I spent part of the day birding in Stearns County, looking for longspurs and shorebirds (still) with no luck. The only wading bird I saw was all black and looked suspiciously like a crow.
I did find TONS of diving ducks, including the first large numbers of canvasbacks I've seen this year. Every lake edge that was open, river and flowage from Paynesville (Koronis) to Eden Valley to Richmond was just loaded with waterfowl - like they're kind of stacked up in a band across those areas. I also saw my first common loon of the year on Horseshoe Lake south of Richmond. There were a few horned grebes, and pied-billed, with the divers, but no others that I saw. Interestingly enough, I was looking at birds on the same pond as Josh Wallestad, but didn't see the western grebes. I did find my first of the year cormorants and herring gulls there, along with lots of waterfowl. The treatment ponds at Paynesville are still covered with ice - there was only a small bit of open water in the middle of one of them. Waterfowl are using the broad ditches along Hwy. 23. The same was true of the ponds at Albany - frozen, and just beginning to show a bit of open water on the edges. No birds there other than a few ring-billed gulls. Betsy Beneke St. Cloud ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
