With the revelation of spring and its migrating birds, a new breeding season is beginning to bloom. Great Horned Owls are already hatching young. I heard an owlet begging down by Frontenac on Saturday. This is the time to get out find hawk nests before the leaves obscure them from view. Great Horned Owls do not build their own nests, but settle into old hawk nest. I have seen hawks and eagles already on nests and have received reports that some of the eagles are already incubating. This is the time to find Red-shoulder Hawk nests in the forests, especially bottomland forests. They can be heard calling from their nests, but will quiet down once they have eggs to tend. I also have reports of Mourning Doves and Bluebirds on nests and have seen Crows and Red-tails carrying nesting material.
The Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas is in its fourth of five years of surveying. If you would like to find some nests for us, let me know. We have mostly moved to monitoring blocks outside of the Metro Area, but there are probably still a small number of blocks in the Metro area that need help. -- Steve Weston [email protected] ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
