North Central Illinois Ornithological Society

We’ll meet at the Alpine Village Shopping Center on the Northeast corner of the intersection of Harrison and Alpine Roads in Rockford. Meet in the parking lot between the Hallmark store and the Amcore Bank just before 8:00 a.m. for car pooling. We plan to leave at 8:00
It looks like we’ll have some ice on the river down by Starved Rock State Park. That will provide places for gulls to stand around, and, if the Lock and Dam are operating normally we may have a good day with a bunch of gulls and some Bald Eagles as well. In the event that the gull-watching doesn’t pan out we still have the back up plan to do some hiking in the State Park. In any event, bring GOOD boots and WARM clothes!!! Watching birds from inside the Lock and Dam observation building is limited, at best. Bring scopes if you have them. After gull-watching we plan to stop for a bite to eat at Duffy’s Tavern in Utica.

Six inches of soggy snow, lots of ice, persistent rain and heavy fog created some really challenging conditions. Both the birds and the birders would have rather been somewhere else. The low total of 52 species and the exceptionally low total of 6982 individual birds are certainly due to the weather. The average number of species for the last ten years is 64. The average number of individual birds for the last ten years is 24,452.
I give great credit to all of you who went out and counted. We spent about a normal amount of time in the field although a higher-than-normal percentage was spent in vehicles rather than on foot. I’m sure we set a new count record for the number of hours spent under umbrellas.
32 counters participated in the field, plus 5 feeder watchers. 3 parties went out early or late to look for owls.
We broke old the old count record of 22 Common Mergansers with a big flock by the 15th Ave. bridge and smaller groups scattered down the river totaling 93. New count records were set by small margins for Eastern Bluebird with 14 and Yellow-bellied Sapsucker with 3.
A huge thanks to all of you for your time and effort. This was the 19th year of the Kishwaukee count. You can see the results of this count, and all of the others, at the National Audubon Society’s website at http://www.audubon.org/bird/cbc. The dates for the Rockford and Kishwaukee counts in Dec 2009 will be the 19th and the 27th. I hope you can join us for some better weather.
Here’s the list of birds we found:

1204 Canada Goose
191 Mallard
16 Common Goldeneye
93 Common Merganser
9 Ring-necked Pheasant
8 Wild Turkey
1 Great Blue Heron
6 Bald Eagle (4 ad, 2 imm)
3 Cooper’s Hawk
21 Red-tailed Hawk
5 American Kestrel
1 Merlin
1 Peregrine Falcon
11 Herring Gull
372 Rock Pigeon
297 Mourning Dove
2 Eastern Screech- Owl
1 Great Horned Owl
3 Belted Kingfisher
61 Red-bellied Woodpecker
3 Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
82 Downy Woodpecker
20 Hairy Woodpecker
15 Northern Flicker
125 Blue Jay
366 American Crow
37 Horned Lark
280 Black-capped Chickadee
32 Tufted Titmouse
2 Red-breasted Nuthatch
97 White-breasted Nuthatch
53 Brown Creeper
3 Carolina Wren
1 Winter Wren
6 Golden-crowned Kinglet
14 Eastern Bluebird
33 American Robin
1207 European Starling
117 Cedar Waxwing
136 American Tree Sparrow
1 Fox Sparrow
19 Song Sparrow
20 White-throated Sparrow
6 White-crowned Sparrow
661 Dark-eyed Junco
2 Lapland Longspur
290 Northern Cardinal
8 Purple Finch
100 House Finch
73 Pine Siskin
282 American Goldfinch
585 House Sparrow

There was a nice dark morph Rough-legged Hawk between the airport and the airport quarry ponds today. Also, a quick run out Kelley Road to Seward produced several large mixed flocks of Lapland Longspurs, Snow Buntings and Horned Larks.

Barbara and I took a drive to the northwestern area of Winnebago County this morning. We had 500+ Snow Buntings in two large flocks on Kelley Road between Weldon Road and Winnebago Road. On Harrison Road, between Trask Bridge Rd. (IL 70) and Knapp Road, we had about 125 Lapland Longspurs divided between several flocks that also had a lot of Horned Larks and a few Snow Buntings mixed in. There was a Wilson’s Snipe visible in the spring-fed creek at Hoople’s pasture on Stephens Road east of Harrison Rd., and, overall, we had 6 Rough-legged Hawks, all light morphs. A few N. Flickers were over the road by the spring at Pec Wetlands FP on Blair Road.

Several Kestrels and a Rough-leg had prey in their talons, so the birds are finding food.