Wellington Area 2/12

Cade Cropper and I set out to try to refind the Varied Thrush this morning at the Martin's House. We arrived to a slow yard and I a guessing some kind of raptor was around. It took about 20 minutes and we started hearing a 'Chup' call. I then quickly found it and got Cade on the bird as well. Unfortunately I didn't get a very good picture of it, but here is the best. There is a Great Horned Owl nesting close to the house and at 9:30 in the morning, which is about 10 minutes before we found the Varied Thrush we heard one of the owls calling.

                                                      Varied Thrush

Cade then asked if we could try to see the White-throated Sparrow and we got permission to go inside to wait for the sparrow. After about a 15 minute wait the sparrow came in and we got great looks at it and some good photo ops. Just like yesterday, there were a lot of birds around.

                                               White-throated Sparrow

                                                 White-crowned Sparrow

                                                     House Sparrow

                                                   American Goldfinch

We were at the Martin's house a little more than an hour, but we saw both birds we were chasing. We then went to the feed lot northeast of Wellington to look for large flocks of Horned Larks in hopes to find Lapland Longspurs. We weren't disappointed. We quickly picked up on large numbers of Horned Larks landing behind some houses and got out our scopes to look at them closer. We quickly found a couple Lapland Longspurs (132) and eventually heard and saw a number of them flying over. While driving out of the area we found a Prairie Falcon sitting on a power pole and got great looks at it.

                                                       Prairie Falcon

Finally we drove to the Wellington State Wildlife area to look for Long-eared Owls. Our one stop where I had three in January didn't produce any Long-eared Owls, but we were still able to find 1 Great Horned Owl and 1 Barn Owl.
Overall a good morning of birding with seeing 3 out of 4 birds we were trying to find and Cade got saw two life birds.