New Birds

 My first Rooks County Red Crossbill, a juvenile female at Webster State Park

A different view of the same bird

After the successful trip with Caid, I decided to check out any stands of coniferous trees in Rooks.  After searching a few different spots, I managed to pick out the above juvenile female.  It's so weird to see a crossbill in 105 degrees of heat.  

A few days later, I made a jaunt over to Rooks Fishing Lake and found a few new birds: county, year, and state Short-billed Dowitchers (feeding next to Long-billeds for nice comparisons); county Banks Swallows; and a county year Black Tern.

Two days later I went back to Rooks Fishing Lake.  The number of migratory shorebirds was down, but I did find one sweet bird: a county, year, and state Willow Flycatcher.

You can see by the primary extension (medium length), faint eye ring, and dullish wing bars that the bird is a Traill's Flycatcher (what Willow and Alder Flycatchers used to be collectively lumped as).  The single "whit" call the bird gave distinguished it from Alder as identification by sight alone is impossible.  

Finally, Tiff, Caid, and I went to Wilson Lake to chill with Grandma and Grand-dude for part of a day. While we waited for the grandparents to show up, I walked around the Bur Oak Nature Trail.  I found some good birds, but the most surprising was to hear the grunt call of a Virginia Rail in a small marsh next to the trail.  This was in the early afternoon with temps around 100!

Now for some numbers: I sit at 227 Kansas birds for the year, 18 away from my goal.  I still believe that my goal is attainable, but it will not be easy, either.  I am running out of birds that I expect to see, so I will need to pick up some surprises along the way.  Also of note, I now have 213 Rooks birds.  This is one more than my 212 for Kent County in Michigan.  I topped that county in less than a year in Rooks!

Crossbills with Caid

I have not done a ton of birding lately.  And I'm not complaining about it, either.  You see there is a very good reason for my lack of birding time, and here he is:

That's me with my son, Kincaid Mark.  He was born on June 6, 2012 and weighed 8 lbs. 14 oz.!  As you can see from the picture, our shirts are pretty familiar.  That's because my beautiful wife Tiffany made shirts for the two of us.  Under the images, the shirt reads "Eat, Sleep, Bird."
There is a very good reason we are both wearing the shirts for the first time: Caid went on his first birding trip with me.  After getting back from Michigan, I found out that Henry Armknecht had Red Crossbills coming to his feeders, crossbills in July!  Tiff and I agreed that it would be a great time for me to expose Caid to the wonderful world of birding.  So I packed him up and drove to Osborne.  It started to rain as I reached Osborne, so I was a bit skeptical of our chances.  As I drove up to Henry's house, I noticed another birder sitting with Henry.  It turned out that it was the eBird reviewer, Jon King.  They said that the birds were still around, but because of the rain, were probably sitting still somehwere.  After awhile, the rain let up and the birds returned.  A successful mission with my son, Caid!  He's my new lucky charm!