Tag: Bald Eagle

Photos: Lollie Bottoms

April 24, 2023

Lark Sparrow

One bird I’ve wanted to see this year has been the Lark Sparrow. Lark Sparrows, which have a harlequin facial pattern and white tail spots, breed in Arkansas. I finally saw several Lark Sparrows on Sunday when I joined five other birders to visit Lollie Bottoms near Mayflower and Conway. Lollie Bottoms winds through agricultural fields and the area circling the Conway airport. It’s an eBird hotspot during winter and the spring/fall migration.

The trip turned out to be extremely birdy with us finding 433 birds of 45 different species. Some firsts for me were Brewer’s Blackbirds and Upland Sandpipers. We thought we’d found a Piping Plover, which would have been another first but it later turned out to be a Semipalmated Plover instead. I also saw some birds I don’t see often like a Lincoln’s Sparrow, a Sedge Wren and a Warbling Vireo. The Warbling Vireo was actually found in a spot that we typically don’t expect to find one so that was interesting. The Warbling Vireo is typically found in deciduous forest, and we found our bird in a patch of trees/brush on the corner of an agricultural field.

Warbling Vireo
American Goldfinch
Bald Eagle
Blue Grosbeak
Blue-winged Teal
Brewer’s Blackbird
Brown-headed Cowbird
Dickcessel
Eastern Bluebird
Eastern Kingbird
Lincoln’s Sparrow
Semipalmated Plover
Purple Martin
Sedge Wren
Upland Sandpiper

Photos: Kibler Bottoms

April 24, 2023
Swainson’s Hawk

Saturday marked my first time to Kibler Bottoms in Crawford County. Kibler Bottoms is a roughly loop drive that goes south into agriculture fields in the bottoms of the Arkansas river Valley.

While there, I got my first glimpses of Swainson’s Hawks. The three Swainson’s Hawks we found were in adult light morph, meaning they had darker heads, white on the upper part of the underwings. The underwings were darker moving down and out. Typically found in grasslands, range maps on allaboutbirds.org show they are typically found in the United States during breeding season. Their breeding season range is more west of Arkansas, but I’m told Kibler Bottoms is a great place to spot them around this time in Arkansas.

Buff-breasted Sandpiper

Another rare bird found was a Buff-breasted Sandpiper that foraged in a field alongside American Golden-Plovers, a Horned Lark. A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher was also sitting in the field nearby. The migration range of the Buff-breasted Sandpiper just passes through western Arkansas so we didn’t expect to see one Saturday. This sandpiper is typically found in dry, grassy habitats according to allaboutbirds.org. They nest only in the High Arctic of northernmost Alaska and Canada and then migrate to South America.

Overall, we found 218 birds of 24 species. Here’s photos of some of the other birds spotted:

American Golden Plover
Bald Eagle
Horned Lark
Savannah Sparrow
Scissor-tailed Flycatcher
Turkey Vulture

Photos: Longspurs and Owls

March 1, 2023
Short-eared Owl

I visited the Stuttgart Municipal Airport recently with a group of birders with the hope of finding Short-eared Owls, Smith’s Longspurs, Lapland Longspurs and possibly even a Barn Owl. While we missed the Lapland Longspurs, we did get lucky on the bird front. Our checklist for the day included four Short-eared Owls, a juvenile Bald Eagle and 77 Smith’s Longspurs.

It actually turned out to be a great birding weekend. I traveled to Wynne to visit family and returned to Little Rock via Hwy. 64 through Bald Knob. The route had me stumbling across a birds such as the below Black Vulture, Fox Sparrow, Hooded Mergansers and Mallards. I even spotted a tree that had a hole that eerily looked like a face. What do you think – do you see the face?

Here’s a visual of the birds I saw:

juvenile Bald Eagle
Black Vulture
Fox Sparrow
Mallard
Short-eared Owl
Smith’s Longspurs
Hooded Mergansers