Monday, April 27, 2009

Catching up, part II

I've been spending a fair amount of time looking in the south parts of the county for Smith's longspurs or upland sandpipers without success. Pectoral sandpipers have been fairly common at the Avery Rd flooding.

I ran across this red-tailed hawk while driving around the St Joe rivermouth looking for a rumoured white pelican. Ironically later in the day I did see an osprey, the raptor one would more likely expect to find sitting in a puddle.

Finally, on the way back from Brown Sanctuary where I also looked for pelicans I spotted 3 vertical white shapes in a small corral with some horses. I turned around expecting them to be domestic geese but figured I'd best make sure they weren't cattle egrets. Obviously the first glance through optics revealed that they were indeed cattle egrets, a bird that's found about every other year in Berrien (though in some years there's multiple sightings, most commonly in May).
However, shortly after I found them they were observed to fly away. I doubt anyone looked for them today given that Smith's longspurs were indeed found in the south county today and basically everyone who looked saw them as far as I could tell. I think I've been to the field they were found in 2-3 times per week for the last 2-3 weeks but what can you do. I suspect though, that Alison's probably been there at least that often during that time. Hopefully they're still there in the morning.


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