Spring Waterfowl - The Grind - Beastmode Days

Thanks to a run of good weather the road to making up a slow February is clear. I touched 20 counties in the last 7 days as I worked a full 80 hour week. (Grand total of 53 counties this year) In just 2 days over the weekend I put up 310 new county ticks against 176 in all of February. This thanks to a 19 hour odyssey with Liz Harper that had us hit Steele, Freeborn, Faribault, Martin, Jackson, Nobles, Rock, and Murray. The final stop was thanks to a key tip from Aaron Ludwig. He had reached out earlier in the day noting with coordinates 2 stops that had serious waterfowl numbers. We continued our efforts and then made Murray our final stop before dark, scoping out a lot of waterfowl and picking up pretty much everything you could with the exception of Ruddy Duck, Ross's Goose, and Blue-winged Teal.

That weekend feast of waterfowl allowed counties like Rock and Murray to jump in with 45 and 42 species in just and hour or so  of birding each with no prior birds to bolster the numbers since it was my first visit of the year.

Dakota County officially took the top overall spot with 64 species and Goodhue leapt up to 3rd with 55. I'm now no longer 100% sure that Washington will take the top spot at years end. With the amount of work I have to do out of county it is possible places like Dakota with more natural migrant density will end up reigning supreme.

In the species battle to 87 we have now American Crow tied with Rock Pigeon at 48 counties and Black-capped Chickadee at 46. I'm hopeful that I can get more than one species to a full 87 by years end, but I'm curious which one will win the race to 87. Should be a fun mini game.

I continue to be amazed at Pine Siskin as it moved up with 33 counties now. As a heavily irruptive winter visitor it is awesome to see even with February being heavily impacted on effort by weather that I could record this bird in so many counties already. Horned Lark has also quickly run up to 35 county ticks and is a good litmus as the first real migrant in the state for how well I'm covering the southern half of the state so far.

With MOU Spring Primer duties (I'll be the emcee of the event being held at Carpenter Nature Center) coming up on Saturday I'll need to grind extra hard this week and Sunday to attempt to get fully back on or even ahead of projected pace. This last weekend moved the needle from a top of being 14 days off modified pace to just 3.8 days behind. Though this is always tough as every morning I wake up a new day is added to the count so 3.8 was last night and now it is 4.8. This gain though has been a huge mental boost to know with the effort and good weather I can erase such a deficit due to weather.

This week will continue to be waterfowl focused and I'll be looking to see how far I can stretch out from metro on a weekday after work and still be successful. Knowing I can put up 40+ ticks on a county in an hour helps to get a vibe on what is possible, especially if I know a quality spot in advance for migrants.

Today I sit at 1450 species ticks out of the desired 10,000. This has already been an amazing adventure and extreme challenge and I'm still strong and excited to continue. Life is good.

Spring Routes - Updates

This blog has fallen behind mostly due to the load of effort needed to bird in 87 counties towards my 10K ticks in one year goal. The weather stopped cooperating a little bit into February and really very little was to be said about things. I was on pace to hit 1500 to 1600 species ticks by end of February and I didn't make 1000 until 3/16 with an American Tree Sparrow in Sherburne county.

With flooding now hitting or threatening to hit in the key places I need to be in the coming weeks it is going to be very interesting how to handle things.

Ag road routes have really picked up with Horned Lark migration really surging and being able to find Snow Bunting with more regularity. I've also continued to pour on Pine Siskin ticks with 29 counties so far, which is super cool for a semi-irruptive bird.

I even found Purple Finch in 2 counties over the weekend thanks to males singing spring songs now. I got visuals in both cases, but their songs grabbed my attention first in both cases. Really helps to know the finch songs as well as contact calls for the ag birds. Rolling down a country road slow with the window down you can pick out Snow Bunting over Horned Lark with relative ease.

I even had a super flock (150) of Common Redpoll over the weekend that I thought were Lapland Longspur until I saw a number of them move from corn field to tree tops. Guess I've never seen Redpolls land in a corn field before.

My hopes right now are that a melt is reasonable enough to not flood out the entire southern half of the state when I need to visit it for waterfowl, ag birds, and migrant hawks. If things do flood out to a serious degree, I'll have to come up with a different plan.