Hey all, RL here… again.
Jason Talbot and I birded Elmore and Owyhee Co.’s Wednesday on our Veteran’s Day push. All along the river we noticed goldeneye most everywhere. A few clumps and smaller scatterings of them on the river from Grandview on up to about a mile below the dam but almost none from the island, where the recent Black Scoter was found, to the dam. Two good-sized rafts on the big water behind CJ dam but essentially none above that to Jack’s Ck..
Possibly the really big numbers have yet to arrive.
My real curiosity is the numbers of Snow Geese that I have been seeing on the several trips I have made to the area recently. The over-swampingly number of them have been flyovers moving SE at altitude with only a relative few on land or the water. My curiosity is what is bringing them here to SW Idaho this time of year. We normally wouldn’t see
these numbers until starting in January. Could one possibility be that the OR and CA fires are pushing them out of their normal flyway? I don’t think it is the weather so much as might be expected with smaller birds?
CGB. RL