Wilson's Plover - Spring has sprung
Wilson's Plover
Ipswich subspecies of Savannah Sparrow
Later in the week was my much anticipated work trip to Nebraska. I had researched a couple spots that would be on the way from Omaha to Grand Island which was my work destination.
First stop was Branched Oak State Park which is a prairie and lake habitat just NW of Lincoln, NE. I can see why some folks choose to live out there. The prairie really is beautiful.
There was a large gull flock on the beach at the lake and this dark mantled gull stuck out like a sore thumb. Yellow feet was the best field mark. In the end, I called it a Lesser Black-backed Gull. Pretty good bird for Nebraska.
A couple of Common Goldeneye was a good find too, although they did not want to be photographed.
Check out the "carbuncles" on these American White Pelican. I took a look online and they are formed during breeding and are hypothesized to function as a kind of target for aggressive jabs from rival pelicans so they can fight without damaging the important pouch.
Harris's Sparrows!!!!! Life bird for me. I hate when people say "lifer" but I felt compelled in this case since this is such a nice bird and I have been searching for them for a while.
I had a couple more hours drive to Grand Island so I reluctantly left Branched Oak. Once I got close to Grand Island, I began to see what makes the Platte River Basin so famous this time of year. Hundreds of thousands of Sandhill Cranes.
Sandhill Cranes - if you have never seen large congregations of Sandhill Cranes, you are missing out. It is a sensory smorgasbord as these birds are big, loud and active as they are getting ready to mate. The males do a dance and face off with other males trying to impress the ladies.
This was just one small field in thousands of acres of similar scenes.
Little house on the prairie.
Ring-necked Pheasant - I love the call of a pheasant, it sounds like a submarine about to dive. It brings me back to my childhood in Old Field, NY where we had tons of Pheasants until foxes later decimated them and then the foxes were killed by development. Now if something would only finish the cycle and kill the McMansions being built all over Old Field. Maybe then the Pheasants would return.
Just before dark all the Sandhill Cranes collectively take off and fly for a roost on the Platte River. It is a sight to behold, and in fact hundreds of birds do go to the roost site every night to watch the spectacle. I should have taken some more pics, but to be honest I was in awe and not really thinking of it.
After work on Thursday I had a couple hours in the evening to bird around Grand Island. The area to the North is truly a stark and beautiful place. Corn fields are interspersed with rolling prairie with tons of raptors working the fields. As I was driving I spotted some really good birds sitting on telephone poles and road side trees but by the time I pulled over they invariably flew before I could get pictures. I saw 3-4 dark morph birds that could have been Rough-legged or even better Ferruginous Hawks but I just did not get a good opportunity to study any of them. I did finally get one Rough-legged that was fairly diagnostic with good wrist patches, but as I pointed my camera skyward the sensor picked up too much light and I kept getting error messages. Arghh. Rough-legged is my nemesis bird this year.
There was plenty of American Tree Sparrows, in fact I think they are the most common sparrow there.
Horned Lark - tons of these everywhere and they were not shy.
Meadowlark were just as plentiful and signing like crazy. I made some recordings of what I think are both Western and Eastern Meadowlarks. Poor Nebraskans have the issue where they have plenty of both species and must have a hard time IDing them. I love the above picture for the old boot he is sitting on. I believe the above bird is an Eastern Meadowlark. The Supercilium is darker and the flank patterning is a little darker or "dirty". The yellow of the throat was a little more narrow than some neighboring Western Meadowlark.
I believe this one is a Western - broader yellow on throat, the supercilium was lighter although its hard to tell in this pic and the flanks a cleaner white. However, the sound recordings should be definitive, I will post them later. I want my buddy Greg to check them out.
My two biggest targets for Grand Island was Greater Prairie Chicken and Prairie Falcon. Prairie Chickens can more easily be found early in the morning when they are displaying this time of year. Unfortunately work through a wrench in getting out early on Thursday. However, in the evening after coming up short at a spot that recently had a Prairie Falcon I spotted a weird looking bird sitting on top a Telephone post. As I got closer I thought to myself it looked like a grouse!!! I know Sharp-tailed Grouse will perch in trees so I was hopeful. As I got closer I saw instead it was a Greater Prairie Chicken sitting at the top of a Telephone pole!!! So weird I thought to myself, although who knows maybe this is normal behavior?
Greater Prairie Chicken!!!
Luckily this chicken did not touch the live section of wire or I would have been eating Nebraska Fried Chicken. A funny thing, as I was parked on the side of this country road staring at this chicken, I had no less than 5 locals pull over and ask if I needed help. Folks in Nebraska are super nice and are not used to seeing birders. In fact at my job site, most of the folks I was working with said they did not even know the Sandhill Cranes were back. How can you miss 100 thousand large grey birds flying and landing everywhere? Only a non-birder can be so oblivious to their surroundings.
Its a good thing that the chicken was sitting on the pole because check out how camouflaged they are when in a field. The same chicken is in the center of the above frame. Can you see it?
Next morning I woke at the crack of dawn and headed to a nearby spot called Taylor Ranch. I followed the directions from a website advertising this spot as a great place to see Greater Prairie Chickens displaying on a Lek. I was prepared to not find anything because eBird had zero reports of Prairie Chickens for 2015. However, I made the left turn onto the road and headed exactly one mile down as the website suggested and immediately found a very active lek with at least 24 chickens!!
I know these pics suck, but keep in mind these birds were quite far. Zoom in, is that two bunny rabbits?
Nope, it's Prairie Chickens with their "horns" up and throat sacs inflated. The noises they were making were very comical. If you have any playback apps, play the Greater Prairie Chicken lek calls and you will hear it.
There was lot of posturing and jumping up and down. Unfortunately most of the birds were just on the other side of this rise in the prairie so I could only catch glimpses when they jumped or sometimes when they walked over the rise. At one point the group flushed when a raptor flew by but they returned and and I was able to count over 20.
Zoom in here and you can see the orange throat sacs on one sexy beast.
On my way back to the airport in Omaha I stopped once more at Branched Oak SP.
I easily found some more Harris's Sparrows.
There were Bald Eagles everywhere! I saw kettles with 15-20 eagles.
Harris's Sparrow
Instead of the Lesser Black-backed Gull I found an Iceland Gull.
Walking through some fields I came across this Bobwhite Quail which was sporting some bling. It was fairly tame so probably it was a cage bird recently released for game.
This male Common Merganser had a nice group of females following him around.
I hope one day I will get another chance to go back to Nebraska, although it may not be for another 39 years. I may have driven through part of it a long time ago but this is the only time I was able to truly soak some of it in.
Great times.
No comments:
Post a Comment