another great day on the island

[hanscom at cs dot utah dot edu (Dave Hanscom)]

For the second time in a week, a Great Salt Lake Bird Festival trip to Deseret
Ranch had to be cancelled due to weather.  It didn't take Bob Huntington and I
more than 30 seconds to decide that the blue skies to the west were much too
inviting to resist a trip to Antelope Island.

The first highlight of the day was the flock of what must have been tens of
thousands of red-necked phalaropes north of the causeway about a mile from
the mainland.  A few peeps and black-bellied plovers were feeding on the
south side at about the same place.

If you're thinking that was the most incredible moment of the day, wait until
you hear about what we found at the ranch.  Hal and Cathy Robins were looking
at a group of grosbeaks, mostly black-headed, and among them was a gorgeous
male rose-breasted!!  We saw him several times during the next couple of
hours, mostly in the Russian olives along the fence line that extends to the
east from the ranch house.  He also flew north and sat on one of the fences
out in the open, but most of the time he stayed in the trees.

After those two sightings, everything else seemed pretty mundane, but the
marshy area by the above-mentioned Russian olives were like an aviary this
morning.  Lots of warblers (Wilsons, yellow, orange-crowned, yellow-rumped)
and more flycatchers than I've ever seen in one place (Cordilleran, dusky,
gray, Hammonds, and western wood peewee).  Warbling verios, Hermit thrushes,
ruby-crowned kinglets, Bullocks orioles, ...  And we managed to find one
long-eared adult owl in a Russian olive tree south of the fenced area.

To top it all off, a burrowing owl was sitting right beside the road as
we drove back to the causeway (about a mile south of the gate in the chain
link fence).  He flew up the hill, but sat on a weed while we checked him
out with the telescope.

What an amazing day!!  Even a trip to Deseret Ranch couldn't beat that!

Dave Hanscom

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