Hey birders,
Benji Inniger and I had a chance to search the north country for birds on
Sunday 1/3/2010. Here are the highlights from the 42 species we saw in St.
Louis County:
Snowy Owl at the lumber yard on the eastern part of Garfield Avenue. It looked
like a young female with very dark barring on the breast and top of head. At
one point the bird flew right over our heads! This was seen just prior to dawn.
At the stakeout location for the Black-headed Grosbeak we saw several warm
weather birds: the aforementioned grosbeak (8:40am), Northern Cardinal,
American Robin, and Common Grackle. We also had great winter finches with
numerous White-winged Crossbills flying overhead, Purple Finch, and Pine
Siskin. We stood in the -16F for 40 minutes waiting for the grosbeak so it was
good that their neighborhood was so lively.
We located the male Barrow's Goldeneye just south of Leif Erickson Park along
the lake walk. The bird was about 30 yards from shore with about 50 Common
Goldeneyes. I'm glad we didn't have to scope through 632 Common Goldeneyes to
find him. He was easily viewed with binoculars.
We then headed to the Bog where oddly we never saw another birder for the rest
of the day. We found Northern Hawk Owl just west of the intersection of
Cranberry and Sax Roads (probably the same as Kim Eckert's), Black-billed
Magpie on Kozu Road, female Black-backed Woodpecker on McDavitt Road (~3 miles
north of Sax Road on east side--look for reddish tree trunks). The feeding
station on the Admiral Road was busy and we enjoyed some very tame Gray Jays
there (couldn't quite get them to take a peanut from my hand). We also had a
couple of Northern Shrikes hunting along McDavitt Road.
At about 4:10pm we located a pair of Great Gray Owls on McDavitt Road about 3.2
miles north of Sax Road. Judging by size it looked like a male and female
hunting the same stretch. The sun was still up so we had time to really savor
these handsome birds. We also had a Great Horned Owl on the Admiral Road on
our way out of the Bog.
The most striking observation from this year's trip was that White-winged
Crossbill was the most prevalent finch. We saw very few Common Redpolls and
probably saw more American Goldfinches at the feeding station on CR211 than
redpolls for the day. We had a nice variety of birds but it was very quiet.
Happy birding!
Chad Heins
Mankato, MN
----
Join or Leave mou-net:http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net
Archives:http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
