Last weekend I went straight west to the South Dakota border for Doug Buri's shorebird workshop. He and Bob Janssen did a super job, especially for birders lacking confidence with this group of birds. The most memorable lesson in the seminar was: The best way to differentiate between Short-billed and Long-billed Dowitchers is to look down. If you are or should be wearing shorts, it is a Short-billed Dowitcher.
There were two bird highlights for the seminar field trips. 1) Doug Kieser's discovery of a Burrowing Owl just three miles from the Minnesota border. We went out later that night and again the next morning and found the bird still on the hay bales. the last birders that first evening saw the two parents join the juvenile. 2) the invisible sandpiper. Phil Chu (thank you, Phil) gave us directions to a field where he had observed a Buff-breasted Sandpiper. We walked the recently burned and mostly bare field chasing Killdeer as we walked. We did flush out a couple of Pectoral Sandpipers, an American Golden Plover, and a couple of elusive Baird's Sandpipers that were seen by a few birders on the wing. We had splintered into three groups and a few stragglers, when someone flushed a Buff-breasted Sandpiper that we had to have walked right by on the way out. While one the group zeroed in on the bird about 30 yards away, others tried to figure out what we were looking at. We had our scopes trained right at one lady, who was about 40 or 50 yards away. We signalled her to stop walking. She looked at us. She studied where we were looking. She looked around. She studied the area behind her. And then started to walk over to us to find out what we were excited about. We waved her to a stop and signalled that she needed to walk around. People were arriving, lining up next to us, and easily finding the nearby beauty. I turned my scope over to one of the participants and she gazed through it. I asked, if she had found it. When she answered negatively. I looked through the scope, figuring that it had walked out of the field and she was having trouble locating the cryptically plumaged bird. But, I could not find it and most everyone had lost the bird, which was still only some thirty yards away. One guy who had watched the bird stop and sit down was still on it. Another found it when it blicked its eye. I looked through one of their scopes, saw the eye, and carefully noted its location. I went back to my scope, focused it in on the spot, and found...an empty field. At this point Bob Janssen started walking slowly out towards the bird. When he was about 10 yards away and still could not see it, It got up and started to walk. At this point just about everyone (but Bob) could focus in on the bird. It was amazing how well it blended in. On Tuesday and then again on Friday I checked the Jirik Sod Farms in Empire Township in Dakota County, hoping to find some Buff-breasted migrants. I found none. The only shorebirds were Killdeer. The best bird of the week was a single Loggerhead Shrike on the wire along 180th Street between Emery and Fischer west of the 180th Street marsh. Of course, this does not include the finds in Yellow Medicine County last Sunday evening. I have seen quite a few bats of late. On Monday I found what I believe to have been a Big Brown Bat flying in the basement of the Mall of America. I also observed several of them at my house in the late evening flying in the company of a smaller bat, probably a Little Brown Myotis. I wish I could do better at differentiating them. Well, time to get back to my microscope and the bugs, leeches, and other critters of the wetland awaiting me. Steve Weston on Quiggley Lake in Eagan, MN sweston2 at comcast.net
