A trip to Duluth starting at Wisconsin Point

Thursday's weather was as nice as promised. I took a half day off of work so that I could go back up to Duluth and spend most of the day birding. I started my day across the border at Wisconsin point. As I was driving into the point I saw this hawk on a small tree in the marshy area along the road.
At first I thought that I might have a juvenile ferruginous hawk, since it did not have a defined belly band and when it took off I could not see any red in the tail.However when I got home and examined the pictures on my PC it was plain that the feathers on the leg do not extend down all the way to the feet, which means it could not be a ferruginous hawk. It is red-tailed hawk, prolly a juvenile, which would explain the lack of red in the tail and the indistinct belly spotting. Down on the beach things were pretty quiet. There were a few gull out by the light house, I decided that I did not want to crawl across the rock wall with my new camera to get any pictures of them, and an American crow working on his tan. Next I decided to go check out the wooded areas around the beach.There I saw some chickadees and a couple of white-breasted nuthatch. Since things were pretty quiet I decided to move on and check out the Minnesota side. On my way back to the bridge I swung through a few areas down by the water where I saw a lot of Canadian geese, gulls and this common grackle. I will post more on my Duluth trip tomorrow.

Birding Duluth

On our way up to do some bear watching at the Vince Shute Bear Sanctuary we had a bit of time to kill. We left early in the morning and planned to stop and eat lunch in Duluth, MN. We arrived in Duluth at around noon but we had planned to eat lunch at around 2:00pm. This gave us a couple hours to do some birding in Duluth. The weather was perfect with no clouds in the sky that is until we got to Duluth. Duluth was completely fogged in. We decided that going to Hawk Ridge to watch for raptors probably would not work well in the fog so we decided to try Park Point instead. First we went down to the beach and walked along the shoreline. There were a few people on the beach, playing with dogs or doing some body surfing, so there were not that many birds. We did spot a ring-billed gull and got a couple picks. Further on down the beach we spotted a group of sanderling running in the waves, their stiff legs pumping up and down like little wind up toys.

After walking for a while we went back to the car and decided to continue down to the end of the point. On our ride around the point we saw mallard ducks, canadian geese, gulls, savannah sparrow and a couple of wimbrel scavenging on the soccer field.