Hello all, Bob Janssen's pre-festival class and the Grand Marais Birding Festival were much quieter than usual. The two day festival classes on the 27th and 28th didn't hold much excitement but did contain a few scoters including white-winged and surf at Paradise Beach. On Friday the first day of the festival it was quite foggy and wasn't the greatest for viewing the lake as we could barely see the rocks at Paradise but had a couple white-winged scoters and two blue geese near the Casino. Friday night I did a bit of birding up the Gunflint trail with Didrick Benz and John Hockema and we found a nice great grey owl sitting on a telephone pole along the Lima Mountain Grade. Saturday...well we'll just say it was worse than Friday and we couldn't see the rocks at Paradise beach at ALL! Sunday, today...Awwwwww, much better the fog finally cleared up and we could actually top of thirty species. We had black and white-winged scoters, long-tailed duck, red-necked grebe, and greater scaup at Paradise beach but not a whole lot elsewhere. Well that is about all for around here, I'm not sure about the other groups on the Festival that I wasn't on but I do know of a pair of cape may warblers at the Sea Villas, a catbird in the campground and a blue-headed vireo somewhere on the west side of the harbor. Good Birding to all,
Josh Watson Grand Marais --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.776 / Virus Database: 523 - Release Date: 10/12/04