The Year in Birds: 2011 (Part 2)

After I posted birding highlights of 2011 yesterday, of course some more occurred to us. Perhaps foremost among these was our January sighting of a northern shrike going after prey in open farmland east of Northfield.


We also had two most unexpected yard birds (species seen in or from our yard) in 2011:

• In the spring my son and husband saw a ring-necked pheasant in our front yard, under a young evergreen that often provides cover for the birds who visit our feeders. We are not far from the eastern edge of town, and pheasants are a fairly common sight in the farm fields just down the road, but we'd never seen a pheasant within the city limits before, let alone on our property -- and so far, never have again.
• Also in the extremely wet spring, when a medium-sized marsh had developed in low-lying land just to the east of our property, we joked about the prospects of attracting shorebirds and were utterly dumbfounded to actually have several visits from a migrating solitary sandpiper. I took some photos through the spotting scope from our three-season porch, just to be able to say I'd photographed a sandpiper from our house.This is a bird I was even more surprised to find within the city limits than the pheasant mentioned above.

• 2011 was also a year of many firsts for my son, who really caught the birding bug last December and was eager to add to his list. One amusing episode concerned his first red-winged blackbirds. These of course are very common birds once they arrive in the spring, but on this day we had not yet seen any for the season. We were near the ponds on the southeast end of town, where the cattails provide prime RWB habitat. At long last we saw a lone blackbird, and a bit later another, so he was quite pleased and gratified -- and then a flock of about 300 of them flew overhead. I think we actually burst out laughing.
• Those ponds, particularly the deep, spring-fed pond south of Superior Drive, provide us much pleasure in the spring. The Superior Drive pond is usually ice-free before any other water in the area and so it attracts a really spectacular mix of migrating ducks and geese and even loons in early spring. In 2011, the year of the early but cool, wet spring, the ice was out and the pond full of ducks by mid-March.

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.