At this latitude, May is a high-octane month. Night starts later, day begins sooner, and I think we all flounder a bit as we try to keep up with all we want to see. When dusk falls, Long-eared Owls rise from the pines near the Point and often, I fall victim to the urge [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Here is a list of all of the waterbirds that were counted during the waterbird count at Whitefish Point in Spring 2017, along with the seasonal totals from Aril 15 through May 31. The count was usually conducted for eight hours, beginning at sunrise, but there were a few days when the count was shortened [...]
The WPBO waterbird count for spring 2017 came to its scheduled end on May 31, though some species are still migrating, such as Red-throated Loons, 11 of which were seen on June 1. The highlight of the last three days of the official count period was the incredible influx of Canada Geese. There has always [...]
Marbled Godwit by Skye Haas The last week has been a good one for seeing big shorebirds at Whitefish Point. On May 22, not only did flocks of Whimbrel totaling 184 birds fly past the point, but we were twice visited by individual Marbled Godwits. The first flew by with a flock [...]
Yikes! I have some catching up to do with this blog! Here are some highlights from this May so far, beginning with the most recent: May 11 – A good morning flight of Long-tailed Ducks, with 325 passing by within the first three hours after sunrise. Morning clouds made for good viewing to the southeast [...]
Tuesday, April 25 started out with several reasonably close flocks of Greater Scaup flying past the tip of Whitefish Point. All but one of the five Lesser Scaup seen that day were nestled in these flocks of Greaters, making this tricky identification task a bit easier. While dabbling ducks were in short supply, a pair [...]
The waterbird count has been picking up steam over the last week with several new arrivals in just the last few days. Today (April 24) we saw the first Caspian Terns of the season and the first White-winged Scoter. Numbers of other species have been picking up too, such as Red-necked Grebe, 79 of which [...]
Here are the totals for all of the waterbirds counted during the standardized 8-hour count at Whitefish Point in Spring 2016 (April 15 – May 31): 1 Snow Goose 3697 Canada Goose (above average seasonal total) 4 Trumpeter Swan 3 Trumpeter/Tundra Swan 18 Wood Duck 4 Gadwall 1 Eurasian Wigeon (first WPBO record; present at [...]
