In spite of weekly searches, twice this week. I have seen NO ww crossbills in Kandiyohi county this winter. There was ONE confirmed report, from early Dec. Reading this week's crossbill reports from SE MN makes it appear they are dripping from every black spruce grove. So I'm curious, is anyone in SW Minnesota seeing crossbills? We certainly have plenty of black spruce full of cones.
As I have seen with other winter boreal invasions (great gray owls, esp), the farther south you go in the state, the further east the birds are found. However, siskin numbers are very high for this region, and the huge redpoll invasion that began about 3 weeks ago seems to be impacting us here to the same degree as everyone else at our latitude. So I am trying to enjoy them twice as much, to get my finch fix. I have never seen a redpoll invasion occur so late in the winter (we had none on our CBC). Randy Frederickson Willmar PS In case anyone is interested, I did get a report of a hoary redpoll from a reliable source in NE Kandiyohi county, earlier this week. ---- Join or Leave mou-net:http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives:http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
