I visited the Steve Wilson/Raft Creek WMA Saturday morning. My target bird was Grasshopper Sparrow. I heard two near the HQ. I ventured further and saw a bunch of egrets and herons in an area downstream so I looped around and walked up on a berm and could see juvenile White Ibises on the other side. They seemed to not be too concerned about me and let me get within about 75 feet before suddenly changing their minds. There were also plenty Great Blue and Little Blue Herons, Snowy and Great Egrets. Plus one Ring-necked Duck who appeared to have an injured wing.
Lakes Grenada and Enid, MS, 6/19 and 6/20/2010
This weekend I completed my part of the Legacy Cerulean Warbler Project for the Kalamazoo Nature Center by visiting Lake Grenada and Lake Enid in Northwest Mississippi. The lakes are named for their nearby towns and Grenada seems to be the much more substantial of the too so I made it my base. I drove over Friday afternoon since Grenada is a four hour drive from Little Rock.
Saturday morning I left the hotel and was on site by 6:30. Since the high was going to be near 100, I wanted to start as early as possible. Lake Grenada turned out to be a good place with a reasonable amount of deciduous trees. As before, I drove around and visited all of the major points around the lake. I was surprised when I heard a Prairie Warbler but on checking the field guide, I found they were more common in the east than the west. With Prairie in their name, I thought Arkansas was on the eastern side of their territory rather than western. By the end of the day, I had seen 49 species but no Cerulean Warbler.
Lake Enid was about 25 miles north of Grenada so Sunday morning I checked out even earlier and was able to start there at 6:30 as well. I had a similar story there, visiting all the major spots around the lake though Enid has a little more variety than Grenada. The eastern end was more like our Lake Conway while the western end was more like our Lake Degray. The Enid area has more kudzu than any of the other areas that I surveyed and I wonder what impact that has on diversity, not good I’m sure. As before, I came up with 49 species though with a few substitutions. I did see an Osprey which was arguably the best bird of the day.
Not being an out at the bars kind of guy, my evenings were spent at the hotel watching DVDs. I had brought two that I had gotten from the library – Dead Snow and Moon. Both were entertaining, the first living up to its promise of being one of the 25 best zombie movies of all time and the latter being a good if low key story of a maintenance man (to be honest) doing a three year stint on the Moon.
Askew Wildlife Management Area, MS, 6/12/2010
In the second of three trips to Mississippi for the Legacy Cerulean Warbler Project, I visited this apparently new wildlife area about 25 miles southeast of Tunica. Sam wanted to go on one of these and I figured this one, which was a single site unlike my other two weekends, was the best choice. We drove over Friday evening and started early Saturday morning.
We got started at 7 AM in the southwestern corner of the area. I was lucky in that I came across two Cerulean Warbler within 5 minutes of leaving the car at my first stop. First a female flew across the unimproved road I was walking, not 25 feet in front of me, and landed in a bush. Then a male followed her. Before I could react, they both flew away but not before I got good enough looks to eliminate everything else. I continued on and came back to the spot twice more but did not see them again. Besides this place, we drove along every sufficiently defined road in the area seeing 45 other species but no more Cerulean Warbler or other exotics. I did find a small Great Blue Heron heronry with at least six nests.
After crisscrossing the area, stopping often to play the Cerulean Warbler song and listening for a response we called it a day and headed home.
