Category: Birding

Karen Holliday and I birded this area near the Arkansas River between Conway and Mayflower Friday morning.  The conditions were cool, windy, and mostly cloudy. Our target birds were Bobolink, Grasshopper Sparrow, and migrating shorebirds.  We weren’t disappointed.

We found about 30 Bobolinks in the fields southeast of the intersection of Lollie Road and Donnell Ridge Road.   None let us get close but many hung around the road easy to see.  Further, in the fields on the river side of the road at the points where they are building a new road that connects to Lollie Road in two places we found four Grasshopper Sparrow.  One was amenable to having his picture taken.

Not far after that we came up to a series of flooded fields which was temporary home to  Black-bellied Plover, Spotted Sandpiper, Greater Yellowlegs, Lesser Yellowlegs, Semipalmated Sandpiper, Western Sandpiper, Least Sandpiper, Pectoral Sandpiper, Dunlin, Stilt Sandpiper, Wilson’s Phalarope, and a Peregrine Falcon.  There were no great numbers of anything except Dickcissel and Red-winged Blackbird but we were able to see a good variety of shorebirds.

Here are some of the best pictures from the day:

Grasshopper Sparrow.

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8050

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8047

Dickcissel, a little bird that gets no respect but who I think is pretty.

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8041

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8044

Spotted Sandpiper

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8038

Pectoral Sandpiper

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8035

Wilson’s Phalarope and Lesser Yellowlegs. I especially like 8029, it looks like they are practicing a dance number with the Phalarope as the star.

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8032

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8029

Lesser Yellowlegs

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8026

Peregrine Falcon

https://jamesdixon.us/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8023

On Friday the 6th, Charles Mills spotted a Cassin’s Sparrow on a rural road in extreme southwest Arkansas. Once accepted it will be a first state sighting.   I thought about making a speed run down there but my Friday was full and Saturday was busy too.  Later Karen emailed me to tell me that she and Helen Parker were going Saturday if I was interested.   I had National Astronomy Day on Saturday but when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to beg off the early hours of NAD  and make a run for it.

The best way to get there is to past Texarkana on I-30 and sneak back up on it from the west, taking “only” three hours to get there.  Dennis Braddy had published the GPS coordinates so we drove till the Tom Tom told us to stop and waited.  In about 20 minutes the bird made his appearance, making big flying loops while he sang. This behavior is called “skylarking” and I had never seen it before.  We were all very happy and glad he had arrived. Then, wait a minute, there was another.  We realized there were two birds doing the unique song of a Cassin’s.  We spotted the other and soon saw them both at once in case there was any doubt.  I was able to get pictures of both birds though not together.  I subsequently learned that this small bird, usually no farther east than Dallas was popping up in Louisiana, Illinois, and elsewhere. For reasons not yet know, they’ve made a sudden but probably surge eastward.

After starting on the east side of town, birding the Witt Stephens Nature Center and Allsopp Park, I wound up at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and walked the Rocky Valley Trail. My target was flycatchers, like the Acadian, which I have not encountered yet this year.  As I walked the trail listening to Summer Tanagers, I realized I didn’t remember what Scarlet Tanagers sounded like so I stopped and listened to playback.  A minute later, two Scarlet Tanagers arrived and played in the trees.  One was a juvenile changing from yellow to red plumage.  Also heard were Black-and-White Warbler, Pine Warbler, and Worm-eating Warbler.  As I completed the loop and was nearing the end, I heard a thrush like sound and stopped to listen.  About 50 feet away was a thrush that might have been a Swainson’s Thrush but the more I looked the more I became convinced it was a Gray-cheeked Thrush (they are similar looking).  Not only that but it wasn’t the thrush I heard, that one was farther back.  I used playback again to confirm they were both Gray-cheeked Thrush.  Although I got no flycatchers, the Scarlet Tanager and Gray-cheeked Thrush were good consolation prizes.