Eight hours most days, I stand on Whitefish Point’s cobbled beach. There, from whichever side of the waterbird shack is the lee side du jour, I make sweeping scans with binoculars and spotting scope. To the west is a stand of scrappy jack pines where, this week, a shrike has (albeit with different, more murderous [...]
Despite the fact that our nightly efforts continue to be regularly interrupted by high winds and/or mixed precipitation, things have picked up a bit since our last update. Aside from a couple of nights when nightly Northern Saw-whet numbers got up into the teens, we continue to be somewhat disappointed by the overall Saw-whets numbers [...]
Highlights: Too many to name! Or: Leucistic Red-Tailed Hawk – Spruce Grouse – Increasing Sparrow Diversity – Pine Warbler – Kinglets – Brown Creeper – Pine Siskin - Broad-Winged Hawk – Snowy Owl – Greater Yellowlegs Just when it seemed like migration might not ever happen, birds started happening in a big way with [...]
There was an amazing Red-tailed Hawk show this past week complete with a leucistic and two dark morphs! Watching them made me realize how long individual Red-tailed Hawk can stick around throughout the day. It was interesting to see so many kettle far out, then break up and fly past the hawk deck, then come [...]
A woodcock twitters overhead, squeezing one last display flight into a sky just beginning to color. You do claim this bird as your spring harbinger, I remind myself. It bears repeating--the morning’s commute starts as a cautious traverse across frozen melt puddles, then transitions to a postholing of sorts through still-deep snow. During the first [...]
Well, we've been going through a period when the nights have been fairly productive, but we keep on waiting for things to open up a bit, which they have yet to do. Northern Saw-whets continue to move through in relatively small numbers and the Long-eareds have started to become a bit more regular. To date, [...]
Highlights: Firsts of the season: American Black Duck, Rock Pigeon, Eastern Phoebe, Rusty Blackbird, American Tree Sparrow, Song Sparrow Passerines put on their first real show of the season on April 10. While covering for Krista Botting, the hawk counter, I observed 24 American Robin, 39 Red-winged Blackbird, 45 Common Grackle, and a Bohemian Waxwing [...]
Highlights: First Waterbirds in the Water (Mallard) – Common Merganser – Brown-headed Cowbird – Increasing Raptor Diversity A big moment at the Point in recent days: the first waterbirds of the season were observed in the lake! Two Mallard were seen flying in and landing in Lake Superior on April 5 with three male Common [...]
The last week of March and the first week of April were pretty slow for migrating raptors. A few birds each day, but nothing truly spectacular in terms of numbers. However, April 5 and 6 brought a few different birds to the Hawk Deck. With the majority of raptors seen so far being eagles or [...]
It's still early in the season and the weather patterns have been erratic enough that we still don't have a real sense of the season's owl migration, but we've had decent results so far. March was pretty good for Northern Saw-whet Owls (NSWO). In previous years March has produced extremely varying results in regard to [...]
