With the majority of waterfowl migration behind us, observations from Kandiyohi county for spring 2010 suggest duck migration was down 50-75%. Personally, I think we were down about 70% from a "normal" year and by far the fewest numbers of all species I have ever seen.
Goose migration is always fickle, but I only saw a few flocks of white fronteds and never saw a snow or ross' goose all spring in our county, though it is still possible to see flocks of predominantly first year birds. Swan and Canada goose numbers were down some, but would still fit into the low end of a "normal" spring migration. Spring temperatures and snow melt came almost 2 weeks earlier to the eastern 1/3 of the state, so I'm wondering..were there areas of MN that saw substantially more waterfowl than usual? Please share your observations with me and I will summarize for the group. I did travel out to the Wheaton area on 3/21, with weather patterns favorable, I should have hit the goose migration there near peak. I saw about 45,000 geese that day with about 75% being white fronted, 8-10% snow, ross. So by western Minnesota standards, bird numbers there were rather weak also. Randy Frederickson Willmar ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
