Yellow-headed Blackbird

The yellow-headed blackbird isn't a bird I've seen much. It seems to be much more numerous further west in Minnesota, although it is certainly present in marshy areas in much of the state, along with the more common red-winged blackbird. I only remember spotting one in Northfield once, quite a few years ago now, right after I had seen many of them on a family trip to the Black Hills and Yellowstone.

But we spotted a couple recently at the marsh near the gravel pit south of town a couple of weeks ago and again last weekend. I see from eBird that others have reported them there this year as well.

If I saw yellow-headeds all the time, as we do the red-winged blackbirds, I suppose I wouldn't continue to find them all that exciting. But the gold and black are so striking that I do love to see them. A friend described them thus: "As if its jet black feathers were dipped headfirst into a golden pond."

The Year in Birds: 2011

See also The Year in Birds: 2011 (Part 2).

I've just caught up with our official 2011 bird list, which I forgot to keep updated in the final months of the year. We have 137 birds on the list this year, including birds seen in California. That's up from only 95 last year, but we didn't have a western trip last year.

Our birding highlights of 2011 included:

• Rare whooping cranes in Rice County in the fall (also spotted by others in the spring):

• My first sight of a large gathering of sandhill cranes at the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in early November.
• My first white-tailed kite, seen hovering over dunes in a Berkeley, CA, bayside park in August -- a beautiful, medium-sized white hawk that at first I took to be yet another gull but whose hovering behavior caught my eye as something very different. This is a coastal bird, in the U.S. generally only to be seen along the west coast, the southern Texas gulf coast and the tip of Florida.
• My first scarlet tanagers, seen on the same mid-May day as 10 or so species of migrating spring warblers at the Cannon River Wilderness Area; the bay-breasted warbler became a new favorite for me the same day.

• A March trip to California that included shorebird- and waterfowl-watching in fairly industrialized East Bay locations and a very enjoyable outing to the Las Gallinas Wildlife Ponds (a.k.a. sewage ponds) in Marin County. Birds included marbled godwit, black-necked stilt, dunlin, pectoral sandpiper, American avocet, willet, American wigeon, northern mockingbird, black-crowned night-heron, black-bellied plover, western grebe, surf scoter, black turnstone and snowy egret. (Addendum, Jan. 8: I've been reminded to add violet-green swallow and cinnamon teal to this trip report.)
• An August trip to California with my then-almost-12-year-old son, where we saw the above-mentioned white-tailed kite and hiked up into the Sunol Wilderness Area in the southern East Bay hills to see golden eagles soaring around the hilltops. This was by our terms a substantial hike (about three hours fairly steeply uphill and down again, in very dry conditions), which challenged and rewarded both of us. I came away from it with an enhanced sense of power to push myself physically and an appreciation for my son's stamina. I'll close with this image of that trail: leading onward and upward to new discoveries about ourselves and the world. 

Wishing you adventures in 2012.

Sandhill Cranes at Sherburne NWR (Video)

I was itchin' to go birding somewhere today while the weather was still mild, and thanks to a couple of blogging friends who mentioned sandhill cranes recently (see Dan Tallman's Bird Blog and Nature Knitter), I'd heard that the cranes have been congregating in large numbers in places like Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge in central Minnesota and at Crex Meadows in Wisconsin. We decided to head to the closer of these, Sherburne NWR, to see if we could spot some cranes. The refuge is north of Elk River and Zimmerman, to the northwest of the Twin Cities metro area, about 90 minutes' drive from Northfield.

I've seen sandhill cranes before -- here and there in fields in central Wisconsin last month, for example, while driving to visit our daughter at Lawrence University -- but only a few at a time. The idea of seeing them congregating in large numbers, staging for their upcoming migration south, was an exciting prospect.

The Sherburne NWR website has a nice guide to where to view sandhill cranes, and it was right on target. We started to see some in the air, and then came upon a field where many dozens were foraging, joined almost every minute by new groups of anywhere from three to eight or more gliding in from the east. At a conservative count there must have been at least 300 cranes there while we watched. Here is a short video of some of the cranes on the ground and others flying in. I love how their long legs dangle as they come in. Toward the end of the video you can hear their calls.

 

 Here are some photos as well.

We also saw a pair of swans fly by.

This was my first trip to Sherburne, and I look forward to exploring it further when it's not deer hunting season. We saw a lot of trucks pulled over and quite a bit of blaze orange hunting gear. We stayed in our car, needless to say.

We've talked about going to Nebraska's Platte River Valley flyway to witness the spring migration of half a million sandhill cranes, considered one of the most amazing experiences in birding anywhere. Dave's seen it, and I'd love to. Getting just a taste of it today has whetted my appetite for that trip even more.