Here are the results from our September 1 Western Minnesota MOU Field Trip, focusing primarily on Lone Tree Lake just outside of Cottonwood, and Swedes Forest SNA near the Yellow Medicine/Redwood County lines. High water and lack of shoreline in Lac qui Parle and Big Stone Counties forced me to restructure the trip. It was muggy as hell, but we found some good birds and explored some excellent habitat!
With all the rain we've been getting, Lone Tree Lake likely has the best shorebird habitat in the western part of the state right now. Over a thousand shorebirds were present. Our group of 37 recorded 78 species in total: Red-Winged Blackbird European Starling Mourning Dove Eurasian Collared Dove Rock Dove Barn Swallow Tree Swallow Cliff Swallow American Crow American Robin Northern Catbird Brown Thrasher Blue Jay Black-Capped Chickadee White Breasted Nuthatch Red Breasted Nuthatch Red Headed Woodpecker Yellow Bellied Sapsucker Downy Woodpecker Hairy Woodpecker Red Bellied Woodpecker Belted Kingfisher Red Tailed Hawk Northern Harrier American Kestrel Swainson's Hawk (Dark Phase)* Osprey Turkey Vulture Bald Eagle Double-Crested Cormorant Pied Billed Grebe Green Heron Great Blue Heron Great Egret Caspian Tern Black Tern Forster's Tern (All 3 terns together at Lone Tree) Franklin's Gull Ring-Billed Gull Wilson's Snipe Baird's Sandpiper Semipalmated Sandpiper Least Sandpiper Pectoral Sandpiper Stilt Sandpiper Killdeer Wilson's Phalarope American Golden Plover Greater Yellowlegs Lesser Yellowlegs Short-Billed Dowitcher Hudsonian Godwit American White Pelican Ring-Necked Pheasant Marsh Wren House Wren House Sparrow Grasshopper Sparrow Swamp Sparrow Savannah Sparrow Common Nighthawk Chimney Swift Canada Goose Mallard Gadwall Green-Winged Teal Northern Shoveler Blue-Winged Teal Cedar Waxwing Least Flycatcher Eastern Kingbird Red-Eyed Vireo Yellow-Thoated Vireo Wilson's Warbler Yellow Warbler Nashville Warbler Connecticut Warbler** *Spotted by Ken Larson, Marsh Moreen, and Donn and Kathy Mattson, along Hwy 212 between Montevideo and Dawson, on the way back to Prairie Marsh Farm Saturday evening. **Found and photographed by Ken and Avis Reed the evening of August 31, in the Montevideo city campground. We were unable to relocate it there 24 hours later. A big Thank You to all who participated! -- Jason "U Turn" Frank Founder and Vice President, Luddite Ornithologists League (LOL) jmfran...@gmail.com >From the Lovely Land of Lac qui Parle https://turnstonecreations.smugmug.com/ Sent from my invisible blue Homing Pigeon ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
