WOW Birding Festival

We like to go to winter birding festivals - usually in warm Southern climes. January has been just awful in Kentucky - temps in the single digits with ice and snow. But we saw a notice for a new birding festival in Western Tennessee, at the lower end of Kentucky Lake. It's only about a 4 hour drive, assuming the weather cooperates, and the two speakers are some of our favorite people. Brian "Fox" Ellis does historical re-enactments of John James Audubon, Charles Darwin and others. This weekend he would attend as Audubon. Julie Zickefoose is an Ohio birding expert, bird rehabber, artist, author and singer! With stars like this we couldn't resist signing up for Wings in Winter at Paris Landing State Park.

For the pre-festival day, we signed up to go to Cross Creeks NWR, near Dover, TN. Of course, it was covered with snow and ice, and although there were birds, they were usually so far away you couldn't distinguish them well with just binoculars. However, the sun was bright (and me without a baseball hat in the car!) and they sky was blue, so it was the best day of the weekend. When the ducks got spooked by something, Julie gave us all wonderful lessons in duck identification on the wing. For example, the Gadwall is a plain looking gray bird with floating on the water. In flight though, it's almost entirely white. You can easily pick out the Pintails by their pointy tails in flight. And Northern Shovelers are mostly rusty on the bottom.

 Many of us were surprised to see good numbers of American Pelicans grouped on the sandbars. Then one took off and flew right over our heads!

Of course, the Bald Eagle numbers have rebounded in the last 25 years or so, and many of them either reside or come to winter on Kentucky Lake. We saw them perching in the trees, or sliding across the ice, hoping to nab a wounded duck.

The Wildlife Refuge manages the water and crops for the benefit of birds who will come to winter, so most fields have some kind of stubble, and the birds graze looking for leftover corn or millet. It's fun to look at the tracks and try to guess what made the. Not a deer, certainly.

When the geese started casually walking towards the corn stubble, it was easy to tell what made all those tracks! Once in a while, the Canada Geese would be joined by a Snow or Ross goose or some White-fronted Geese, so we had lots of variety.

We saw things I did not expect too, such as thousands of Red-winged Blackbirds in the fields along with the Grackles. I thought they all went much farther south in the winter.

Raptor numbers were good and we saw Harriers, Red Tails, Red Shoulders and Kestrels along with the Eagles.

We did NOT expect to find an armadillo, however. In Tennessee!? It ran across the road in the snow, leaving a trail of four footprints around a dragging tail mark.