Country Birds

The trip is shaping up to be a lot of fun, the group congenial, the birds cooperative. If only the weather were a little warmer! We ended up spending as much time in the car today as out of it, but still had some exciting experiences.

One of them came as we drove slowly along Cedar Creek Road. Horned Larks and Western Meadowlarks were everywhere, driven to the roadsides by the still heavy snow cover. At one point, I saw three suspicious-looking black forms on the muddy ground of a horsepen. We turned around and found three Brewer’s Blackbirds, a stunning, shiny male accompanied by two dark-eyed beauties. This is not a common bird in southeast Nebraska, and these were my first for Cass County. Almost enough to make me a county lister!

One of our target species nearly eluded us today. Harris’s Sparrow can be tremendously common along these brushy farm roads in fall and spring, but late March is not a great time to look for them: a bit late for the wintering birds, a couple of weeks early for the big warm-season pushes of northbound migrants. I did see one at Gavins Point the other day, farther upriver than I’d expected, but we didn’t run across any at all for the first several hours today, until finally a single individual popped up in a junco flock just south of Bellevue. It gave us a run for our money, but eventually joined a second bird feeding on an open grassy patch not too terribly far away; one was an adult, the other a white-chinned first-winter bird. Hope we get to see more of this incredibly charismatic Zonotrichia!