This Sandhill Crane from a recent William O'Brien SP seemed to be less than excited about foraging in a frozen swamp in April. Spring is coming dude.
Already well into my participation in birding events, article writing, and radio efforts I started to consider what additional closer to home goals could sneak into this year without being a major hindrance on my larger goal.
The first of which is micro listing with Afton State Park being my target. Considering it is a State Park I figured it would play a key role this year for weekday efforts and close to home outings when family events demanded my time. What I didn't expect is that by the first week of April I would already have visited the park 15 times and scratched out 53 species in a terrible migration year. My owl species in the park are at 5 with hopes of finding at least 1 more this spring. (Eastern Screech) Last year Afton had a pretty sick list of birds that are super tough if not impossible in the rest of the county. (Ruffed Grouse, Western Kingbird, Yellow-breasted Chat, Summer Tanager, Hooded Warbler, Townsend's Solitaire, and Common Raven all immediately come to mind.)
My goal then tacked onto my year is to Big Year at Afton State Park. I'm not even sure what is possible in the park by myself, but it would be fun to see if I could get to 170, which is roughly the number of species identified in the park since January of 2017.
This goal also helps me mentally to plug into the effort fully and not think about the fact that I'm missing out on a trip to another State Park or something. Now it will be interesting to see how my weekends go once the weather gets nice. I'll need to get my out of town trips in, but perhaps this is where a few days of vacation come to play where I can get out of town for a 2 or 3 park swing and then have another day for pure Afton. Then have a day of vacation to recover/relax so it's a 3 day weekend and not beastmode every day while trying to work all week.
A bit blurry as I also had to push the color/brightness up on this backlit photo of a Red-Shouldered Hawk. In the top you can see a fresh snagged mouse/vole in the left talons. The bottom cut was a throw away shot that ended up showing the tail really well of this species.
I have had a couple Afton trips recently with poor weather that is suppressing migration a lot, but I was able to scratch out some good species anyway. During the week I was able to get decent pictures of a Red-Shouldered Hawk hunting in the open prairie and yesterday I found a Brown Creeper working near Trout Brook loop. This hike from the north end was a bit snow and mud laden but I really needed the trail time and some hills to flex my legs on a bit. Of interest on the hike at Trout Brook Loop was a single bat flying around. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a bat flying around with snow on the ground before. I'm not even sure if it can be identified to species with just an aerial view, but I've recorded it at least as a mammal species for my list.
My long Brown Creeper working the trees down in the Trout Brook Loop. I was hoping for maybe a drumming Ruffed Grouse, but I'll take this and bat on the trip.
I actually wanted the hiking to try for a Fox Sparrow at the park, but only Dark-eyed Junco and Song Sparrow were interested in showing up on this day. I realized this morning while writing this post that I'm 30 species behind my count from last year already. It is amazing how far behind the migrants will get when you have these challenging weather patterns that suppress movement.
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