February turned out to be an excellent month for viewing raptors at the Franklin Landfill, in Milwaukee County. Bald Eagles were plentiful, with 11 being seen on the 15th. Two of them flew around, performing quite an acrobatic show. It was very cool to watch and photograph. Also during the month, up to 15 Red-tailed Hawks were seen, many just soaring on the sides of the hill, in the up drafts of the wind. They would just hover, flipping their wingtips up and down to stay in one place. Also present were, 1 Rough-legged Hawk, 1 Northern Harrier, 2 American Kestrels and 1 Northern Shrike. I was able to see the Rough-legged Hawk go down to the ground and catch mice several times. A couple of bites and back in the air it went. The shrike was one of the more tame shrikes I’ve ever seen. Usually you can’t get within 50 yards of one, but this one let me a lot closer! That was really exciting! I spent many days there during the month, while taking over 10000 photos, trying to catch all of the action happening. The photos below are from my visits during the month.
Road Trip 12/27/19
My friend Lorri and I were planning a road trip on Friday 12/27. We were originally going north to find some of the winter birds. However, in combination with the negative reports and warm weather, we decided to try for the Varied Thrush instead. We arrived at the UW-Stout parking lot 21 at 7:15am, where it was apparently feeding with a group of robins. It was still fairly dark, so we parked facing the berry trees, in case they came in before sunrise. Sure enough, about five minutes later, the thrush came in with the robins. This was a life bird for both of us! They were feeding on berries in the snow, that got knocked off the trees. The trees were right alongside the road, so they would fly up into the larger trees, when trucks would drive past. We pulled up right next to the trees and waited for them to come back down. After 20 minutes or so they came back down. They would go up and come back down about every 30-45 minutes, and would disappear and then reappear into the larger trees. We then caught some bad luck. A woman was plowing the parking lot with a front end loader with a large plow, scraping across the asphalt and making a lot of noise. We waited it out, but the thrush never came back. We did see a flock of robins head off to the south, during the snow removal. We spent the majority of the morning there, and before heading out, we decided to take a ride around the block, to see if we could relocate the thrush. We did! It was with several robins in parking lot 30, between the fire and police departments. We didn’t stick around to see if it would come down to some of the berry trees over there.
We then thought we would head over to the Buena Vista Grasslands, hoping to see the male Snowy Owl, that has been around. We didn’t find any Snowy Owls, but did see several Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Harriers and American Kestrels. We also saw 38 Greater Prairie-Chickens, which were lifers for me. They were very far out, but were flushed by something and flew a good distance, that we could watch them. We drove around the area for the rest of the afternoon, but there wasn’t too much activity. We did get 3 Short-eared Owls just after sunset. They were in the field southeast of the intersection at Hwy W and Taft Rd. The photos below are from the day.
