Scoter Finds and January Plans

Trying to get out every day if possible in the county for open water checks looking for sea ducks I picked up a second sighting of White-winged Scoter at Big Marine. Likely the same bird I found a week or so prior at this location. I pinged the Washington County crew and Bob Dunlap motored up to get the bird (his 240th) for his county list. The lake also still had 2 Common Loon present and Common Goldeneye and Ring-necked Ducks as well. I also had a couple Rusty Blackbird fly over me at one point which was a nice collection of birds for November 8th.

Of greater import is planning this evening for the big year. I started to hone in on locations for January looking to get out for distance trips 3 of the 4 weekends and on New Years day to really get things going quickly. Any other month time frames I'll try to snag some quick trips to Afton, William O'Brien, or Fort Snelling I think.

New Years Day: (1 of 2 plans to be executed...Full hiking day at Jay Cooke using a couple different trails or just a quick Jay Cooke effort and then also hit Moose Lake and Banning on the return trip doing some type of drive in and short hike/snowshoe effort.)

January 6th weekend: Carley and Whitewater, basically my winter options for getting to the SouthEast and thinking that they provide some small measure of Golden Eagle sighting. I'd be happy at this point if such a thing happened outside of the parks themselves as I've never seen one before.

January 13th weekend: McCarthy Beach and Scenic, I realized anything in eBird for winter is almost non-existent. I don't see that many attempt to bird in the State Parks over the winter, especially the further flung ones. In my case I will need to look at the adventure as, birds are bonus, and the scenery and hike is the important part of the adventure.

January 27th weekend: Crow Wing and Cuyuna Country SRA at least provide something central and north of the cities. Again scant evidence of birds to be seen at these places. One set of eBird reports represented the bulk of any Jan/Feb eBird efforts, but all 4 were 30mins each day from a window. So really nobody has hiked some of these places for the purpose of bird watching in the winter.

This would give 7 to 9 locations in January, which would be on or above pace for a full year spread. Considering my plans for May this would be a great start and provide plenty of blog fodder and winter photo ops. Additionally, what good is an adventure I knew what to expect where ever I went.

I like the idea of something North Shore to start off February and see the lake, maybe frozen over or something. We have started very cold in the state so far, but maybe we will hit a warm spell and keep a bay or two open for some interesting North Shore birding between the parks.