It's been a few days without blogging......mainly because I haven't seen much of interest. It's the beginning of shorebird season, so the shorebirds are beginning to show up. Unfortunately, they're always the same ones. Of course, when 2 new birds showed up last week, I was in Wisconsin for a week. Amazing. Well, part of the aura of doing a big year is the frustration of missing good birds. I've already missed a Mockingbird, a Harlequin Duck, and a Baird's Sandpiper this year, so I was hoping to improve on that today.
Jake Cvetas saw what he thought was a Yellow-crowned Night Heron yesterday afternoon in Buffalo Grove. That's a great bird for Lake County. In fact, it would be a county lifer for me. So I headed down there at 5:30am this morning to beat the traffic. Unfortunately, I didn't see the YC anywhere. I saw the willow tree where Jake saw it, but no bird. I looked for about an hour to no avail so I left and explored other areas. One nice side trip I took were to the athletic fields at Vernon Hills HS. There were birds all over them including 1 SOLITARY SANDPIPER, 1 LEAST SANDPIPER, 3 HORNED LARKS, numerous swallows, many blackbirds, and about 30-40 KILLDEER. Looks promising for grasspipers!
I spent the day tooling around checking shorebird spots and finding nothing, so when I got home and checked my email to find out that Al Stokie found a Lark Sparrow at IBSP South, I almost passed out. Another county lifer! I hustled down there ASAP and got there around 4:30. There was a lot of beach traffic, though, and no song at all, so I found no bird. Tough day, but it's all part of the game. There are tough days and, hopefully, some more exhilarating ones to come later :)
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