Thanks to Peder Svingen for passing along word of the White-winged Dove. I stumbled upon the bird last evening (~5:15 PM; 8/24) perched singly on a telephone wire, just south of the intersection of Superior Street and 54th Avenue East, but north of the railroad tracks. The bird remained there long enough for me to pull over, grab the bins, and secure a good look before, of course, taking off as soon as I went for the cell phone. It flew SW over the railroad tracks towards the intersection where 52nd Avenue East and Dodge Street team up to run into Superior Street. I proceeded to circle the neighborhood for the better part of a half hour in a fruitless attempt to try to refind the bird. Anyhow, while it seems likely that this bird is ancient history by now, if anyone is in the neighborhood, it may still be worth a look. I drove by the 54th Avenue location today and, not surprisingly, no White-winged Dove was to be seen.
Also last night, Josh Bednar and I surveyed the nighthawk scene from atop an apartment complex along Superior Street at 60th Avenue East, Lakeside. It appeared as though the flight had a pretty abrupt start, with practically zero (<100) tallied at Hawk Ridge in the afternoon/early evening before the count was wrapped up at 5:30 PM. We noted the first sizable group at approximately 6:10 PM, with 1,200 passing by in the following 20 minutes, mainly looking towards Hawk Ridge (inland) from our site. However, as the night wore on, the flocks of birds morphed into a dispersed stream of nighthawks that eventually were flying overhead and along the lakeshore. Birds were counted in 15 minute time bands, the lowest being 800 birds, the highest just shy of 1500, but a pretty steady passage over the course of the next two hours. The flight was basically over at or before 8:30 PM, with a total of 10,379 nighthawks winging their way past the rooftop in nearly two hour's time! However, as it now turns out, this appeared to be merely a precursor for tonight's movement (8/25). Karl Bardon reported the final figure from Hawk Ridge at a whopping 13,154 nighthawks, equaling 23,533 in the last two nights. Approximately 11,000 of the Hawk Ridge birds today were seen from 4:20 PM onwards, with the flight dwindling noticeably towards dusk. Tonight's movement was almost all on the lakeshore, scope-scanned from the ridge. As a first timer to fall migration in Duluth, this was truly an amazing spectacle. Good Birding, Cameron Rutt Duluth, St. Louis County ---- Join or Leave mou-net:http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives:http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html