New Years Birding - 2017!!

New Years Day! It's a magical day where the birding clock resets, and old becomes new!  Every bird is new again.  Excitedly, we rush around noting the chickadees, woodpeckers, waterfowl and sparrows as they are the first, the first of the year!

     This year, the Kalispell Christmas Bird Count fell on the 1st of the year! I meet with Denny Olson and Gail Bissel and we conducted the count in our section of the count circle. Our area is generally a good one, including a spring creek with waterfowl, a section of town with feeders and fruiting trees, and some natural river bottoms for many other species!

     This winter was been colder and snowier than the last several.  With that, the American Robins have infiltrated the town and are abundant anywhere there are berries to be eaten!  We arrived at the Treasure Lane access point to the Owen Sowerwine Natural Area (an IBA) in Kalispell. Here, we stumbled upon dozens of robins! As we got out of the car, I counted the robins and neared 40 birds! 

     Looking over the robins, a small brown blob in the foreground caught my attention. just 10 yards in front of me was a perched Northern Saw-whet Owl!!!

Northern Saw-whet Owl

     We gawked over this bird for a minute or two before it flew deeper into the thickets. What a great bird to add to the Christmas Bird Count! Turns out, this was only the second time this species has been seen on the count.

     We continued to bird our section, finding some good birds like White-breasted Nuthatch, Merlin, Pileated Woodpecker, and Townsend's Solitare.

     The intersection of 6th and 6th East in Kalispell is a good spot for finding birds, as the many Mountain Ash trees attract berry-eaters. We had over 40 American Robins there as well as several Cedar Waxwings! 

American Robin

American Robin

Cedar Waxwing

     I ended the Christmas Bird Count with 37 species, and just enough daylight for a quick run to see my resident Harris's Sparrow in the west valley.
American Tree Sparrow - #38
Harris's Sparrow - #39

Now I just needed one more bird to have an even 40 species for the 1st of the year. Just then, a Rough-legged Hawk flew over me as I was departing the sparrow spot! #40!

     The Harris's didn't offer a chance for photos, but I did get an American Tree Sparrow and one of the many Song Sparrows there, this one with some white feathers on its forehead! 

American Tree Sparrow

'whitehead' the Song Sparrow!

A good day of birding, and a great start to the New Year!

Kalispell Christmas Bird Count

Today was the Kalispell Christmas Bird Count, and the last on of the count season for me. This time I got to do my own section again, and my mom joined me also.

Breakfast at Finnegan's Restaurant was great, and lots of people showed along with Byron and Maggie Butler from Bozeman. Shane Hatfield and I unofficially split the area, my mom and I did the north end while he started at the south end of our section of Evergreen.

After breakfast my mom and I drove north to the top of our section, and on the way I was NOT watching the road while driving but I DID spot a large flock of something flying around the north end of the Kalispell international airport. I stopped and scanned with the scope. SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED! There was a flock of something way the heck over there! They did look VERY much like Snow Buntings but closer inspection should reveal maybe another species in the mix. We drove to a road that got much closer and WHOA! My first look at perched SNOW BUNTINGS!!!!!! All others were flying! They were still quite far but I got to see the great color and detailed wing and face patterns! Fantastic!!!!!

After that, my mom and I check all the spots, working south meticulously, finding every bird possible. We got a few American Goldfinches, Harlan's Hawk, Bald Eagles, Mountain and Black-capped Chickadees.

We even came to a Great Blue Heron along a little bayou. On Bayou Rd, we had a Merlin attacking a large flock of House Finches and the like.

Feeders are always a good find while on a CBC. People feed birds, more birds see birds feeding, they come, and so on. At this on house, I got 2 year birds at the feeders, Hairy and Pileated Woodpecker!

About halfway down our area, we ran into Shane, discussed the birds so far, and went south the the bottom of our area to work our way up through Evergreen to see if we could find something that Shane might have missed.

At the very southeastern corner of our area, is a RV park along the Flathead River, and here I got some great shots of a Mountain Chickadee as/after is was bathing in a puddle on a large rock.

Now this bird was puzzling, and quite interesting. This is the only photo I got. I was hoping it was as tame as the Mountain and would bath with my taking pictures but soon as the shutter went off so did the bird. I have read that some Black-capped Chickadees have a little white eyebrow, but I have also seen photos of hybrid birds. Body color and shape isn't right at all for Mountain or even half, so I am going with an odd Black-capped, though the flanks are a bit duller then the surrounding birds. Please, if you have any comments, share!

We then drove up and down every road in our section of Evergreen. Here in town there is a bunch of birds, I mean LOTS! We were looking for some good birds Shane missed, but instead found some he missed that we weren't really looking for. We had just one Song Sparrow, one White-breasted Nuthatch, and 7 Wild Turkeys in Evergreen. We saw about 10 Wood Ducks along Spring Creek but Shane had 15 in that same location so we went with his number.

After nit-picking Evergreen we went back north to work our way down one more time to look for owls, and I found a male American kestrel off of the highway! Another yearbird, along with WB Nuthatch, and Snow Bunting.

I grabbed this one semi-good-enough-to-be-called-crummy digiscoped shot of one of the 2 "normal" Red-tailed Hawks in our section.

We ended the day with 42 species for our area, I saw 40 and Shane had a Sharp-shinned Hawk and 3 Red-winged Blackbirds. I got 5 more Yearbirds to get me to 56 for the year! (I forgot to mention Hooded Merganser and American Coot from Jan, 1st)

Snow Buntings were the best bird, and my favorite too! You know, I have read that in Europe and the USA and places, Airports are great birding locations....... well now I can agree with my own personal sighting!

Bigork and Ninepipes Christmas Bird Counts!

Saturday was the Bigfork CBC, and this year, due to a low turnout I was in charge of my own section of the count circle!!! This year was the first year I have a drivers license, so basically the first year I even could do my own area.

The mother of my lovely girlfriend, and great family friend, Rikki Perkins came with me to survey my section. Thank you to Rikki for tallying up the birds through out the day.

To me totally honest, the day was slow.... quite slow. We had a almost wholly forested area, and only had 27 species, with 272 individual birds. Our best bird was one WHITE-WINGED CROSSBILL, the only one for the whole count, and a flock of about 50 COMMON REDPOLLS!!! This, to me, was the best part of the day, with a YELLOW-shafted Flicker!!!! What a great bird! Not a separate species, but a cool, and sporadic bird in western MT. The most numerous bird was Wild Turkey with 53.

I thought this was cool, my black lab is named Blackie, so this was quite cool. Down this little side road was where we got our first CHESTNUT-BACKED CHICKADEES.

Birds weren't the only wildlife around. We saw a few White-tailed Deer walking through the woods. A foggy, rainy, slow day, but with some good birds.

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Sunday was the Ninepipes Christmas Bird Count. Ninepipes NWR is a FANTASTIC spot for birds in the winter, or any season. Every time I visit this area, I see more great birds! It is a mix of agricultural farmlands and pothole prairie grassland riddled with the pothole ponds.

Last year I got my lifer RUSTY BLACKBIRD down here, but we didn't turn out any lifers this year. I thank Dan Casey for having me come along and help with his area if the count.

Again, today was raining constantly throughout the day, and with spotty fog all over. It made for an interesting and quite fun day. This count was a MILLION times faster paced then the count before. So many birds, and so much birding. I love this count.

We walked a few shelterbelts, and I got this shot at the second belt we walked. I call it "Watcher in the Mist"

These are a few shots of the area we birded in the morning. a view of one of the shelterbelts we walked..... Me looking for Snow Buntings in between belts..... A few of the Mission Mountains from the Mission Valley (ninepipes and surrounding area).

In the belts, we had a few GREAT HORNED OWLS, AMERICAN ROBINS, and one LONG-EARED OWL. The only Long-eared we had.

We encountered small flocks of AMERICAN TREE SPARROWS, one NORTHERN SHRIKE, MERLIN, and 3 AMERICAN KESTRELS.

One of the cool things, was we had 5 "HARLAN'S" Red-tailed Hawks. There was a whole article on them in the January 2009 issue of Birding Magazine. I got a few pictures of 2 birds, but only these of one individual were good enough to publicize.

The tail pattern is similar to Figure 3 in the article, but has more distinct banding looking like maybe a bleached Figure 9.

Also we saw 14, count it 14 Great Horned Owls! That is the most I have seen in one day ever!!

Along Post Creek, a very birdy area, (many rare birds have been discovered there) we had a few birds, not any rarities or odd bird species, but we did have a YELLOW-shafted Flicker!! Dan got to observe the black whisker mark and all! That makes one for each day! Also, we had a MARSH WREN, a good bird for winter.

Dan Casey looking at 2 NORTHERN HARRIERS and a field full of Ring-necked Pheasants. We had almost 200 pheasants that day and like 79 Black-billed Magpies. A good day of birding, and fun at that!