Saturday, June 2, 2012

Breeding Birds

This is officially my first summer in Rooks County.  I spent some time the other day trying to pick up some interesting breeding birds for the county.  Some of my target birds were the following:
-Virginia Rail
-Least Bittern
-American Bittern
-Swainson's Hawk
-Mississippi Kite
-Eastern Wood-Pewee
-Say's Phoebe
-Scissor-tailed Flycatcher
-Yellow-billed Cuckoo
-Burrowing Owl
-Rock Wren
-Common Poorwill
-Yellow-breasted Chat
-Cassin's Sparrow
-Marsh Wren
-Lark Bunting
-Bank Swallow
To make a long story short, I didn't find many of my target birds.  In fact, I only found one: Say's Phoebe.  I'm not discouraged by this; it just means that I will have to do more exploring later on.  I tried really hard to get a Rock Wren.  There was some very nice territory for them in the SW portion of the county, but I didn't even get a hint of a bird.  I did find some nice territory for Common Poorwills, so now I only need to go there at dusk some time to see if they are in fact there.  The raptors were a bit frustrating, especially the Swainson's Hawk.  I expected them to be fairly common breeders in the county.  Perhaps they are and are just sticking close to nests right now, but I expected to see one.

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