Catching Up on Recent Birding

 Yep. I'm behind. I have actually been out and doing some birding recently, although most has been incidental while walking the dogs. They are not the most patient when it comes to allowing me to look for birds. You can see in the photo at the left, Loki is ready to walk, not stand still and look for birds. This was a beautiful, crisp morning with frost. We did see some nice birds (briefly).

I have seen a lot of birds, even with all the "help" from the dogs.  I didn't post about the bird outing at Lake Arrowhead State Park on the 11th, so I'll start with that. It was a bit nippy when we started (around 26 degrees), but as usual in January, we had some good birds. Nothing special, but a nice variety. We saw Canada goose, white pelican, double-crested cormorant, mallard, green-winged teal, American coot, northern shoveler, killdeer, least sandpiper, ring-billed gull, yellow-shafted and red-shafted flicker, eastern/western meadowlark, Bewick's wren, northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, orange-crowned warbler, fox sparrow, white-crowned sparrow, song sparrow, Harris' sparrow, red-winged blackbird, great-tailed grackle, spotted towhee, dark-eyed junco, American pipit, and house finch.

Most of my birding lately has been at Lake Wichita Park, which is close to my house. Again, because of the dogs, I wasn't able to focus on birding, but still saw some good birds the last couple of weeks. Some notable birds (for me) were a repeat of the black phoebe (this time, at the west end of the pond at the end of the chat trail), a pair of Cooper's hawks talking (they are usually pretty quiet), a couple of long-billed dowitchers, and a great horned owl sitting atop a tree.

The weather is starting to warm up, which means summer won't be far behind, so get out and see the birds before it gets miserably hot!

Good birding!