After a beautiful week of balmy 60's and upper 50's, Friday brought with it the promise of a 3-day weekend combined with the din and numbness of winter winds. For the 2nd week in a row we got significant snowfall accumulations on a Friday right before the weekend followed by a series of days with cold NNW winds. Not good for spring migrants, so my hopes weren't very high Saturday when I left practice around 11:45am to head west and hopefully find some geese. I headed out to Dowell, Neville, Darrell, and Fisher roads in far NW Lake County but saw nil except for a couple of HORNED LARKS. I continued north toward Volo Bog and stopped at Sullivan Lake when I saw what looked like a dark-billed non-Mute swan. I got out of the car into the stiff 20mph winds and was
able to get nice looks at a beautiful TRUMPETER SWAN (#99).
Trumpeter Swans have a large black bill that completely encloses the eye as you can see above. The similar Tundra Swan has a smaller bill that pinches off the eye:
There's also usually a yellow spot near the eye which you can kind of see in this picture. Anyway, that was a great bird and only my 3rd in Lake County. From here I headed over to COLSP to look for a Turkey Vulture. I headed down the Goldfinch trail and lo-and-behold there was a TURKEY VULTURE (#100) soaring right along the trail!
From hear I headed home quite pleased with the day's findings.
Sunday I had trouble deciding where to go, as usual, so I started on the lakefront at 6:30 am hoping to find a Black Scoter. I saw a few birds moving north around 7am that were definitely dark-winged scoters. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with me, they were too distant to accurately ID. Other than that nothing was moving on the lake, so I headed to Van Patten Woods where I also had nothing. I had gotten a call earlier from Jim that he had some birds behind the citgo station on 41, so I decided I would head over there. I took a detour by way of Delaney Rd. so I could scan the skies for any passing Golden Eagle (one can always dream :). Never saw any raptors, but I flushed a group of sparrows on the road as I drove past, so I pulled over to check them out. Good thing cuz #101 WHITE-CROWNED SPARROW was playing right alongside the American Tree Sparrows.
There were 2 juvenile birds along with a beautiful adult. As I finally pulled into the Citgo Station I could see that the wetland area had a few birds. There were 6 NORTHERN SHOVELERS, 2 NORTHERN PINTAIL, and #102 GREEN-WINGED TEAL
Nice! Last stop was Rollins Savanna where I added namesake SAVANNAH SPARROW (#103) along with the Song and Tree Sparrows. Ended up the morning with 21 sp. of waterfowl which is not too shabby!
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