Kara and I spent some more time in the Eastern UP birding this past weekend.  This time, we joined a group from SW Michigan that birds up there every year.  With Kara’s new job at the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary, we thought it’d be a good marketing opportunity as well as a way to meet new friends and enjoy some more time in Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. 

Of course, this time of year is great up there for Owls.  We saw the usual suspects as well as hitting some spots we typically don’t go to.  This was a fun change of pace from simply sitting on Snowy & Hawk Owls all day waiting for  action.

All in all, it was a nice trip with the weather cooperating about half the time.  One disappointment was finding a dead Northern Hawk Owl hanging from a power line.  We have our own opinions of how the bird died but we will probably never truely know.  We thought this string of wrongful bird deaths was continuing when the next morning, Kara and I found a dead Sharp-Tailed Grouse.  We figured we were cursed by then until we went in for a closer look.  This was a natural kill by one of the many raptors in the area and it was still fresh (including a wing print in the snow where the bird pounced).  It doesn’t get any better than that!  Oddly enough, it was a refreshing site to see after the non-natural death of the Hawk Owl the day before.

We did lots of driving and searching with a few nice sessions of sitting and waiting (my favorite) which yielded some nice results.  This trip tended to be more about birding but I did manage to get a couple decent flight shots of Snowy’s as well as having fun sitting in the snow shooting Black-Capped Chickadees coming and going.  We were after Boreals but they never materialized.  All in all, another good weekend.

Keep close to the blog.  I will be heading to San Francisco next week for business which should yield some new imagery on my off time.  At the end of the week, Kara will be joining me and we will be doing some birding and sight-seeing for a few days.  New posts to follow!