[cobirds] redpolls in the Pawnee 11/18

Hi Everyone--

Today 11/18 I went out to the Pawnee Grasslands. I drove up WCR 57 to WCR
100, and went west. About At 1.5 miles, I stopped and listened for
longspurs. It took a while, but I finally did get good fly-by looks at a
couple of Laplands. A Ferruginous Hawk flew north over WCR 100. I turned
around, stopping at the sunflowers 1.3 miles from WCR 57. In the sunflowers,
I saw 6 Common Redpolls. Inexplicably, a Downy Woodpecker was right in there
with them. I continued back to WCR 57, and continued north. Maybe 0.1 miles
north of WCR 100, an adult Northern Shrike was sitting on a utility wire
tearing apart what looked like a grasshopper (seems late for grasshoppers,
but I'm not sure what else it could have been). I drove the auto tour over
to WCR 77. I saw another 20 Lapland Longspurs, one in the scope from about
20 feet away. Several of the longspurs were giving a curious lark-like
whistling sound in addition to the rattle, and I saw quite a few perched on
barbed wire (I'm used to seeing them bellying along on the ground). I ate
lunch in Grover, but didn't see much there. I saw a light morph Rough-legged
Hawk just north of the Wyoming border near Carpenter. On my way home I
stopped at Rawhide (too windy to see much), Douglas Reservoir (male
Long-tailed Duck was toward the north end, past the boat ramp, with a big
flock of mergansers; three Red-breasted Mergansers were toward the south
end), and Grandview Cemetery (no sapsuckers, but a Great Horned Owl gave a
sleepy hoot around 4pm; some really bad golfers were bouncing shots off the
Austrian Pines).

Mark Miller
Longmont, CO


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