I mentioned last night the 1981 count, my first. I’m attaching a scan of the page with our count, as published in American Birds – no kids, not on papyrus, but close 🙂
Seeing how the birds (and birders) have changed is one of the great appeals of our Christmas Bird Count, both from a scientific and more global perspective, but also from a personal and very specific perspective.
Jumping out at me beyond our 67 species were the count-week-but-not-count-day species : Pied-billed Grebe, Wood Duck, Ruddy Duck, and Mourning Dove.
Boise’s CBC was held today in a mix of very foggy (~1/3 to 1/2 of the circle?) to beautiful sunny weather. A number of misses but some great finds. Thanks a ton to everyone who participated, and to the many folks to who helped coordinate!
Preliminary totals:
participants: ~80
species: 104 on count day, plus 6 count week species that had been seen Thurs-Sat but not today
Highlights:
Trumpeter Swan (a 1st) – western greenbelt & ponds on N side
RB Merganser (only a handful of years) – Barber Park
Osprey (~7th time)
Greater Yellowlegs (2nd time?)
2 Spotted Sandpipers (only a handful of years)
Long-eared Owl (1st time?) – high in foothills
2 Bushtits (2nd time?) – on Joplin rd across from SW corner of storage facility
Ovenbird (!!; 2nd time in a row) – private residence, can’t be seen from street
I don’t know the address but knowing the CBC zone it was in, it can’t be more than ~2 miles from the bird we hosted last winter … same bird or serious coincidence??
Western Tanager (1st time) – Barber Park
Lincoln’s Sparrow (~4th time) – canal W of Borah Park
good variety of finches – Red Crossbill, Pine Grosbeak, and Evening Grosbeak
count week species: Lesser Scaup, Barred Owl, Lesser Black-backed and Herring Gulls, Blue Jay, Harris’s Sparrow
Misses (mainly due to fog or access):
blackbirds (too foggy to see main roost in gravel pits) – Yellow-headed, Brewer’s, and BH Cowbird
One of my best birding memories is having a Goshawk dive on me from her nest
high in an Eastern White Pine in 1998 at Nescopeck State Park, Pennsylvania.
Alan Gregory
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Alan C Gregory Lt. Col., USAF, Ret. Mountain Home, ID Air Force Public Affairs Alumni Association, life member Member, North American Butterfly Association
While conducting our Winter Raptor Survey between Wendell and Hagerman yesterday, we veered off the path to see if we could relocate the COLO. We spotted a large grey raptor with a black and white facial pattern that flew up into a Russian-olive. It was near the river and not in the South Hills. I took photos and called it a lingering Osprey. After submitting raptor route data and information about our Osprey sighting to Jeff Fleischer, he responded.Â
“You’ve got a Northern Goshawk, not an Osprey.” I have corrected my ebird report. I wish all of you who subscribe to ebird alerts were not privy to this embarrassing mistake. Alas, mea culpa.
Got a pretty decent, not great, pic of a Northern Harrier just off state Hwy. 67 this afternoon while motoring out to Mountain Home Air Force Base from the city of Mountain Home. I never fail to see one of these raptors while traveling north into Camas County or south off the highway to Grand View in Owyhee County. Does anyone know what the breeding status and population estimate is for southern Idaho? Rainy, off and on, but it didn’t slow the desert-loving Common Ravens.
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Alan C Gregory Lt. Col., USAF, Ret. Mountain Home, ID Air Force Public Affairs Alumni Association, life member Member, North American Butterfly Association
Yes, I would be interested in taking this on. I do travel up to Camas and Blaine counties several times a year, for birding, butterflying and bicycling.
You are welcome Alan :).  I am curious, do you spend a good bit of time in this area?  The reason I ask is that the only coverage that I have for our project consists of a highway speed coverage of Hwy 20 from Mt Home to Hailey, we have no off road coverage on any of what looks to be prime raptor habitat.  The hardest thing for me in this project is to find folks to cover certain areas that are out of the way from population centers where I can draw volunteers from.  Next winter, if you are interested, I could build a route out there that could add valuable data to our project data base.  The challenging part of building a route is to find the right roads that you can drive on during winter conditions, if you have spent a lot of time in this area, might you have some segments of roads that you could recommend that would be open for winter driving?  No arm twisting here, just thought you might be interested in our project enough to help with future needs :).  To give you an idea of what our project is all about, I put together a power point presentation that can be found at this link:  ecaudubon.org   which will take you to the East Cascades Audubon Society’s webpage, sponsors of the project.  Look for the picture of the flying bald eagle then follow directions to the start of the program.  There are 227 slides full of charts and maps and hundreds of excellent raptor photos.  Most of the slides have an audio track filled with information about the project and the birds that have been found, lots of ID tips too :).  Check it out on one of these cold winter days coming up! :). Good birding to you 🙂
Jeff, Thanks for the ID correction. I never even considered Ferruginous. The first one of those I saw was years ago in the Morley Nelson-Snake River Birds of Prey area.
Alan Gregory
Home of Idaho Birding and the Idaho Bird Records Committee
