On May 26, 2008 (Memorial Day) Jeanie Joppru, Shelly Steva, Pat Rice and I tried to break Matt Cole's and my 1995 mark of 134 for Clearwater County. Unfortunately, the temperatures dropped dramatically after 4:30 a.m. when the heavy rains and front went through and the day was mostly characterized by damp, misty cold and moderate wind until the sun started clearing the sky near Berner from the northwest part of the county around 6 p.m. Warblers were a struggle to see and hear although we had fair numbers at Itasca St. Park in the a.m. especially near Nicollet Trail (the best trail in the park in my opinion) off Wilderness Drive where we had Bay-breasted and Mourning Warbler (very few singing); even Redstarts and Chestnut-sided Warblers were scarce; there were good numbers of Thrushes along the park roads including a few Grey-cheeked and the more common Swainson's Thrushes; and Bert's Cabins still has good numbers of Evening Grosbeaks. Unfortunately, many flycatchers were not calling at all so we were skunked on Olive-sided, Great Crested, and Alder Flycatchers. We only heard relatively few Least Flycatchers even though they were calling seemingly everywhere the warm day before. Upper Rice Lake WMA was wind-swept and fogged in so we also missed out on Western Grebes and other potential waterbirds there. Hawks were scarce as we had no Kestrel and no accipters (Where are all the Kestrels! Was there a local die off in April?), however several widely separated Merlins were seen including a likely Richardsoni race bird in the open country in the northwest part of the county). We had a Dickcissel nevertheless about three or four miles northwest of Bagley along with our single (!) Eastern Bluebird near by. 42 Wilson's Phalaropes were at the Clearbrook Sewage Ponds along with a rare Ruddy Duck for the county. No Chimney Swifts and Common Nighthawks could be found. However, as the day cleared late we did pick up Baird's and Pectoral Sandpipers and Dunlins at the Skoe (owned by the DFL State Senator Rod Skoe family and open and friendly to birders) extensive wild rice paddies about six miles north of Clearbrook which had good water (almost too much for shorebirds) and most of the common ducks including Green-winged Teal and Pintails (but no lingering Scaup or Tundra Swans as seen in the Waskish area wild rice ponds to the east in Beltrami County a few days earlier). Sandhill Cranes started mating dances at 6 p.m. or so perhaps indicating that there were early nesting failures. We found all the six swallow species although in very low numbers from the April mortality and were particularly fortunate to find at least a couple Bank Swallows late in the day. We saw only one(!) Yellow-headed Blackbird foraging with a large flock of Bobolinks late in the day in open farm country. We ended up with 122 species despite everything. Because we were not near the record, we skipped the shore of Lower Red Lake and the forests and marshes on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in the far north of the county and ended the count fairly early (be aware of the excellent spicy curly fries from the Clearbrook Drive-in). I drove 160 miles during the count period and I used about six or seven gallons of gas for the count, not counting driving to start in Clearwater County from Bemidji and back. Lastly, neither butterflies nor dragonflies of any kind were seen all day during the count.
Doug Johnson Bemidji, MN -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20080528/291754fe/attachment.html
