_____ Hi everyone! After dropping my daughter and her friends off at the Owatonna Cinema late this afternoon, I checked out Rice Lake State Park and Spindler's Pond in Steele County. The latter had a mix of both Blue & Green-winged Teal and Gadwall, along with 9 Greater Yellowlegs. At Rice Lake, I was able to experience the "2008 Horned Grebe Phenomena". >From just one spot, I panned left to right and counted 37 of them, but like I said, that was just in one spot. They were all over the lake. If the day had been calmer and warmer, I would have checked it over more thoroughly to nail down a more accurate count, but if I were to estimate, I'd say there were easily over one hundred there. Other notes of interest from the lake included Eared Grebe, Red-necked Grebe, Forster's Tern, Franklin's Gull, Canvasback, and a pair of lingering Common Mergansers. *I also observed a couple of loons, one in non-breeding plumage. My immediate thought was Western Grebe because it had its head and bill tilted upwards, but when I focused in, I realized it was a loon. Then my thoughts were, "Maybe a Red-throated Loon due to the angle of the head and bill?" After watching it for awhile, I could see that the bill looked somewhat bold, and I THINK that I saw a flatness to the top of the head, indicating Common Loon. BUT, my overall feeling was that this loon didn't have the "bulkiness" of a Common Loon. I couldn't tell if it had a necklace like a Pacific Loon or not because it was far out there, and the wind was so strong that if I let go of my scope, it blew right over. Anyone exploring Rice Lake may want to keep an eye out for this one. QUESTION: Do Common Loons retain their non-breeding plumage this far into April or is this a "1st summer phase?" Good birding! Dave Bartkey Faribault, MN screechowl at charter.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20080426/6ca93276/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00011.txt Url: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20080426/6ca93276/attachment.txt -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: _AVG certification_.txt Url: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20080426/6ca93276/attachment-0001.txt
