are also walkways built into the bogs where you can get into the middle of good birding places.

You can now book week-long mid-winter birding tours of Sax-Zim Bog, some originating on both coasts. Just to see boreal birds like nowhere else.

How did this all happen? As I said, no one set up a Sax-Zim Bog nature preserve.

Over a hundred years ago, the towns of Sax and Zim were established, with a strong presence of Nordic immigrants, for the lumber industry that was logging this area. The towns together grew to about 400 people. The logging eventually died off, while mining to the north provided new employment. Although the towns themselves eventually died—neither is incorporated today and even a gas station is hard to find—residents could find jobs within commuting distances.

So many people just stayed. The area's population has been about the same for decades. Some of the land continues as family farms, with large pastures that themselves attract birds. One active farm goes back five generations.

In the past few decades, the area has developed a small tourism industry around its birding, an interest that was raised significantly after the 2004-2005 northern owl invasion. Soon, there were two significant non-profit organizations involved with the area, Friends of Sax-Zim Bog and The Conservation Fund.

Friends of Sax-Zim Bog was organized to stop new potential logging in the area that might threaten the habitat that makes the area so valuable to birds. This non-profit is now a $1-million-a-year operation with a Welcome Center, warming house and staff. 

In addition, they have purchased over 4,000 acres of land and have helped set aside thousands more. They organize regular activities. For example, they have an annual BRRRRdathon in early January, claiming to be the “World’s Coldest Birdathon,” providing detailed maps with information on how to find birds and a wonderful website. It all helps make the area truly a mecca for birders.

The Conservation Fund also got involved, but not to purchase property but to arrange land swaps, trading productive timberland outside the bog for valuable wetlands that are then placed under permanent conservation protection. They have helped conserve more than 42,000 acres within the Sax-Zim Bog.

Years ago, I first heard the term "soft adventure." That's me, I told myself. I like adventure but I have no interest in climbing Mt. Everest. I enjoy exercise and exploration, but I don't care about risking my life.

It's what I like about Minnesota. There are lots of ways to experience soft adventure and still come home with all my body parts. That's the Sax-Zim Bog. It’s a great example of Minnesota adventure, a place that looks almost worthless, yet people from around the world will spend a lot to experience it.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I celebrated New Year’s Day by taking a drive to the Sax-Zim Bog. On our way, I wondered whether it would be quiet, as it often is on New Year’s Day, or busy.

Birders aren't ones to stay home! It was busy! On a barely plowed two-rut road far from anywhere, there were other cars, all enjoying the soft adventure—and birds—of the Sax-Zim Bog. The Welcome Center was open, a kind worker helped me identify a large hawk we had seen, and we bought ourselves a couple of great mugs.

Minnesota never lets me down.

AI Investing—Lessons From the Past

Hardly a day passes without another artificial-intelligence headline: a major acquisition, a sudden decline in an AI company’s stock, new breakthroughs overseas, security vulnerabilities, government initiatives, reports of “blistering” growth and profits. 

As of early September 2026, the four largest companies in the S&P 500 account for roughly a quarter of the index’s total market capitalization, and all have major investments in or exposure to AI: NVIDIA, Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft.

Some of the more recent AI developments are the expanding use of AI agents to handle workflow; "reasoning" models; processing images and photos; and the continuing use of AI to write software.

This isn't the first big change to happen to modern society. Railroads, electricity, computers and the internet, medicine and automobiles are just some of the huge changes that have occurred in recent history. And each of these changes has created big winners. But there are also losers along the way. 

A revolutionary technology can create huge economic growth while simultaneously destroying enormous amounts of invested capital—and the eventual stock market winners may be companies that weren't the original technological pioneers.

For example, Cornelius Vanderbilt and James J. Hill are names still known today who made massive fortunes in the railroad industry. But along the way, the panic of 1873 helped usher in a prolonged economic depression. During the ensuing depression, about 25% of hundreds of railroads went bankrupt.

The lesson is not that railroads were a bad technology. The lesson is that a good technology can attract too much capital, leaving investors with poor returns even as society benefits enormously. Ultimately, investors aren't buying technologies; they're buying claims on future cash flows at a particular price. 

The same was true of other huge advances, such as in automobiles. Henry Ford pioneered the use of an assembly line for mass automobile production with the Model T in the early 20th century. There is perhaps no single consumer product that has transformed American life more than the Model T.

Ford pioneered mass automobile production and made Henry Ford extraordinarily wealthy. But because the company was privately held by Mr. Ford, investors could not simply buy Ford stock during the crucial early years. Meanwhile, General Motors—built through acquisitions and diversification—became one of the era’s great public-company success stories.

At this same time, many of Ford's competitors lost fortunes. There were nearly 300 car companies prior to the Model T, and forty years later, there were only a handful of major car manufacturers remaining, several of which still produce cars today.

Many of us lived through the dot-com boom of 2000. It developed during the late 1990s, peaking early in 2000. The Nasdaq Composite rose roughly fivefold from 1995 to its peak in March 2000, and then fell about 78% by its October 2002 low.

Cisco, one of the largest IT companies at the time, briefly became the world’s most valuable company in late March 2000, before its stock collapsed, losing roughly 90% of its share price from its peak. Twenty-six years later, in March 2026, Cisco’s stock finally closed above its previous peak in 2000. Note that this does not include dividends paid along the way, nor does it account for 26 years of inflation. But it shows the devastating losses incurred in the dot-com bubble by even the largest IT companies. 

In retrospect, many made fortunes in the dot-com boom and many lost fortunes in the dot-com bust. Although the bubble destroyed enormous amounts of shareholder wealth, it also financed enormous amounts of Internet infrastructure and software that later became economically valuable. And some companies, such as Amazon, eBay, NVIDIA and Google, came to dominate their respective fields, all names well known today. Investment losses and social progress can occur at the same time.

I remember the peak of the dot-com boom like it was yesterday. For the first—and last—time, I paid a Certified Financial Planner to review my investments. Like seemingly everyone else at the time, she was mortified that I had 20% of my investments in bonds, a figure that had been commonly recommended for years. But at that time, no one recommended buying bonds. Contrary to my instincts, I sold them, buying into a grossly overpriced equities market. It was a terrible investment.

Around the same time, I had an outing with my youngest son at McDonald's playland. After crawling around the tubes for a while, I got us some food and then read that day's Wall Street Journal while he continued playing. I read a fascinating article about Julian Robertson, founder of Tiger Management, an early hedge fund opened in 1980. A quarter of the money was his own, invested together with his clients.

Near the peak of the dot-com boom, with his value fund struggling, he announced that he would return his clients’ money. He couldn't make sense of the IT boom and couldn't justify investing other people’s money in a market that “I frankly do not understand.”

Even with these late losses, he had an extraordinary long-term investing record, returning about 25% annually, after fees, with losses in only 4 of 21 years. At that time, it was one of the best long-term track records in the investment world. And over the next eight years, his personal fortune, which he continued to manage, returned 404%.

His decision to walk away just before the Nasdaq collapsed became legendary. He died in 2022. I remembered that article—and the bonds I sadly sold—while the market slowly and steadily declined over the next two and a half years.

That experience has shaped how I think about today’s AI boom. AI is approaching—and in some areas exceeding—human capabilities in remarkable ways, but I remain skeptical of predictions that computers will simply replace human intelligence. After all, computers are mostly fairly stupid machines: powerful but not inherently intelligent.

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex system, and we still understand surprisingly little about how subjective consciousness, judgment, creativity and common sense emerge from it. Today's AI systems are amazingly powerful, but they are also capable of making spectacular mistakes, with little “knowledge” of what they are doing.

The question is not whether AI will matter. It almost certainly will. The harder question is whether the companies attracting the most capital will capture the resulting economic value.

I'm not pretending to know how this will end. History suggests that in the coming decades things will be vastly different in the AI world than what is predicted, both good and bad. Forecasting the future is a dubious science, and neither humans nor AI are particularly good at it.

AI may become one of the most important technologies in history. That does not tell us which companies will earn the profits, how long those profits will last, or what investors will pay for them. The safest conclusion is not that today’s AI leaders will fail, but that technological importance alone is not a sufficient investment thesis. Caution, diversification and humility may go a long way in protecting investors from trouble.