I was out of the state over last weekend, but still in the lower 48. See if you can identify where our family went, in this email I sent to my birder mother when we arrived home (place names removed for the puzzle...)!
Send any replies back-channel, so as not to clog our in-baskets!! Tuesday we drove home, beginning in early a.m. with good weather and a wonderful panoply of views and birds: so many rough-legged hawks (all phases of adult and juvenile plumages were represented) on every 3rd electric or phone pole or sparsely available tree and some fences for several 100 miles! Every 3rd or 4th was a red-tailed hawk (again, several phases), a few kestrels and smaller raptors that may have been sharp-shinned, 1 for sure golden and quite a few bald eagles, and 1 for sure short-eared owl coursing over the partially snowy landscape. I would say at the LEAST 200,000 snow geese (not kidding on the numbers, they made many salt/pepper flocks in the air and covered many fields along the way), a close-up look at a flock of the smaller cackling geese, quite a few of Canada geese, a few horned larks, and 2 meadowlarks. There was hardly any snow and it was a lovely, sunny and WARM day, about 50 degrees early in the day (very uplifting!) but getting colder as we approached and entered Minnesota. Holly Peirson Columbus, SE Anoka Co. ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
