Wednesday, February 20

Happy days. Went with our friend Ellen to a local restaurant last night and they served scrapple. Kind of the haute cuisine version of scrapple. They said it was made of pork sausage and polenta. Back home we would say pig parts and mush. Actually scrapple is made from what you don’t use for sausage. But I quibble. It was excellent. Life is good and all is well in the world.

We made it back from Marquette safe and sound on Monday and a blizzard blew into Marquette on Tuesday. Something like 36 inches in the western part of the county. They closed the road we would have used to escape.

Joanna in the blizzard with a mob of birds. Just keep an eye on those hungry chickadees. It could get ugly if you start looking like scrapple to them. Notice the snow shoes to go out in the back yard. (Picture by Jean).

We tried for the great gray owl on the way back but struck out. It was seen the day before we were there and the day after. One person wrote that they were within 40 feet of it and they watched it until his wife’s shutter finger hurt from taking pictures. Loud sigh from Ed.

I can’t complain too much. We got four new species; pine siskin, evening grosbeak, red crossbill, and gray jay. These are good birds to get, especially the red crossbill and gray jay. We got really good looks at other species we don’t get to see too often. Like white-winged crossbills and redpolls.

 

Happy redpoll.

Redpoll eating.

Still eating.

Black-capped chickadee. Looking for a carcass to chew on.

The Michigan count now stands at 79 for me and 74 for Lise. I’m at 30.4% of the 250 species goal, Lise at 29.6%, and 14.0% of the year is gone. (My goal for the year, however, is 10 species for the year, so I’ve already “exceeded expectations”. Everything else is icing on the cake. – Lise)

Graphs for the analytically oriented.

I figured we would need to average four to five species a week to make the 250 goal. Right now we are doing about 10. Looking ahead at schedules, the weather, and our list, I see our average dropping the next couple weeks. We can do some rarity chasing but the counts are going to drop until we start seeing some seasonal changes. So while birding is slow we’ll focus on Fido the wonder lizard.

Fido doing Pilates.

Stretching them muscles.