Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Birding on Broadmeade Walk

Six people joined me on Sunday morning (February 2) at the Parmer Village end of Lake Creek Trail for the monthly group walk. When we started at 8:00 AM it was cold and clear but the temperature got up into the 60s by the time we finished at about 10:30. It was a beautiful morning! We found 38 species of birds on about 1.5 miles of trail here are some highlights.

At about 7:30 AM I arrived by the pond. While I waited for folks to arrive I watched a Wilson's Snipe in the tall grass at the edge of the pond, a Pied-billed Grebe in the pond, a Double-crested Cormorant that flew in and circled the pond a few times before returning across Parmer where it had come from, and a pair of Lesser Goldfinches that sang in the small trees by the sidewalk for a bit. Here's the female Lesser Goldfinch:

Lesser Goldfinch

After the group arrived we took our usual route walking upstream in the creek bed to the last dam. The creek bed was surprisingly birdy. We found 3 species of sparrows including Savannah Sparrow, a species I hadn't seen on the trail yet this winter. We got to see and hear a Bewick's Wren sing, found a Blue-headed Vireo, a couple Orange-crowned Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Eastern Phoebes, and saw this stunning male Eastern Bluebird perched on someone's chimney:



Eastern Bluebird

After arriving at the last dam on the creek and spending a few minutes to see what might show up, we continued upstream in the strip of woods on the north side. There we got to see a flock of about 15 Cedar Waxwings fly in and start feeding, first on (I think) hackberries and then mistletoe berries! It was so fun to watch the flock shift to mistletoe and I got this photo of one of them with one of the white berries in its bill:

Cedar Waxwing - 2 - 1

We left the woods and followed the trail into the Town and Country playing fields. On their large baseball field we found about 24 American Pipits looking for bugs in the grass. Some passers by asked what we were looking at and it was fun to show them the pipits which didn't seem to mind us watching them on the other side of the fence. Here's one of them:

American Pipit

Shortly after we turned around and on our way back a Belted Kingfisher chattered and flew over us.

Here's our complete bird list on eBird.

And here are a few more photos on Flickr.

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