December 30
th was the
Wabasha CBC and my last CBC for 2007. For this count I was partnered with Laura
Coble, who was the coordinator for the
RedWing CBC that I participated in earlier in the month, and we were assigned an area on the south east side of the CBC circle. We started our count in the small town of
Kellog, just south of
Wabasha. We toured the town checking out all or the feeders that we could find and
counting the
passerines and woodpeckers that we found. We saw juncos, chickadees, house and tree sparrows, gold finch, house finch, cardinals, blue jays, white-breasted nuthatch,
downie, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers and even a lone pine
siskin.
On the south side of town we came to a feeder stand that appeared to only have black squirrels feeding at it. I thought that it was strange since the feeders appeared well stock and there was adequate cover. Then a larger bird took off from down low and landed in a tree above the feeder.
It was a sharp-
shinned hawk and it was looking for breakfast. We stopped to watch the bird and so that I could take some pics. After about 30 seconds of looking around the bird hunched over and prepared to take off. I thought that he was going to take off and leave but to my surprise he went down towards a small bush. From out of the bush a small dark bird took off, I am pretty sure that it was a junco but it really happened fast so I can not be 100% sure, but he was too late. The sharpie smacked into the
passerine, that was bolting for its life, and knocked it into the snow. The sharpie followed quickly behind and captured the bird with its talons down under the snow.
If you look carefully at the picture above you can see a wing in the snow by the sharpies leg. He stood on the junco for about half a minute, just long enough to squeeze the life out of it, and then took his prize and flew off to the safety of some neighboring pine trees where he could eat in privacy.
After that excitement we headed out of town to investigate the rest of our area. In a rural area, not far out of town, we spotted a tree where a few mourning doves had perched.
Later in the day we found a pretty good size flock of mourning doves. We also saw a couple of northern shrikes as well as quite a few raptors including three bald eagles, one rough legged hawk, and about 10
redtail hawks.
This immature
redtail was fairly tolerant of people and let us get pretty close to take some pics. We all met in
Kellog around lunch time to check in and then went back out to check some rural areas, a golf course, part of the Mississippi Valley National Fish and Wildlife refuge, and some land owned by the Nature Conservancy. It was starting to get dark and we had covered our territory so we decided to head back and take a trip through
Kellog again on our way back. Since we had already counted
Kellog pretty well we decided not to count anything new unless it was something that we had not seen in town on our first trip through. We added two more birds both of the same species. First was this adult coopers hawk that we spotted in a tree.
He flew before I could get a real good pic, with out so many sticks in the way, and we could not find where he went to. So we continued back to a feeder stand that where we had seen a lot of birds and we found an immature coopers hawk hunting there.
At first I only got a couple of shots of his back before he flew but we did relocate him before we left town and I got my shots. We did pretty good for raptors that day but the CBC as a whole counted over 50 eagles as well as quite a few rough legged and red-tailed hawks and one snowy owl.
I spent last weekend doing two Christmas Bird Counts. These were the only two CBCs that I did this year, compared to the five that I did last year. The main reason for the cut back was that I did not do the Duluth and Two Harbors counts this year because the dates were not on the same weekend like they were last year. It would have been hard to drive two and a half to three hours up there in the early morning, spend all day on the count and then drive back in the dark. So this year I just worked on the Hastings and Redwing CBCs. I did Hastings on Saturday with Drew which is where I photographed the kestrel pictured above.
This red-shouldered hawk was also from the Hastings count on Saturday. Drew and I found 27 different species. On Sunday I went out with Jim and Jim and we found 22 different species on the Redwing count. This year I decided to concentrate more on the count, which is why I did not take many pics. I brought the camera just in case we needed to document anything that we found. The funny thing was that on Sunday we found a small flock of cowbirds, on a farm south of Redwing, that I should have taken a picture for documentation but I did not even think about it. After all they were cowbirds, a common bird that I frequently see that many people consider a pest, but they are rare in Minnesota at this time of the year so I really should have taken a pic. I guess I will know better next year.
In the afternoon things picked up a bit. Probably the best birding area that we found was at a feeder station in some ones yard on Pine Bend Trail. These feeders seemed to be very attractive to woodpeckers. There were around 10 
There were 6 hairy woodpeckers.
We also saw at least 4 red-bellied woodpeckers, a lot of juncos, chickadees and white-breasted nuthatch and our 2 most exciting birds of the day. We saw a tufted titmouse, but it was too far away to get any shots with out entering into these people's yard, and one red-
Even though things were a little slow for us other groups that were part of the count did well. Some of the more interesting birds that were spotted were a flock of red-winged blackbird, gray partridges, American kestrel, great horned and barred owl
We completed our first zone around noon and then met back with the group at the afternoon 
Shrikes kind of remind me of the little kid on the block who is always trying to be one of the big kids. They are a songbird who acts a lot like a raptor, hunting small rodents and birds. Unfortunately they don't have all of the tools that a raptor does, namely the powerful talons. But they don't need no 
Later on we returned back to Lighthouse point but things were still quiet. There were a lot of deer wondering around the woods.
There was also a very noisy red squirrel.
But there was nothing new as far as birds go. Since we had already covered the territory and things were pretty quiet we decided that we were done. Mike went home to Duluth and I hung around Two Harbors shooting some winter scenery until 2:30 when I turned in our numbers to Jim Lind to be tallied.
Even though both the Duluth and Two Harbors CBC were kind of quiet I did have a lot of fun. I am already scheduled for another CBC this week and am planning on participating in a couple more on the last weekend in December.
During our count we spotted 3 types of woodpeckers. There were hairy woodpeckers, like the one above, downy woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers. It seems to be a good year for woodpeckers in Duluth this year. There were 2 three-toed woodpeckers counted during the CDC which was the first time that species had been seen during the Duluth CBC. There was also 3 black-backed woodpeckers seen, which tied the CBC record, 33 pileated woodpeckers and 88 hairy woodpeckers which are both new high totals. Our group spotted quite a few hairy and at least 5 pileated.
I had read on the list server, it was Mike Hendricks our group leader who had posted it, that there had been a flock of around 500 of the waxwings down on Park Point the week prior to the count. So I was hoping that we would see some and that I would get some pics.
But waxwings are very nomadic and go where the berries are.
This group was working on a mountain ash that was in some ones front yard in a residential area.
The fun thing to watch though was after they ate some berries they would go to a neighboring pine tree for a drink of snow.
I could have sat and watched them eat the snow all day but we had a job to do and so we moved on.
Some of the more interesting species that our group spotted were a boreal chickadee, great gray owl, and a coopers hawk. Unfortunately I did not get any pictures of these. 
I finally went to my hotel and checked in after it got dark. When I got to my room I shed all my extra layers of winter clothing and laid down on the bed. I woke up 3 hours later. Unfortunately it was too late for me to make the compilation dinner but from the information that I received there was a total of 55 species counted which is one less then the average of 56. The slow birding was prolly due to the weather which has been colder, with more snow, then in recent years.