Just returned from the second of two two day trips to the west to look for shorebirds. Finding mud flats is not easy this year. Most WMA lakes are full to the cattails. Most sewage ponds are also full to the rocks. The only decent spots we found are as follows. A few birds were seen in other places but not many.
Lac Qui Parle County-Salt Lake has good mud flats and a good variety of shorebirds plus nesting Eared Grebes, on Thursday there were 7 Marbled Godwits and one Willet among the rest on the Minnesota side, the South Dakota side also had a very large number of birds, the only other spot of any consequence in this county we were at is the spot mentioned for the Yellow Crowned Night Herons (which we never saw in spite of 4 stops on different days and times) Yellow Medicine County- Lanners WMA (2 miles north and 2 miles east of St Leo) is still good, it was drawn down last year and was good this spring and still has good mud flats, 13 species were present today, although that was made temporarily lower with fewer total birds by the hunting of a Peregrine Falcon, easiest to study with a scope from the north road where you are able to walk a few feet through the reeds to get good open views Dennis and Barbara Martin [email protected]
