On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
It’s Albatrossity Monday, and then we have a nice mix for the rest of the week.
Albatrossity
As we prepare for another winter blast (hopefully with less snow this time), here are some birds that I photographed after the last one. A couple of yard/feeder birds, but the rest are birds seen in the countryside, once the roads were semi-passable.
For some reason we have lots of House Finches in the summertime, but they are replaced by American Goldfinches (Spinus tristis) in the winter season. They are dull-looking in January, but are starting to get more colorful right now, so maybe I can get some shots of some that have a funky molting vibe. At any rate, they are abundant and cheering birds to see on a cold January day. Click here for larger image.
The Fox Sparrows (Passerella iliaca) became a regular presence during the coldest spell, and I enjoyed watching them flick their tails open and closed as they foraged on the deck. This is a bird I wish we had here year-round! Click here for larger image.
If you live out of town in these parts, you can get American Tree Sparrows (Spizelloides arborea) as feeder birds. We’ve never witnessed them in our yard at the edge of town, but maybe the next cold snap will bring one or two. This one was feeding along the side of a country road with a large flock of sparrows, including his species as well as Dark-eyed Juncos and Harris’s Sparrows. Click here for larger image.
Here’s another bird that can come to feeders in more rural areas, Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta), the state bird of Kansas. In summer we have mostly Eastern Meadowlarks in these parts, but winter brings large flocks of Westerns, and their cheerful bubbly song can be heard on most sunny days here. Click here for larger image.
When the ground is covered with snow, the semi-cleared road edges attract lots of birds, looking for grit, seeds, dead insects, or whatever they can find. Flocks of Horned Larks (Eremophila alpestris) are among them, fluffed up against the cold; occasionally the flocks will include some longspurs (Lapland, generally) just to keep the birders on their toes. Click here for larger image.
There are some bigger birds here as well. I was thrilled to find a flock of 14-15 Greater Prairie-Chickens (Tympanuchus cupido) foraging in a harvested soybean field in mid-January. Populations of this bird are declining in this part of their range, and they are always hard to see outside of the spring lekking season. But they show up pretty well in a snowy field! Click here for larger image.
The dinosaur lineage of Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) is never more evident than when they are galloping across a field. They are much more common than prairie-chickens, and even more comical. Click here for larger image.
Our local coal-fired power plant has some cooling ponds that stay open all winter, and in recent years those ponds have hosted huge flocks of Snow Geese (Anser caerulescens). They roost on the ponds at night, and fly out to find waste grain in the fields in the day. The cacophony of these large flocks as they get airborne has to be seen and heard to be believed; this video might give you just a taste. Click here for larger image.
Raptors, of course, are also abundant here in winter. This female American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) is giving me the stink-eye, but she sure is a cutie! Click here for larger image.
Rough-legged Hawks (Buteo lagopus) spend the summers in the Arctic, and head back south in a meandering fashion for the winter. Nomadic even in winter, at least at these latitudes, they come and they go with the weather. Most (90-95%) of the Rough-legged Hawks I see in Kansas are males, like this one, with multiple black bands on their very spiffy tails. Click here for larger image.
War for Ukraine Day 1,088: More Drone Swarms
J.
Great photos, as usual. Love the female American Kestrel shot and the snow geese. So beautiful.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
Beautiful!
Meadowlarks have all but dissapeared from my part of Eastern Pennsylvania. I miss them.
Your pics aren’t warming me up though. The windy cold front that came through last evening with it’s following wind gusts has knocked out our electric power and had the internet down for most of the night too. The Verizon internet is back up, but no word on when the power will be restored. Things are running on my battery backups for now and I have hot tea. I really wish we had a fireplace or a wood stove. A kerosene heater isn’t as nice.
Winter Wren
Beautiful shots as always. Would love to see a prairie chicken some day! The snow geese in flight is my favorite.
SteveinPHX
Thank you for photos. Reminds me of years living in colder latitudes.
stinger
Welcome Mondays! Wonderful photos as always!
Geo Wilcox
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): Reforesting will do that. We used to have them but when we let our fields go fallow after selling our horses, the trees started to take over and the meadow larks do NOT like any trees of any kind where they nest. Too easy for predators to sit in the trees and pick them off.
Back before white people got her, our area was totally forested. They chopped the trees down and that allowed many field species to expand their range. Not only meadow larks but also species like cow birds, that in turn allowed them more species’ nests to parasitize and increase their populations.
Netto
Meadowlark song was a hallmark of my childhood in semi-rural Colorado in the 60s/70s. Not even robins could compete with meadowlarks for the evocative nature of their singing. Today, my 96 year old mother still lives in that house, but 20 miles of suburbia separate it from significant meadowlark habitat (sigh). On the rare occasions when I hear a meadowlark these days, it immediately takes me back to those cool, clear spring mornings that hinted of the lazy mourning dove calls in the hot afternoon to come.
At my present house in northern Colorado, I recently watched a kestrel have its breakfast on my lawn. I went out later to look for leftovers and found only a bit of vole femur and tibia connected by scraps of bloody tendon.
Thanks for the photos!