This afternoon, David Muth, Dan Purrington, and I went out to Sham's Road north of Kaplan to look for some Lapland Longspurs I had seen there on New Year's Day. The birds had been in a set of big muddy fields where stubble had been plowed under. When we got there today, the fields seemed empty except for some Killdeer, but after a few minutes we spotted a small group of sparrow sized birds circling the field in undulating flight. We picked them up in flight and saw they were the longspurs, and when they landed, we realized there were hundreds of the birds in the back of the fields. Soon the birds were up and flying, and some of the birds splintered off the main flock and landed near us. They moved like an army over the bare ground, foraging quickly and manically. One circled overhead, then landed right in front of us.
We ended up getting great looks, and though our highest count was about 250 birds, we're sure pretty sure not all of the birds were in the air at the same time. Usually these handsomely marked tundra nesters spend the winters on the prairies of the Midwest, reaching us in big numbers only when the weather there is too harsh or snowy for these birds to find food. Clearly, this has been a mild winter here--what brought so many down?
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