Maria and I were on a road trip in mid September, driving from Montana to Michigan. We had intended to drive through Sand Lake NWR in northeastern South Dakota, but the auto route was closed, so we were driving in the general "neighborhood" and found ourselves driving east on a gravel road, just north of the refuge. Almost immediately, we realized we had hit the mother lode of Western grebe-dom.
The area was flooded and the road was actually closed to "tractors and trailers" but not to automobiles. We were surrounded by high water, and the marginal road was only a few inches higher than the surface. The sky was blue and the temperature was in the high 60s; there was no wind and very few insects. What there was were hundreds of birds, especially the Western grebes, all around us, vocalizing, swimming, diving, very close. It was magical! We could easily see the distinguishing black on the head covering the eye, which distinguishes the Western from the Clark's grebe. There were also hawks and herons and double-crested cormorants and yellow-headed blackbirds and a miscellany of shorebirds that day, including a Wilson's snipe with its improbably long bill at the edge of a pond early in the misty morning, a nice start to a memorable birding day.
There was a rookery with 100s of nests in the flooded trees to the south of the Western grebe area. A probable prairie falcon began feeding on a dead fish just up the road but a vehicle passed from the opposite direction and it flew off before we could positively identify it. We watched a pair of hawks (likely Swainson's) fly in nearly perfect symmetry for several minutes; we saw several rough-legged hawks with pale heads, perched on fence posts.
And we saw cattle egrets hanging around some cows, and great white egrets and snowy egrets in the reedy marshes, along with great-blue herons. Nice day.....
No comments:
Post a Comment