Christmas Bird Count 2016

I was worried about this year's Christmas Bird Count, which was held yesterday in our area (the "Faribault circle"), as the weather forecast was terrible: 6-9 inches of snow were predicted to fall by morning and then the temperature was expected to plummet, along with brisk winds and blowing snow causing more headaches as the day went on.

However, the snowfall wasn't as heavy as predicted; it had stopped by the time it was getting light, and Northfield-area snowplows did an excellent job of getting the roads clear enough for reasonable safety. So my frequent CBC companion Dan Kahl and I set out in his trusty Subaru (with emergency supplies in the back, just in case). Here's what it looked like on 110th Street southeast of town.

Kind of bleak, eh? You might not expect to see much bird life, but in fact we came back with a higher species count than I've recorded here in the past: 25 species (see full list at the bottom of this post).

On that very road, we saw two pairs each of three ground-feeding birds that I've not often seen, though they are not uncommon: lapland longspurs, snow buntings, and horned larks. Lapland longspurs and snow buntings breed in the Arctic and are only here in the winter, while horned larks can be found in most of the U.S. year-round. In the photos below you can see some corn kernels that no doubt attracted these seed-eaters to the side of the road.

Lapland Longspurs

Horned Lark

Here's another shot of the rural landscape. I love the patterns of bare hedgerow and grasses against the snow.

Though we had a slow start to winter this year, strong cold in the past week caused ponds and streams to ice up quickly. The large pond south of Superior Drive in Northfield had just a few open areas of water left, and in one of them we saw two Canada geese, a mallard, and two American coots. The coots were a surprise, as they don't generally winter here, but perhaps they were lulled by the extended fall we had until recently.

American Coots (rear and right) with Canada Geese

I was also excited to identify a rough-legged hawk -- another Arctic-breeding bird that winters in southern Canada and much of the U.S. The prominent black patches at the bend of the wings helped identify this rather pale hawk.

Here's our full list for the day:

• Canada Goose - 19
• Mallard - 100+ - seen all at once, criss-crossing the sky in many skeins, wings beating fast
• Rock Pigeon 5
• Mourning Dove 3
• Bald Eagle 6  - including a group of 5 circling together, 3 adults and two juveniles
• Red-tailed Hawk - 1
• Rough-legged Hawk - 1 
• Red-bellied Woodpecker - 4
• Downy Woodpecker - 7
• Blue Jay - 1
• American Crow - 14
• Horned Lark - 2
• Black-capped Chickadee - 11
• White-breasted Nuthatch - 4
• American Robin - 1
• Cedar Waxwing - 20
• House Sparrow - 20
• House Finch - 10 (I wonder if I captured them all -- it might have been a few more)
• American Goldfinch - 2
• Lapland Longspur - 2
• Snow Bunting - 2
• American Tree Sparrow - 4
• Dark-eyed Junco 30
• Northern Cardinal - 6

No starlings, pheasants or turkeys!

Peace, Joy, and the Christmas Bird Count

This lovely male house finch, high in a tree above Sibley Swale, was beautifully illuminated during the Christmas Bird Count last Saturday. The morning was cold, cold -- with not much wind, but enough so that walking west made the eyes water and the face go numb.

During the count it helps to put a highly visible notice on one's vehicle explaining why you're driving slowly and peering through binoculars at people's houses (but really, at their bird feeders, trees, shrubs, and lawns).

It was good to once again do the count in the company of Dan Kahl, the caretaker and naturalist at Mount Olivet Retreat Center in Farmington. My husband Dave joined us for part of the morning as well, but unfortunately his one good eye was bothering him and he wasn't seeing well, so he bowed out about halfway through.

Our territory, as usual, covered a rural area east and south of Northfield as well as much of the south side of Northfield itself. We drove most of it but walked a bit of Sibley Swale, the Sibley School nature area, and the marshy area just west of the south end of Archibald Street.

This was our count for the morning -- 20 species, which is two more than last year:

• 60 house sparrows
• 40 European starlings
• 32 American crows
• 26 dark-eyed juncos
• 14 blue jays
• 14 mallards
• 12 American goldfinches
• 9 house finches
• 7 pine siskins
• 6 downy woodpeckers
• 5 black-capped chickadees
• 5 rock pigeons
• 3 white-breasted nuthatches
• 2 American tree sparrows
• 2 mourning doves
• 2 northern cardinals
• 1 Canada goose
• 1 red-tailed hawk
• 1 ring-necked pheasant
• 1 red-bellied woodpecker

Gene Bauer always does a meticulous job of organizing our regional Count, and it's so much fun to breakfast with all the other CBCers at Gene and Susan's house and return to report in and warm up over soup at lunchtime. Many thanks to them, as always.

To all: Wishing you peace and joy in this season of darkness and lights, and the restorative and transformative blessings of nature in the year ahead.

Ice Forming on a Frigid Morning

Saturday was the Christmas Bird Count in our area, and wouldn't you know it would be the most frigid morning we've had this whole mild December -- only about 10 F. as we set out around 8:00. One bright side was seeing some fascinating ice formations along the creek near Dennison, where we always stop in hopes of seeing birds, but rarely see any even when there is open water. This time we saw a couple of goldfinches. 

Click on any of the photos below to see them larger. They were taken from quite some distance so they are not all crystal clear, but you can see what a variety of patterns and structures were to be seen.

I haven't studied ice formation much, but there is some basic background in this Britannica article. 

The only ducks we saw all morning were a group of 14 mallards splashing vigorously in a small area of open water in the middle of the pond south of Superior Drive. Man, that looks cold.

Christmas Bird Count 2014: Quiet

Participating in the annual Christmas Bird Count has become a tradition I look forward to eagerly. It's a chance to devote half a day, or more, to looking for birds and documenting the number of each species we see, as well as our time spent and mileage covered by car and on foot, to aid in interpreting the numbers reported. I've also written here about the Christmas Bird Counts of 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013. As in the past, we were assigned to a rural area east and south of Northfield, as well as a good portion of Northfield's east side.

Relatively mild at about 30-32 F. all morning, it was also gray and chillingly damp, though thankfully not windy. Ponds were frozen, while creeks were open. The mantra of the day for our group of four turned out to be, "Boy, it's really quiet out there." While we saw some decent action at a few homesteads that had well-stocked feeders, we came up dry at many others, including those at my own house. It wasn't always literally quiet, as we had an ample number of crows cawing raucously, but there were a lot of places that seemed unexpectedly bird-free.

Open water at the creek west of Dennison -- but no birds

The photo above is taken from the highway bridge just west of Dennison. Every year I get my hopes up for this creek, which often offers open water and seems so inviting from a human perspective, but once again there was nothing to see.

Here are our results for the morning. Occasionally birds (mostly chickadees and nuthatches) were identified by sound though not seen.

• 2 Canada geese
• 55 mallards, seen in many small groups overhead, flying with their characteristic rapid wingbeats, and in a large congregation on the open creek in the golf course
• 1 ring-necked pheasant. Pheasant numbers are down so much in the last few years that this was now considered a lucky sighting.
• 1 sharp-shinned hawk seen flying through woods (I missed seeing this. Darn!)
• 1 red-tailed hawk
• 19 rock pigeons (your standard barnyard or urban pigeon) on silos
• 5 mourning doves
• 1 red-bellied woodpecker
• 5 downy woodpeckers
• 1 hairy woodpecker
• 12 blue jays
• 52 American crows
• 14 black-capped chickadees
• 7 white-breasted nuthatches
• 43 dark-eyed juncos, including a flock of 35 seen on the west edge of the Sibley School natural area
• 5 northern cardinals
• 39 house finches, the majority of them in one large group at a rural homestead with plenty of large trees and well-stocked feeders
• 22 house sparrows, mostly in one large group at the pond west of Archibald Street and just north of Jefferson Parkway; we first caught sight of a few of them on top of and going into a wood duck box. 

This total of 18 species is the same as our total in 2011 (the last count I can find detailed notes for). Species seen then that we did not see yesterday included the European starling, wild turkey, American robin, American goldfinch, and northern shrike. Species seen yesterday that we did not see in 2011 included Canada goose, ring-necked pheasant, sharp-shinned hawk, rock pigeon, and hairy woodpecker. I always hope to see snow buntings or horned larks for the CBC, but there were none to be seen yesterday, nor (ambitious hope) a snowy owl, for which there have been sightings in Rice County in the past week or so.

Non-avian sightings included plenty of squirrels and, notably, a mink that was being eyed warily by a pair of mallards on Spring Creek on the east edge of Northfield.

I was happy to see several new participants at our Northfield-based count, including my longtime friend Mary, who came along in our group, as well as the now-familiar friends who are faithful to this effort. Thanks as always to Gene Bauer for organizing the bird count for the Northfield area, Gene and his wife Susan for their hospitality for the pre-count breakfast and post-count lunch, and the other bird enthusiasts, both experienced and developing, who showed up and helped make it a fun day of comradery and citizen science.

CBC - Tree Sparrows and Horned Larks

For the fifth year in a row, I participated in the Christmas Bird Count last Saturday. Light falling snow seemed to reduce the number of birds that were out and about. For example, we saw very few crows in the air, which is certainly unusual. My route, which I shared with Dan Kahl (the naturalist at Mount Olivet Retreat Center in Farmington), took us down the rural roads south and east of Northfield as well as around the southeast quadrant in town.

My favorite sightings of the day were a bald eagle in flight on the far eastern edge of our area, 12 horned larks in a snow-covered cornfield, and 7 American tree sparrows in the tall dried grasses at the west edge of the Sibley Elementary School's nature preserve. Other highlights were large flocks (50+) of house finches and mallards.

Tree sparrows, which breed in northern Canada and Alaska, are only seen here in the winter. Their rusty caps are similar to those of the chipping sparrow, but in the winter we don't see chipping sparrows, which migrate to the far southern U.S. and Mexico. The tree sparrow has a bicolored bill, which you can see better if you click on the second photo below.

American Tree Sparrow

American Tree Sparrow

Horned larks are here year-round, but I don't often see them. We only spotted this group by seeing their movements against the snow, though we were looking pretty hard at most fields we passed, hoping to see either horned larks or snow buntings (which we did not see at all this time). The horned larks were spread out enough that I couldn't get a decent photo of several at once. I enjoy their striking markings.

Horned Lark

Horned Lark

As always, I thank Gene Bauer for organizing the bird count for our region, Gene and his wife Susan for their hospitality for the pre-count breakfast and post-count lunch, and the other enthusiastic birders who showed up and helped make it a fun day of citizen science.

Winter Robin

We spotted this robin during the Christmas Bird Count last Saturday. This is my Solstice/Hannukah/Christmas photo for 2011: warmest wishes to everyone, and thanks for reading Penelopedia.

Christmas Bird Count 2011

This was the view from the passenger seat at just after 8 o'clock this morning, as my little Christmas Bird Count group set off to spend the morning slowly driving the back roads southeast of Northfield, as well driving and walking the southeast section of town. We covered 29 miles by car and about half a mile on foot (mostly on the footpaths near Sibley Elementary School) in 3.5 hours. It was a pretty morning, with last night's dusting of snow still fresh on the fields and trees, but it was relatively slow morning for birding. While we had a few exciting moments, things were generally pretty quiet. We spotted or identified by sound approximately:

• 80 European starlings in a single group
• 51 house finches (about 40 in a single flock)
• 50 mallards (flying overhead)
• 26 American crows
• 21 house sparrows
• 17 black-capped chickadees
• 9 mourning doves (7 in a small backyard tree visible from a footpath)
• 7 blue jays 
• 7 wild turkeys
• 6 dark-eyed juncos
• 5 American robins
• 4 downy woodpeckers
• 3 American goldfinches
• 3 northern cardinals
• 3 red-tailed hawks
• 2 northern shrikes (one in town, near the ponds off Jefferson Parkway near Prairie St. -- an exciting "spot")
• 1 red-bellied woodpecker
• 1 white-breasted nuthatch

There were also a few pigeons, which are officially called rock pigeons these days. Numbers above are from memory and may be inexact, as we didn't keep our tally sheet after making our official report, but they are close.

Dan and Erika Tallman were the Northfield-area coordinators this year and hosted the pre-Count breakfast and the post-Count lunch. It's always fun to sit around the table with other bird-minded Northfielders, and some who come from elsewhere to participate because their home regions don't have a count.

We joined in the Christmas Bird Count the previous two years as well, and I blogged about both outings. In 2009 I saw my first horned larks and provided more general background about the Christmas Bird Count, and in 2010 I saw my first northern shrike and wrote about the frustration of unofficial turkeys -- turkeys that were on the wrong side of the road along our area boundary and so could not be officially counted.

The history and research value of the annual Christmas Bird Count (a project of the National Audubon Society and partners) were nicely described in an article that ran in the most recent Northfield News. Read it here.

The Belly in Red-bellied Woodpecker

As I've noted before, and as others have certainly also observed, red-bellied woodpeckers would doubtless be called red-headed woodpeckers if not for the red-all-over head of the extremely handsome bird that actually bears that name.The eponymous red belly of the former is not very red and not very easy to see, so it's hardly a good field mark. It does show a little, however, in this shot of a red-bellied woodpecker in our front-yard maple tree this morning.

Earlier posts I've written about red-bellied woodpeckers can be found here. It hasn't been a common bird for us in the past, but we have seen one two or three times since we started tracking our observations for this Project FeederWatch season, which started about a month ago.

Next Saturday we'll be participating in the annual Christmas Bird Count for the third time. In the past two years we've been assigned to areas to the east of Northfield as well as some in town. I'm looking forward to it. One slight hope is that in a morning out and about in the countryside we might see a snowy owl. Many snowy owls have been sighted in the northern U.S. in the past several weeks, signalling a major "irruption" year. They come south in search of food when their usual sources are scarce, and unfortunately a number of the birds that have been reported have been emaciated and some have been found dead. A Google map showing rough locations of snowy owl sightings is available here.

Unofficial Turkeys

I spent this morning participating in the Northfield section of the Faribault "circle" of the Christmas Bird Count, as I did last year. This year, unfortunately, Dave had to be away from home, so my 11-year-old son came with me and we were paired up with Dan Kahl, who is the naturalist at the Mount Olivet Conference and Retreat Center. It was great to have the help of such an experienced and affable partner; he was able to quickly make identifications I would have struggled with alone due to distance, speed of flight or other factors.

At the pre-count breakfast hosted by area coordinator Gene Bauer and his wife, Susan, I was also happy to meet Dan Tallman, and his wife Erika, of Dan Tallman's Bird Blog; we've been exchanging blog comments for some time now so it was nice to connect in person. We probably met at the same event last year, but at the time we didn't have any frame of reference. Birdwatchers seem on the whole to be such congenial people, and I enjoy getting to know more of them.

We were assigned a section of southeastern Northfield and a rural area extending farther south and east as far as the edge of Dennison. Much of our driving route was along roads that bordered our assigned area, so officially in those situations we were supposed to count only birds on one side of the road -- the side toward the interior of our area. Anything on the other side of the road was reserved for the person(s) assigned to the adjoining section to record.

There was just one time when we saw something interesting that was on the wrong side of the road: a flock of 11 wild turkeys on a driveway near the intersection of 110th St. and Hall Ave. So these were unofficial turkeys from our perspective, but being large and relatively stable, they formed a good subject for the only photo I took during the outing.

Wild turkeys, rural Northfield (click on photo for larger view)

Birds we officially recorded today included a northern shrike (a very cool spot, and a life bird for me), two small flocks of snow buntings (another lifer -- we looked hard for them last year but didn't find any, though we did find horned larks, which sometimes flock with snow buntings), a flock of 23 robins (!), several downy woodpeckers, a red-bellied woodpecker, a white-breasted nuthatch, two cardinals, quite a few blue jays, four mourning doves, four ring-necked pheasants, four rock pigeons, one bald eagle seen in town behind Sibley School, 34 crows, and numerous juncos, chickadees, goldfinches and house sparrows.

People who participate in the CBC are sent both the regional results and, eventually, a bound copy of the nation-wide report for the year. It's gratifying to be part of this "citizen science" project that helps track avian population patterns.

Oh, and at the end of the morning after hearing our story, Gene noted our turkeys on the side of the reporting form and said that if the adjoining reporters did not spot that flock, he would count them. So it turns out they might not be unofficial turkeys after all.

Christmas Bird Count

Yesterday Dave and I spent the morning driving the back roads east and west of Northfield, counting birds. We were participating in our first Christmas Bird Count (CBC) -- an annual Audubon Society event that dates back to 1900, in the early years of the conservation movement, when it was proposed as an alternative to a competitive Christmas hunting tradition. Audubon and other organizations use data collected in this longest-running wildlife census to assess the health and changing distributions of bird populations and to help guide conservation action.

Some CBC participants stay home and keep track of the birds they see in their yards; some walk through neighborhoods or through parks or nature trails; others, like us, cover a larger outlying area by car, getting out from time to time at promising spots like open water, thickets of trees, and so on. We drove quite slowly where it was safe to do so, pulling over from time to time to peer into fields or trees and to listen for birdcalls.

The countryside is divided into official CBC record-keeping circles. Northfield is on the northern edge of the circle that includes Faribault on the southern edge and is called the Faribault circle. The top slice of the circle, including Northfield, is Area 8. Dave and I were assigned the two outer curved wings of that slice, with the town of Northfield itself and the nature areas of the two colleges being covered by plenty of other volunteers.

I took the photo below early in the outing, showing the division between two farm fields looking north from a road east of Northfield. The temperature was around 20 F. with quite a brisk wind blowing from the north. In terrain like this in the east section of our territory we saw several roadside flocks of dark-eyed juncoes and house sparrows, a dozen ring-necked pheasants gleaning corn from a harvested field, and -- almost invisible out in a field blending in with the clods of soil, and only spotted because we saw movement -- four horned larks, America's only true native lark (meadowlarks are actually in the same family as New World blackbirds and orioles) . I think this was a "life bird" (first time spotted) for me.

To the west of Northfield, we covered the area along Highway 1 to a point just west of I-35, but mostly east of the interstate and north of 1 but south of Highway 19. Here we found a greater variety of habitat, including some wooded and marshy areas. We saw a kestrel on a wire overhead, a bald eagle soaring close enough that we could hear its distinctive, high-pitched cry, and a flock of common redpolls -- these actually a life bird for Dave despite his many years of birdwatching; we are near the southern limit of their winter grounds, and they don't appear here consistently, though I remember having them at my feeder in Northfield a number of years ago. He had not known them to visit his feeders when he lived in Minneapolis.

The magnificent old oak tree below was just off a winding section of one of the north-south roads on the west side, across the road from more oaks and conifers where several downy woodpeckers were active and easily visible.


Here we were actually witnesses to a minor collision, as a local resident backed his pickup truck out of his driveway into the front bumper of an oncoming vehicle, which had stopped as it saw the truck coming and was even blowing its horn. They seemed to know each other and were quickly laughing about it, so we went on our way. By that time the morning was nearly over and we were starting to get stiff necks from craning to spot birds while driving, and tired eyes from a lot of binocular use.

We were invited back to the circle coordinator, Gene Bauer's, house for lunch, where we enjoyed some soup, compared notes with other volunteers, whom we had met at breakfast before we all set out, and filled in our official reporting forms. These included counts of each species identified, the miles driven or walked, and the time spent observing. Tracking the latter two items helps with the interpretation of data -- if walkers spent four hours covering two miles on foot through a residential neighborhood, their count numbers will have a different interpretation than ours, where we spent about four hours covering 33 miles of mostly open countryside by car and clearly couldn't look with detail into every tree and field we passed.

Other birds we recorded seeing or hearing during the morning included crows, pigeons, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches in drab winter plumage, black-capped chickadees, white-breasted and one red-breasted nuthatch, a hairy and a red-bellied woodpecker, and two red-tailed hawks. No wild turkeys, which surprised me a little, and only the one group of pheasants.

We enjoyed the morning's birdwatching, meeting some birdwatchers we hadn't known before, and the feeling that we were contributing to a useful body of data. I imagine this will be a new Christmas-season tradition for us.

Merry Christmas, and a joyous new year to all.