Bowdoin NWR

Yellowstone in May is not exactly a birders paradise so we typically arrange another stop or two, while on vacation, to do a little bit of birding. This year we left Yellowstone a day early so that we could visit a couple of other parks on our way home. Unfortunately due to bad weather and a flat tire we only had the opportunity to make one stop.
Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge is located in the short and mixed grass prairie region of North-central Montana. It is home to many western prairie species of birds such as the western kingbird and western meadowlark, pictured above.
Bowdoin was established back in 1936 to help protect vital resting, feeding and breeding habitat for migrating birds, particularly waterfowl and shorebirds. The refuge encompasses 15,551 acres, 8,675 of which is wetlands. The wetlands provide homes to a variety of birds such as the yellow-headed blackbird pictured above.
The refuge is centered around Lake Bowdoin. In preglacial times it is believed that the lake was actually an Oxbow in the Missouri River but over time the river has moved 70 miles south of the lake. What was left behind is a variety of habitats including saline and freshwater wetlands and native prairie. These are perfect habitat for the marbled godwit pictured above.
Before 1936 Lake Bowdoin was used by the Montana Bureau of Reclamation as a catch basin to help manage the waters of spring floods, irrigation return flows and seepage. Each spring snow melt would pour down into the lake from Beaver Creek and the Black Coulee drainage flooding the land around the lake. This provided good habitat for shorebirds and waterfowl that were migrating north at about the same time, like the white-faced ibis flying above.
Once the refuge was established the Works Progress Administration began the construction of the refuge headquarters as well as a system of water control structures designed to help manage the wetlands to provide the proper habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds like the Wilson's phalarope pictured above.
Lake Bowdoin sits on 5,459 acres of the refuge. Islands in the lake hold breeding colonies of white pelicans, double-crested cormorants, California and ring-billed gulls. Wetland areas around the lake provide habitat for American avocet, black-necked stilts, ducks and grebes. Eared grebes in breeding plumage are a common site at this time of year.
In the upland prairie areas you can find pronghorn antelope, deer, sharp-tailed grouse and raptors. We found a pair of northern harriers hunting in the fields just outside the refuge. I was happy to get a shot of the mail in flight. I see females pretty frequently around home, mostly during the fall, but I hardly ever see the males. Female harriers are mostly brown compared to the light gray color of the males from which they have received the nickname, "the gray ghost".

My World: Bosque del Apache

In the middle of New Mexico, surrounded by Mountains and dessert, lies an oasis that is one of the top birding locations in the United States, the Bosque del Apache.

The Bosque is a 57,000 acre National Wildlife Refuge that straddles the Rio Grande River in Central New Mexico. It is comprised of 3,800 acres of active flood plane from the Rio Grande as well as 9,100 acres of wetlands, farm land and riparian forest which was created through a system of water management. These wetlands are surrounded by arid foothills, mesas and dessert.

Because it is the only extensive wetlands in an arid region the Bosque attracts many different types of birds, over 340 species, through out the year. However many people choose to bird the Bosque during the winter months when large flocks of water fowl descend on the wetlands making it their winter home.
My last visit to the Bosque was in January of 2007, which is when I took all of the pictures in this post. It was great to be there during the peak waterfowl season.

There were a lot of ducks out on the lakes and pools when I was there. A lot of them are pretty common back home in Minnesota during the warmer months, like coots and mallards, but there were other ducks that I rarely get to see back home. In Minnesota we do not see northern pintails all that often, at least not in the eastern portions of the state, so it was a treat to get many very close views of them down at the Bosque.
There were also a few northern shovelers swimming around. Shovelers are another duck that tends to spend their time more in the western portions of the continent.

I also got a chance to see a small group of greater white-fronted geese. This was a life bird for me. These birds breed up near the arctic circle and then spend their winters down in the southern US and Mexico.

The greater white-fronted geese were on the outskirts of a large flock of snow geese. Although snow geese where not a lifer for me on this trip, we sometimes see snow geese as they migrate south plus I had seen them on a previous trip to the Bosque, they are still a bird that I have only seen a couple of times. The Bosque is usually home to over 30,000 snow and Ross geese each winter.

The snow geese are not the only things that winter at the Bosque in large numbers. Approximately 14,000 sandhill cranes spend the winter on the refuge.

Sandhill cranes nest in parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin so these are birds that I have seen and photographed often but we do not usually see them in as great of numbers as is possible down at the Bosque.

The big spectacle, during the winter, are the "fly in" at dusk and the "fly out" at dawn. Each day large flocks of birds spend their day out in the fields and farmland looking for food, but at night they come back to roost on the shallow pools of the Bosque. The times when the birds are coming in "fly in" or leaving "fly out" attract large crowds of spectators.

The Bosque has many different types of habitat, besides the wetlands, to explore. The arid hilly regions were habitat that was different then anything that I have near home.
Some of the birds preferred the habitat of these dry open hills. Many raptors could be found circling these areas looking for prey. The raptors that I saw at the Bosque were eagles, red-tailed hawks, coopers hawks, American kestrel and mostly northern harrier, like pictured above.
There were also quite a few passerines and other small birds that were birds that I do not often see like roadrunners, spotted towhee and red shafted northern flickers, the northern flickers that we see in Minnesota or typically yellow-shafted.

Strange bird at Carlos Avery

After 6 days of rain the sun finally came out for an extended period on Friday. Since it has been a while since I have birded Carlos Avery I decided to take a trip north after I got off of work. While driving through the park I spotted an unusual bird crossing the road in front of me. I got out of the car to get a closer look and a picture.The picture did not turn out that well because the bird was already in the woods by the time I got out of the car but from the picture I identified the bird as a Chukar. This confused me because from what I read Chukar where Eurasian game birds that were introduced to the US and had established populations in dry western states. Since I could not find any listing of these birds in Minnesota I turned to the Minnesota Ornithologists' Union to help me with the mystery. The overwhelming response that I received was that this was probably a captive bird that had escaped or been released.

Other species that I saw on my trip where a green heron

a pied grebe

And a northern harrier

It was great to get out in the sun and do some birding.

Medicine Lake continued

At the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge we also were able to photograph a few birds in the fields surrounding the lakes. Along with red-winged blackbirds they had a pretty good population of yellow-headed blackbirds.
Red-wings are common in eastern Minnesota but yellow-heads are not so we always like to get shots of the Yellow-heads when we get the chance. We did have one living at Woodlake Nature Center in the Twin Cities earlier this year but I have not been back in a while to check and see if it is still around. Sounds like something to do tonight.
We also spotted a couple of chestnut-collared longspur. They were difficult to shoot because they stayed low in the grass.
Eastern Kingbirds are also common in eastern Minnesota. I usually see quite a few when I visit the Carpenter Nature Center in Hasting's Minnesota.
The range of the western kingbird does not extend to the eastern portion of Minnesota.
We saw many ring-necked pheasants in the park and in the fields on the side of the road on the way there and on the way back.

We even saw a jack rabbit spying on us from near the border of the preserve.
After we left Medicine Lake we spotted this harrier flying over the field on the side of the road. We spotted many harrier on our trip but usually we were on the freeway and could not stop. Since we were on a highway at the time we decided to stop and get a couple of shots.
After I got a couple shots my wife noticed a second raptor had flown into the area. I believed that the second bird was a female harrier but it was pointed out by Dennis and Barbara Martin that it looked more like a swainson's hawk.

The dark remiges certainly looked like a swainson's but I was still not sure until I found this picture in my archives.

This shot had the clearest view of the second birds face.
And it was not very harrier like. Dennis and Barbara were right. Thank you very much for the correction.

It appears as though the swainson's was intruding on the harriers territory. This is something that prolly happens often out in open areas like the one we were in. The harrier did not seem to take the invasion lightly.
I kept shooting as they continued to circle each other until they faded away into the distance. Then we headed on home to give our attention starved cat some love.