Snow Day Friday

No this isn't a post about the weather. That title would be "No Snow Winter" this year. This is a post about birds and more specifically 38 birds of a particular species. And to be more precise this post is about this particular Friday, a day that I had hoped to make happen since late December.
This day had it's genesis in December when I began to see reports of large numbers of Snowy Owls from across the country and continued after a post Christmas road trip turned up seven owls in an area near Fort Peck where I really didn't expect to see that many. What really cemented the idea though were continued reports from my friends in Glasgow that went something like "we saw eight along the highway the other day" or "I saw three last night just north of the house."
My ideas was to spend a day looking to find as many Snowy Owls as I could and when the boys had Thursday and Friday off of school and I had no "need to get done" projects or "need to attend" meetings on my work calendar, the time was right to head north.
I enlisted my Dad to join me in my quest and Thursday night we planned our route. We would head north from Fort Peck to Glasgow and continue north until we could see Canada and then head west along the border, then turn south and wind up in the little town of Hinsdale on Highway 2. We would then head east on Highway 2 back to Glasgow and return to Fort Peck via the backroads to find some owls had been hanging out there all winter. In addition to the reports from my friends, fellow Montana blogger Mona at Montanagirl has been posting a number of great photos of a number of Snowy Owls from the area around Hinsdale so we figured this route would allow us to find those birds as well.


Charles Carlson photo

The day turned out to exceed our expectations. I had originally thought that if I found 20 owls I would be happy. We hit that number before we were halfway through our route. At one point we had observed 16 owls in about 18 miles.



Most of the owls were perched on poles or signposts.


Charles Carlson photo

But some were in trees.




Charles Carlson photo

This one landed in a field after he flushed from a fencepost on the side of the road. I am sure that if there were many sitting on the ground along our route we missed a lot of birds given how well the blend in with their surroundings when they are not exposed on a perch.



I got his photo just as he was landing.



And this one as he was flying across the field.




Charles Carlson photo


Charles Carlson photo

Most of our east to west portion of the route was barren of owls and I am sure, given the knowledge of where we found the birds, that we could have probably found at least 20 more owls that day had we chosen a different route to maximize the habitat that we found the birds in. We also found an assortment of typical winter birds for the area including Snow Buntings, Horned Larks, Lapland Longspurs, Golden Eagles, Rough-legged Hawks, and a Prairie Falcon.


Charles Carlson photo

On Saturday, the boys and I headed across Fort Peck dam after a walk along the Missouri River. We were looking for another owl reported on Friday perched on the lightposts that line the top of the dam (what would have been our 39th owl on Friday). We found him right where he had been reported the day before and I pulled off the side of the road to show the boys and get a photo or two.
Apparently I hadn't pulled off the road quite far enough and just about that time a Montana Highway Patrol officer went past, then flipped his lights on and turned around and pulled onto the shoulder of the road in front of me and nearly right under the owl. As he got out of the car I expected the owl to bolt, but here merely looked down at the officer as he got out of the car and walked back to the van. He asked if I was taking photos and I pointed over his shoulder to the owl now looking right at him. He turned and looked and was a bit surprised to see the owl looking back at him. He mentioned to me that he had observed a number of them this winter and wondered why that was so I was able to explain to him about the lemming population and the increase in owl productivity. He explained to me that he would like me to pull further off the road next time and got back into his car and headed down the road.



This is the owl looking down at the officer. The owl stayed there the whole time and the patrolman walked back and forth to his patrol car with my license and registration and he was still sitting there when I decided to leave a short while later (after pulling further off the road). I suspect that this particular owl had had a few cars stop to look at him this winter.
Friday turned out to be the best day I had spent in quite a while. I got to spend a nice day birding with my Dad, something I don't get to do often enough these days and Mom made pasties for dinner that night. And I got to see 38 different Snowy Owls in one day. Can't beat that.

Birding in Northeastern Montana

If you are interested in birding in one of the best places to see large numbers of grassland birds in North America here are a couple of things you might be interested in. One of my goals when I moved back to Northeastern Montana was to promote the birding opportunities in the area and hopefully bring additional "value" to the prairie beyond the traditional grazing, hunting, and oil and gas production and these are two efforts I helped initiate to help meet that goal.

The first is a new addition to the Montana Nature and Birding Trail, an online resource for birding sites in MT. The Northeastern Plains Birding Trail, which up until now has existed pretty much as a hard copy product, is now online. See it here. Let me know if you have any feedback on the site. We are still working out some things we noticed that need to be fixed but hopefully this site will be helpful for those of you interested in birding here. If you would like a hard copy of the trail see this website (then scroll down).

I also wanted to let everyone know about the Glasgow Feather Fest. This is an annual event we put on in Glasgow to highlight the prairie birds of the surrounding landscape. It is a small festival with lots of great birds.

Click on the image above to see a larger version and all the info on the poster.

Here is a copy of the brochure (hopefully I will have that posted tomorrow - I can't find the whole brochure right now) with a registration for the event. We currently don't have much of a web presence for the festival but that is something we will be working on. If you have any questions can contact me for more information.

Raptors Across Montana

I returned yesterday from a two day training in Butte, MT, an eight hour trip (one way) from Fort Peck. Although it is a long drive, it was a nice, albeit fast, traverse of the state with a good deal of windshield birding. On Tuesday when I woke up, it was -25 degrees outside without the windchill and after a day of blizzard like conditions on Monday, attending the training was in question. After consulting the weather reports and road conditions on the web I decided that I would go. It turned out to be a rather uneventful drive for winter in Montana as far as road conditions and weather go. The most obvious birds I found during my drive were raptors and there were lots of them along the way (probably because it is tough to observe smaller birds while traveling down the interstate, much less identify them). Rough-legged Hawks were the most widespread bird I found from one end of the state to the other. I probably observed between 50 and 80 individuals each way. Bald Eagles were the next most common and widespread bird I observed, from the more traditional habitats along the Yellowstone River to perched on small buttes and feeding on roadkill. Ravens and Black-billed Magpies were pretty common too but only west of Billings. Black-billed Magpies are still much less common in the eastern part of the state after a precipitous decline that occured about the time that West Nile Virus came through here and I suspect that much of the population around Fort Peck was wiped out at that time. Horned Larks were common in scattered flocks along the highways north and east of Billings. The most species I observed the most individuals of was the Canada Goose, with many large flocks wintering along the Yellowstone River from Billings to Livingston. I saw one haystack near Reed Point along the Yellowstone River that was covered with Wild Turkeys like a wildebeast carcass covered with vultures. Other raptors observed along the way included two Merlins in Billings, a number or Red-tailed Hawks along the Yellowstone, two American Kestrels, and a Northern Harrier.

This photo depicts a typical scene in Eastern Montana this time of year. Although this happens to be a Bald Eagle, more often it is a Golden Eagle perched on these knobs.

This immature Golden Eagle was soaring in the updraft at the edge of a small hill along the highway.

This adult Bald Eagle was perched in an old Ponderosa Pine along the highway. I appeared to have just finished a dinner on the roadkill Mule Deer in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

Birds of Montana

A while back I mentioned that I had some exciting news concerning Montana birds and a project I am working on. I can now let you know that the project is a book on the Birds of Montana. Jeff Marks, senior author of the project, invited Paul Hendricks, Dan Casey and myself to co-author this work he has been trying to get underway for a while. We are currently seeking funds to help support research and writing time, pay for illustrations and travel to museums and libraries, and defray printing costs to reduce the retail price of the book. All royalties from book sales will go to Montana Audubon.
In addition to soliciting foundations, businesses, and government agencies, we are requesting support from individuals who have an interest in birds and conservation in Montana. One way individuals can participate is through sponsorship of species accounts. Individuals can sponsor one or more accounts, with the sponsor's name appearing at the end of each account and in the acknowledgments (see Barn Owl and Mountain Plover accounts). The donation amount for sponsoring an account ranges from $100-300, depending on the conservation status of the species. The rate for agencies and corporations is $1,000 per species independent of conservation priority. Donations are fully tax deductible.
I am really excited to be part of this project and I am looking forward to letting you know more about it as it grows.