Birders, On Sunday morning we went birding in the Lakeside area looking at feeders looking for any unusual birds. We stopped to get coffee at the gas station on E. Superior St., where there is some road work going on, and we were stretching and sipping coffee in the brisk morning sunlight (bbbrrr!!!) and we spotted a few dozen Bohemian Waxwings. We went down to the trees they were in and for the next 40 minutes flock after flock of them flew from the lakeside to the hillside inland...and we counted 300+. Also, on Saturday on the way to Pine county, I noticed the ditches in the rural areas of both Pine and Carlton were filled level across with snow. I walked into the ditches and in some places the snow was hard packed from the snow plows...and the snow held my weight in many areas. I sank up to my knees in some of the ditches, but a lot of the hard packed snow held my 165 #'s very well. The owls were into the fields farther than in they were before this last snow storm. They were a lot closer to farm outbuildings and sitting on fence posts out in the fields and pastures. The owls were a lot harder to find, and the numbers were a lot lower. I talked to several other birders in the Barnum and Mahtowa areas who said the birds were farther south and west than earlier in the past. They had come up Hwy. 61 and birded Pine and Carlton counties but thought we were "exaggerating" the numbers, but they saw owls and were happy. They also thanked the bird lists for alerting them to the southward push. Bruce
"I care to live, only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness." -- John Muir
