First, sorry about the Laughing Gull that was a Franklin' Hey birders, First, sorry about the Laughing Gull that was a Franklin's Gull. We didn't get the right lighting on the bird until right before sunset and because it was unable to fly, we only got views of the upper wing when it stretched. There was limited white in folded primaries and underside of primaries were dark. Finally, we were able to view a little white between the gray of the wings and the black wingtips. A sweet torment after a very long day. I only confirmed yesterday after returning to my reference library.
Andrew Krenz and I attempted to break our previous record in the county of 139. With the screwy spring, we were not sure how this was going to go, but there were just enough birds lingering from early pushes and some new arrivals as well. We ended up with 140 species. Summary: 13 waterfowl, 2 grebes, 3 herons, 5 hawks, 15 shorebirds, 3 doves, 2 owls, 6 woodpeckers, 5 flycatchers, 4 vireos, 5 swallows, 6 thrushes, 20 warblers, 12 sparrows, 9 blackbirds. Big misses: Wild Turkey, Cooper's Hawk, Brewer's Blackbird. All of the warblers were gotten around Wilson's Lake and near Fedji Lake in the eastern part of the county. There was lots of shorebird habitat along ditches in the northern part of the county west of La Salle. Apparently the heavy thunderstorm of the previous week caused some flooding out there. We had a couple of oddities in the night. One sounded like a Common Poorwill calling from a farmstead northwest of Madelia. The bird was calling in the distance and we moved closer to see if we could hear it better and (of course) it stopped. We used a tape to try and coax it to begin again, but no dice. Our other nocturnal oddity we had multiple times. When playing an Eastern Screech-Owl trill, we had a bird respond with a call note that sounded like an Eastern Towhee. This happened 5-6 times. Towhee is a hard bird to get in the county and we did a dance the first time we heard it. However, it kept happening at all our stops. It was either a "shu-wink" or "shink". We ended up removing Eastern Towhee from our list at 9:00pm when we pulled up to another woodland edge and got that bird to call again. Anyone have any ideas? Swainson's Thrush? We're still waiting for warblers, shorebirds, and flycatchers in Blue Earth County, so hopefully those will show up for our Big Day on Saturday. Happy birding! Chad Heins Mankato "But ask the animals and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?" --Job 12:7, 9 ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
