Winter at Killdeer Plains

Columbus Audubon has held winter field trips to Killdeer Plains every year for decades. The trips are in January, February, or both. The series was first led by the late Mike Flynn; then by Earl Harrison and Bill Heck; and now, after a one year hiatus due to the pandemic, by James Muller. This year’s trip was held on Sunday, January 30, and memorable trip it turned out to be.

Because of lingering concerns about Covid, we skipped the usual carpooling from Columbus, instead arriving at our rendezvous site at Pond 27 in separate vehicles. After a long wait to be able to hold field trips again, it was obvious that folks were making up for lost time — there were a lot of cars! But there was a shortage of birds: the large pond that we hoped would be teeming with ducks was frozen solid. One car had spotted three Ring-necked Pheasants in a nearby field near our meeting location, but a quick check after everyone arrived failed to relocate these birds. We did spot a Bald Eagle way off in the distance, but we knew that we could get a better look than that!

All right, it’s cold — but sunny, thank goodness — and there’s snow on the ground, so let’s go with the flow. We took the short drive to Washburn Road, which is locally famous for three winter species: Horned Lark, Lapland Longspur, and Snow Bunting. But the road was curiously short on birds; we finally located a few Larks here and there, but neither of the others.

We had better luck with Bald Eagles, quickly finding a much closer immature bird soaring overhead. In fact, we saw as many as half a dozen, both adults and younger birds, although it was hard to get an exact count because they kept flying over us throughout the day!

We worked out way around the edge of the refuge along agricultural lands until we found another of the winter Killdeer specialties: a Northern Harrier cruising back and forth low over the fields, hunting for an afternoon meal of some small rodent. We picked up another Harrier on the way over to the maintenance building where there is the only “portapotty” restroom for miles in any direction.

The next planned stops were to check out the old pine grove for Long-eared Owls, then be at a stakeout at dusk in hopes of spotting Short-eared Owls before it was too dark to see. However, the owls had other ideas.

One car (ours) left the maintenance lot a little ahead of the others to scout the owl grove. But halfway there, we spotted a couple of interesting birds and pulled over to investigate. The birds were a Short-eared Owl and a Northern Harrier who seemed to be having a territorial dispute, diving at each other in the sky — what an amazing sight! Even more amazing was the fact that the sun still was shining well up in the sky, at least an hour before sunset. Short-eared Owls are not supposed to be flying around that early, but there it was. The harrier and the owl eventually headed off in different directions so we backtracked to tell the rest of our group, only to find that they had stopped along the road and seen as many as eight owls. (We saw several of these eight at close range as well.)

As the owls had moved along, a few of us headed over to the pine grove, but no owls, Long-eared or otherwise, were to be found there. We all turned our cars toward Columbus as the sun sank below the horizon, still marveling at the wonderful show that the owls had provided.