Snowy Owl in a Snow Storm!

Year 5,

A winter storm hit the Duluth area this morning. Wind driven snow is being blown out of the Northwest at 29 mph. Now most people might think these are lousy conditions for birding, but for me it just increases the challenge. Since in Duluth photographing a polar bear in a blizzard is impossible, I looked for the next best thing … a Snowy Owl. I will admit a bit of luck was involved in capturing this image. The wind and snow abated a touch for a few minutes, and during this respite the owl I was watching telegraphed to me it was about to take off. The strong wind meant of was able to take quite a few photographs as the bird had to flap its wings quite a few times to get moving forward.

Before the storm hit last night I went up the shore a bit and found this Great Gray Owl hunting at sunset. Although the light conditions were very dark due to the heavy clouds and light freezing rain, I was still able to get some neat images. Don’t be afraid to run the ISO up on your camera. These owl photographs were taken with an ISO of 3,200. In both the flight shot for each owls, the wings are a bit blurry. This adds to the impression of motion, but it is important to still have image focused correctly … in this case the eyes.

Birding All Minnesota State Parks in 2018

Year 5

Ben Douglas has a cool idea. While as a birder I am not into keeping lists, I love folks who have interesting and unique ideas. Ben’s idea is he will bird every state park in Minnesota during 2018! For most people, including me this means I had to look up how many parks this effort entails (66 parks). Given Minnesota is 407 miles from North to South, and 360 miles from East to West, this will be a lot of land to cover … particularly as a lot of the driving to reach these parks will be on rural roads. Browse to Ben’s  blog, The Big Douglas, and bookmark it (or subscribe). If you have installed my Minnesota Birding News App, his posts will be automatically presented to you!

This image is of Ben and his first park of the new year, Jay Cooke Park.

eBird Range Maps

Background, Year 5

A very useful tool when birding an unfamiliar region, or just looking for a specific kind of bird in your home area are eBird Range Maps. This map based tool will pull up Google Maps with eBird sighting reports superimposed on top. Whether on a mobile device or a personal computer, you may move the map around, select different date options, bird species and much more. Use the linked version I have provided attached to this post, and after setting some parameters bookmark it to your own computer. Once saved to your own device, you may easily load the tool, make a few changes and have a local bird guide! Please note that sensitive species such as Great Gray Owls will not be accessible via the range map.

I have annotated a screenshot of a Evening Grosbeak eBird Range Map. I often switch Google Maps over to satellite mode once I zoom in on a desired birding area. This helps me learn in advance what kind of habitat I will encounter.