With the sunny weather I decided to take the afternoon off and drive around north of Lansing looking for field birds. With the high snow depth they were pretty easy to encounter, foraging by roadsides and flushing on approach. Those wanting to look for them, just drive slowly along any of the less-traveled roads between big fields.
I stopped to photograph three main groups with different dynamics. The first had about a dozen each of Horned Larks and Snow Buntings, and they tended to hang out with their own species but loosely associated with each other. This was somewhere along Conlon Road, I think (I need to take better mental notes). Also had a Common Redpoll flock of about a dozen somewhere here. The second group along Indian Field Road just north of 90 was smaller, about a dozen Horned Larks with 3-4 Snow Buntings and two Lapland Longspurs (lifers for me, actually). I'm guessing because the Snow Bunting number was smaller, the group tended to stay together more as one group. Before I left a lone Common Redpoll also joined this group. The third group was a very large flock of 100+ snow buntings around Fennel and Snushal Roads, big enough to murmurate like starlings. An interesting observation was that the smaller groups were more approachable than the large flock. The common redpoll flock was most approachable, while the smaller field bird flocks were a close second. I'm guessing that the flushing dynamic of these flocks relates to a single individual sounding an alarm that triggers the flush, and that the large flock was more likely to have the one jumpy individual to sound the alarm to trigger the flock to flush, but this is just conjecture. Also, flushing behavior on foot vs. by car was noticeably different: on foot they tended to fly farther away while in the car they seemed to only flush a shorter distance. When the birds were backlit I actually had trouble driving to the other side of the flock, as I just kept pushing them down the road bit by bit -- I might have had better luck if I drove by fast. Finally, at Salt Point I flushed a/the continuing Killdeer from the beach. Suan -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
