2013: July 5th-13th – Birding North Dakota

       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.

 

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.

      

   

Lark sparrow

    From this day on, we concentrated on the areas of the state west of Bismarck.  North Dakota has more National Wildlife Refuges than any other state with a grand total of 63. The three units of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park adds another 110 square miles of natural wilderness lands to provide birders with a spectacular stage.  During our weeks visit, we birded both the North and South units where our backdrop was the spectacular Badlands of North Dakota.  Golden eagles, Big-horn sheep, bison, and elusive birds like the richly hued Lark sparrow were all visible to the attentive viewer.

      

         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.

 

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.

 

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. 

      

       

 As we departed at the end of the week, we all agreed that this is an incredibly beautiful region of our country in which to bird.  To see the land quickly being “taken over” by oil and fracking interests concerned us all.  Once pristine landscapes are now dotted with hundreds of drilling rigs, housing for the workers, and signs supporting the philosophy of “Drill, baby, drill.”  Granted, we need to explore and develop our natural resources here in our homelands, but we hope that the time is taken to do so with foresight and wisdom rather than just the desire to make a quick buck.  Montana is also considering the development of their resources, but is carefully weighing the pros and cons of practices like fracking and is waiting to see what the “final word” is on the environmental impact of this method of extracting these resources.  In the meantime, get out and see North Dakota while here is still some of the natural beauty to see!  It may not go on forever.

Eared grebe on a pot-hole pond