Antelope Island 12-May-2005

[Dave Rintoul <drintoul at ksu dot edu>]

Greetings

Since I only have one more week in Utah before I head back to Kansas, I
dodged the raindrops (and rainbows) and headed out to Antelope Island this
morning. My main goal was to photograph the long-eared owlets at Garr Ranch,
but I was foiled in that quest. Either they were all hunkered down in the
nest (not likely) or they have been escorted by the parents to another tree
(more likely); no owls were seen by me. This may be a personal trend. The
only other time I saw a long-eared owl nest, there were five owlets sitting
on a branch beside it one day, and nothing the next day when I returned with
the camera...

But otherwise I had a pretty good list. I watched a Long-billed Curlew
collaborate with a Red-tailed Blackbird to escort a raven off the island.
Most unexpected bird was a single Eurasian Collared-dove, consorting with a
Mourning Dove, near the solar panels north of the restrooms. Also in that
area I found two empids, identified by me as Gray Flycatchers; photographs
of one of these birds will be sent to the UtahBirds.org webmaster, since
Gray Flycatcher is currently on the list of "most wanted bird photos". But
my empid ID skills are not the best, so perhaps experts should weigh in on
this identification first! Other "good" birds seen near the boggy area east
of the barn were (in no particular order)

Green-tailed Towhee
Northern Waterthrush
Swainson's Thrush
Yellow Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Wilson's Warbler
Some other empid, identified by me as Hammond's Flycatcher, but which did
not pose for a portrait
Black-headed Grosbeak
and the ubiquitous Brewer's, Red-winged and Yellow-headed Blackbirds

A lone Franklin's Gull stood out among the thousands of California Gulls
along the littoral north(west) of the causeway. And there was much
excitement when I got back to the Biology Building at the UofU; a pair of
Golden Eagles cruised low over the building, caught a thermal (probably the
first thermal around here for several days...) and circled up and out of
sight over the Administration building. Or maybe it wasn't a thermal; the
typical University administration building can be a prodigious source of hot
air sometimes :-)

Cheers

Dave

Dave Rintoul                                <drintoul at ksu dot edu>
Biology Division - KSU                           ICBM: 39.18N, 96.34W
Manhattan KS 66506-4901                             VOX: 785-532-6615 
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~drintoul/              FAX: 785-532-6653
Currently on sabbatical at the University of Utah
 
"The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident;
inept, frightened pilots in control of a vast machine they cannot
understand."
						- William S. Burroughs

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