Yesterday at noon, I was at the canoe access parking lot at the very south end of Banning State Park, 1.5 miles south of 123 on Pine Avenue where it terminates at the substation. I could hear a Louisiana Waterthrush singing from the parking lot. I tracked it down and found it singing along Skunk Creek. This morning, the bird was still audible from the parking lot, but about 100 yards upstream.
Yesterday, I also checked the Louisiana Waterthrush spot reported at the end of the Wolf Creek Trail at Banning last year and found nothing. This new spot is much more accessible! Over the last 3 days, I made 2 stops at the Moose Lake sewage ponds, 3 stops at Sandstone, 1 stop at Hinckley, and checked exposed shoreline along Sturgeon Lake and a huge mudflat from a drained beaver pond in Kanabec County and found NO shorebirds whatsoever and ducks were scarce. On the plus side, many of the marshes in the area that still hold water have American Bittern, Virginia Rail, and Sora still around. Migrant sparrows were completely absent as were Yellow-rumped or other warblers except the waterthrush. -- Shawn Conrad www.itascacnfbirding.com ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
