Nebraska 2009: In Like a Lion

It’s March that’s supposed to be so capricious on the Great Plains, but our early April visit proved that month just as mercurial. It’s not that the temperatures were ever all that cold–it was 60 F when we landed in Omaha last Thursday, and in the high 20s at its worst–but the wind and the snow and the sleet and the general rawness of it all reminded me, forcefully, of why I make my home in good old AZ!

None of which, I hasten to add, is to suggest that here weren’t birds. In fact, we tallied a quite respectable 95 species in two and a half days, and the list would have gone higher had we not for the most part been limited to those birds, like this lovely and fluffed-up Horned Lark, that the late-season blizzard drove to the roadsides.

But what roadsides, and what birds! We had outstanding looks at Harris’s Sparrows in the flocks of Dark-eyed Juncos and American Tree Sparrows that lined the country roads, and American Robins were impressively thick just about everywhere we looked. Most were males, as expected at this season.

I made a bit of a fool of myself in exulting over this spectacular thrush, but you have to remember that robins are a high-mountain specialty in southeast Arizona, and to see them in their springtime hordes on fields, lawns, and roadsides is always a blast from the distant past for me.

Our morning’s visit to Fontenelle Forest, in horizontal sleet and snow, discovered that robins weren’t the only turdid arriving in numbers.

Hermit Thrushes, uncommonish anywhere in Nebraska, were abundant wherever the snow had melted a bit. Our estimate of more than 20 was certainly low, but was still as surprising as our 30+ Red Fox-Sparrows and 15+ Golden-crowned Kinglets. An eastern Winter Wren was singing near one of the boardwalks, and even let himself be glimpsed. Looking glum were two gorgeous alternate-plumaged male Myrtle Warblers, a taxon I don’t see that often these days and almost never in their spectacular blue and yellow plumage.

Rainy days and wind drive birds to the roadsides and birders to water.

Lake Manawa, a large oxbow (now) just across the river in Iowa, was nicely covered with ducks, mostly Lesser Scaup and Northern Shovelers, but we also found an early Red-breasted Merganser and representatives of just about every other waterfowl species common in the Midwest. As I was making a vain effort to scope the distant flock of Snow Geese for other species, suddenly a white breast and a black head appeared: Common Loon!

And in magnificent breeding plumage at that, riding the frigid waves as if it had never left its oceanic wintering grounds. One of those times when I relish being wrong: I’d said early in the weekend that we were very unlikely to run across any loon of any species.

So many birds and so many species offered consolation: it truly was a spring storm, one that would not last and would finally–after I’d left!–give way to better weather. The true rainbow promise was provided by a bird that few people think of as the harbinger of spring.

Yellow-shafted Flickers were everywhere all weekend, from suet feeders in the southeast to the treeless reaches of the Sandhills. This more than any other is the bird that says spring to me, no matter how leonine the April weather. To hear them laugh and kyeer from oak forests above the Missouri River is to know that we were just a week off in our visit to “springtime” Nebraska.