Yesterday (Saturday) I spent the morning birding with Kathy Brown with some awesome results.
We left my house in the dark at 5:30am to be on-site for a dawn census of cranes. Our first stop was 190th Street in Empire Township on the south edge of the U-More property. This primo birding location is a minimum maintenance road that is closed in the winter. Gates were closed and we hiked in perhaps a half mile to the area where cranes bred a couple of years ago. It was a chilly, but pleasant walk. We found no cranes. There were nice pools of shallow water teaming with Mallards. We also had a flock or two of Snipe, estimated at 30. We also saw three Northern Harriers and three Sharpies. A highlight was the coyote we spooked, who raced across the fields. We also found weasel tracks. Our next stop was Great Western Industrial Park at Hwy 56 and 284th Street in Randolph. We had both meadowlarks singing. At other locations we found quiet meadowlarks in agricultural fields. We found a cooperative flock of about 200 Lapland Longspurs. I was unable to find any thing besides a few Horned Larks in their midst. I witnessed several examples of allotropic feeding. I found a first of year (FOY) Vesper Sparrow. we did not find the Short-eared Owl or any tracks that suggested the presence of Gray Partridge. We stopped at Lake Byllesby visiting the boat launch on the SW corner of the lake, which was a poor site for waterfowl observation, but better for passerines, which were feeding in the debris that were driven into the shore by the winds. Passerines included Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Lincoln Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow (FOY), Hermit Thrush (FOY), and Eastern Phoebe. We headed to park land on the NW corner of the lake, where we got the bulk of the 21 species of waterfowl that we found that day, including Horned Grebe, Northern Pintail and a flock of 30+ Tundra Swans flying over. At Lake Byllesby we ran into Kevin Smith and company and followed his suggestion to head to Miesville Ravine to look at Winter Wrens. We found two or three of them along streams and probably finished the day with twenty or thirty Hermit Thrushes, most of which were here. I suggest that anyone who wants to see those two birds head to Miesville Ravine and look along the streams. Everywhere we went we found flocks of Juncos and Tree Sparrows. Hermit Thrushes were widespread and numerous. We also had a couple of Turkey Vultures. Steve Weston On Quigley Lake in Eagan, MN [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
