Wow! More Snow!

Greetings,

Not to sound too much like a broken record, but our late spring weather pattern continues and even as I write this, there is snow in the air. After last Friday’s blizzard, the road up the mountain has even more snow on it and some truely impressive drifts; it was Sunday before I could safely make it to the top on the snowmobile once a trail had been blazed by other more experienced riders. There are sections that were blasted by the storm that look like ski-hill moguls!

As to the migration, the hawks continue to move, when there are breaks in the weather. In fact, this Sunday past was one of the most enjoyable days of the season with most of the flight low along the bluff on strong southeast winds. Imagine, if you will, Red-tails, Rough-legs and Golden Eagles coming by the watch at eye-level! Can’t beat that. While the Red-tails have taken over as the dominant species, there has been a definite increase in the numbers of several birds, most notably Sharp-shinned and Rough-legged Hawks. I love those dark-morph Rough-legs; one of my favorite raptors. The day-to-day diversity of species has also picked up. Adding to that variety have been the sighting of a couple of dark-morph Red-tails in recent days; always nice to see among the typical light birds.

Large numbers of Canada Geese are moving now and on Sunday, I ran up a tally of almost 3600. New birds the last couple of days have been Bittern, Greater Yellowlegs and Kingfisher. Juncos certainly outnumber any other songbird that’s around right now but there are a few Fox and Tree Sparrows in the mix as well.

Calvin