A late short visit to NOI at the end of the day yesterday yielded a large flock of about 60 Lapland Longspurs on the NE corner of the impoundment just north of 260th St. They were flying across the N/S road between a picked bean field and the just picked headland of a corn field. Difficult for me to ID these lifers because they were hard to see in the poor light yesterday, they kept moving, and their call couldn’t be matched to anything on iBird Ultima or Sibley. They were making a pip-pip-pip sound in flight. I did eventually get close enough to them in the corn field and one sat for several minutes very cooperatively on the edge of the road that I’m confident they were all Laplands. Except for the calls that didn’t match anything. If anyone can help with this please let me know.
Because of the wet conditions, I would not recommend venturing beyond the perimeter roads. What I could see were probably thousands of waterfowl, at least 5 Snow Goose, one blue morph, Greater Yellowlegs in most pools on the edges and very vocal, a single juvenile Great Blue Heron at the stone dam on the south side, several Northern Harriers, one lone Snow Bunting on 250th St on the east side, Pheasants, Blackbirds, E/W Meadowlarks. Charlene Nelson Elbow Lake farm ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
