Group Walk Report November 15, 2014

We had eleven people on this month's group bird walk on the preserve. We started at 9:00 and enjoyed about two and a half hours touring the property and finding 23 species of birds. On the trail through the western half of the preserve I was able to call up a nice mixed-species foraging flock of songbirds. There were 12-15 individuals that included year-round residents Carolina Chickadees, Black-crested Titmice, Northern Cardinals, and newly returning winter residents Ruby-crowned Kinglets, a single Orange-crowned Warbler, and Hermit Thrushes.

On the northern "sandy prairie" area of the preserve we got pretty good looks at a beautiful male American Kestrel perched on top of the Purple Martin houses. Further east we saw and heard a Common Raven perched in one of the dead cottonwoods. And we got to see more than one Eastern Phoebe hunting insects close to the ground. Here's one of them:

Where the sandy prairie area meets the oak/juniper woods near the eastern edge of the preserve, we found a large leaf-cutter ant colony with a few coyote tracks on it. Here's one of them:

Coyote tracks are very similar to dog tracks, but dog tracks usually have much larger and blunter claw marks than these tracks had.

Here's our complete bird list:

http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/email?subID=S20568779

And here are the above photos as iNaturalist Observations.

Posted on November 16, 2014 08:26 PM by mikaelb