I am still finding Barn Swallows feeding young in nests. On Monday I found in an Eagan picnic shelter what was unquestionably a second brood for a pair that nested by themselves about five weeks earlier about 20 yeards away. On Thursday I found two more nests at a small colony at a loading dock by Anderson Lakes in Eden Prairie.
A more interesting bird was the juvenile Red-shouldered Hawk I found in Brooklyn Park along US-81 near Brooklyn Blvd on Tuesday. The same day at Rosedale, I observed a Peregrine flying through the parking lot about 10 feet above the cars. It flew right over my head about thirty or fourty feet up. Today I took the opportunity to detour to check out the Princeton sewerage ponds. The ponds were relatively uninteresting with no shorebird habitat and little waterfowl. I found a few uninteresting gulls, a couple of Franklin Gulls, and six Black Terns. All around the ponds Cedar Waxwings were hawking. In the bushes surrounding the ponds, which appeared to be much more promising habitat, I did find a couple of blackburnian warblers. I have looked at several ponds and marshes around and with the recent rain have found scant exposed habitat for shorebirds, which means that I should be paying more attention to wet fields. My backyard is quite birdy, but I have seen nothing new. I have to remember to fill the hummingbird feeder which is being rapidly drained. Last weekend, the storm woke me and I decided to check stuff I had on the porch for one of my projects. Much had been blown around, but nothing had to be pulled into the house. I did have to pick up a plant that had been blown over. After I climbed back into to bed, Cherie cried, "What in the world is that on the wall?" I had to get back up and carry a wet tree frog from the bedroom and deposit it outside. I probably would have let it crawl the walls all night, but the grand-puppies had sought comfort from the storm on our bed. I didn't trust them to not turn it into a meal. Of course, Cherie probably wouldn't have tolerated an amphibian in the bedroom, no matter how insignificant. Steve Weston on Quiggley Lake in Eagan, MN sweston2 at comcast.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20070818/b2c9ff5b/attachment.html
