Off to a new venue for the beginning of July…..North
Dakota. We have never traveled to
the “Peace Garden State” and found the idea of birding here with the New Jersey
Audubon intriguing. And so,
when we heard of the opportunity to spend a week birding the prairies and the
badlands, we jumped at it.
The majority of the trip was
spent in the western half of the state.
We flew into Bismarck a day early to get acclimated and spent the next
day birding the Dakota Zoo. I’ve
always found zoos to be great places to find native birds which are attracted
to the water features, the captive species, and perhaps the excess food found
in these places. Our best finds of
the day were our first Black-headed grosbeak and a cute little 13-lined ground
squirrel (the first of many!).
Our birding excursion started
in earnest the following day as we headed east towards Dawson. The plains and the associated wetlands
surrounding the potholes (depressions left by the glaciers which are not filled
with water to form small ponds) serve as an attractive habitat for quite a few
birds we do not regularly find back home in New York. While we generally find Red-tailed hawks as the “default”
hawk back east, here Swanson’s hawks are more prevalent.
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| Swainson's hawk |
Red-winged blackbirds were
here in the pothole regions just like back home, but we also had Brewer’s and
Yellow-headed varieties here to add to the mix.
While the Upland sandpipers
are somewhat of a “find” back in the Empire State, here it was not uncommon to
find them perched on fence posts along the sides of the dirt roads.
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| Lark sparrow |
Back in the prairies, we spent
some time seriously hunting for three of our true target birds…..the Sprague’s
pipit, Baird’s sparrow, and the Le Conte’s sparrow. We found all three species and Sharon and I added the first
two mentioned to our Life-lists.
Photographing then was quite a challenge as they tended to stay far off
and would only occasionally pop up out of the heavy grasses to give us a short
look before dropping down into denser vegetation. Still, the looks were wonderful and most memorable.
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| Le Conte's sparrow |
One of the most productive
areas was the area near Granville, ND known as the Granville Marsh Road. As with many of the roads in this
state, this is a long, straight, and for the most part well maintained dirt
road. Many of these dirt roads
have a posted speed limit of 55 MPH, and when the oil tankers which have lately
become more and more common in these parts come roaring down the “highway”
towards you, it is best to give way and stay out of harm’s way. In between these trucks, however, there
were long periods during which many grassland birds would come out to perch on
the roadside fence posts. Wilson’s
snipe were commonly heard and not infrequently seen in such positions.
The Vesper sparrow, a fairly
tough bird to sight in NY, was again frequently seen along the roadside.
In the potholes, Black terns
were abundant. Forster’s and
Common terns were occasional, but the Black was definitely the easiest to see
and photograph here on the prairie.
We also got used to seeing
gulls not common to the east coast in the form of California and Franklin’s
gulls. An occasional Ring-bill
would show up, but the “frankies” were by far the most conspicuous.
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| Franklin's gulls |
All totaled, we tallied 157
species by the end of the trip.
Among notable “misses”, we had not found the Prairie falcon or the
Sharp-tailed grouse (which was actually reported by one member of the
group). But seeing the Sprague’s
pipit doing its aerial display and then plummeting at lightning speed from the
heights down to the grassland floor more than made up for those birds we
missed. Watching the Brewer’s
blackbirds ride the backs of the hawks they were chasing from their territory,
and seeing the spat that arose between a Yellow-breasted chat and a Catbird
made for great images in the camera and in our minds.
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| Eared grebe on a pot-hole pond |
