On Monday evening, 3/20/17, from 7:30 pm to 8:15 pm, I heard at least 7 calling male American Woodcock in Elm Creek Park Reserve 1.5 – 2 miles south of Eastman Nature Center’s access road. I had used this site to see timberdoodles from 1985 to 2005, it was good to see the birds are still around. One problem is – there never used to be ANY car traffic on this road. On this night, I had 30 cars drive by my roadside vantage point in a matter of 45 minutes. I neither saw nor heard any courtship flights occur, but on 4 occasions I had birds flush and fly away when the lights and road noise approached their position. I will come back to see if I can locate birds farther in from the road and try to capture the spectacle one more time. I have attached a URL of a short clip of a video of the site…not much to look at unless you love these birds like I do. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kg0Qp0hTqU&feature=em-upload_owner Good Birding, Mark Alt Hennepin County Sent from Mail for Windows 10 ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
