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.