The migration for certain birds has finally reached northern Minnesota. While waterfowl are finding the paths north blocked due to the lack of ice free water, now that a large amount of our snow has finally melted certain “early arrivals” are working their way through the area including Red-Shafted Flickers. These woodpeckers spend a lot of their time on the ground, but startle easily. This bird was near me, but flew up into this nearby tree. Twas a photographic challenge … a cloudy day with brown (the Flicker’s plumage) on a brown background (bare tree branches).

• View this project’s Flickr photo stream. (click upon image to view at full size)

Well … actually 61 species!

Today is my 90th day of 365 Days of Birds … my year long bird photography project. Now that I am about 1/4 of a year through the effort, I wanted to reach 60 bird species on my 90th day. When I started this project on my wife’s birthday back in January, I was worried about even finding birds to photograph in the middle of the northern Minnesota winter. Even today on April 22nd there is over one foot of snow on the ground in the forest, and none of the area lakes are even near ice out. For this reason the annual bird migration has been slow to get started.

Reaching 60 bird species in my photographs was made easier by spending some time down in Florida helping my Dad, but also made much more difficult given my stay up in the Colorado Rockies while working as a volunteer for the YMCA of the Rockies. Up in the mountains there were basically two birds present, crows and magpies.

Today I captured with my camera an Eastern Phoebe and a Kildleer. One of my goals of this project is to maximize the number of bird species of which I take photographs. Thus, I will often forgo a cool photo of a bird I have already photographed, and work hard to take pictures of birds I’ve yet to capture on my camera.

• View this project’s Flickr photo stream. (click upon image to view at full size)