Tag Archives: MN North: Riley Road Fields

200k Views Coming Soon!

Background, Year 5

A bit under five years ago, on January 23, 2014 on my wife’s birthday I started this blog. Sometime within the next few weeks I will hit the magic number of 200,000 views. I find this number amazing!

I need to figure out how to celebrate when this mark is achieved. I welcome suggestions via this post’s comments. At a bare minimum, I have some coasters which incorporate my photos which I will have to figure out how to give away!

And here is the first photograph I ever posted to my blog … Riley the Snowy Owl!

45F, Windy & Drizzle … Let’s Go Birding!

Year 5

Sounds like a horrible idea, right? However if one always waited for the best weather instead of enjoying ugly conditions I would never have found a Pectoral Sandpiper. The Cornell School of Ornithology describes this “fairly rare bird” in this manner:

A medium-sized, chunky shorebird, the Pectoral Sandpiper is found most commonly on mudflats with short grass or weedy vegetation and seems more at home in the grass than in the water.

If you inspect the image, please note the water. I got wet watching this bird, and the two Snow Geese for which I had actually driven over to the Riley Road Playing Fields.  I will admit this afternoon was some of the worst photographic conditions I’ve experienced in some time!

Pectoral Sandpiper

Snow Geese

Below Zero Birding

Year 4, ,

The last few days have been cold in the Northland, with temperatures plunging to around -25F or worse. Does this mean one stops birding? No! I just make certain I have extra warm clothes and blankets in the car in case I get stuck somewhere. In addition to the cold weather, the past week has seen about one foot of new snow which came in multiple bursts. This extra snow seems to be making it a bit easier to find birds as they are concentrating on known food sources, as opposed to being deep in the forest and even foraging through the snow on the forest floor. Here are some images I took over the past three days …

Superior Rough-Legged Hawk on Connors Point (Duluth Harbor) … snowies also being seen at dusk on Connors Point, the Superior Middle School and the Richard Bong Airport

Riley Road Pine Grosbeaks … if you bird Riley Road, get out of the car. I found a large flock of pine grosbeaks, but they were 10 to 50 yards off the road.

Sax-Zim Bog Pine Grosbeak “Gritting Up”