I’ve given up on adding the solitaire to the 2006 list, though it’s apparently still at the CC. The trips add up to too many miles. Seeing it 11 days ago was a real pleasure.

Forest Park birds, January 4–10

January 4

Highlights:

• Wood Duck (5)
• Great Blue Heron (1)
• Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (1 male)
• Pied-billed Grebe (1)

January 6

On the walk in to work there were Six Gadwall (2 males, 4 females) with a flock of mallards in the water on the south side of the stone and wooden bridge near the skating rink. The grebe was near one of the boardwalks.

I walked the loop that passes the footbridge on my way out. A Carolina Wren was trilling (my first of the year) and a Song Sparrow chipping along the river. In the brush near the end of the path were some especially bright female cardinals with lipsticked bills and red gloves. Two brown creepers flew into the same tree and worked their way up the trunk and along the branches.

As I drove along the river to Deer Lake, two kingfishers flew by, calling.

January 10

A small flock of White-throated Sparrows on the slope behind the skating rink was a welcome morning sight. I decided at the last minute this afternoon to walk the footbridge loop and was treated to a loose mixed flock of juncos, 3 to 6 Song Sparrows, 2 Swamp Sparrows, a Carolina Wren (seen this time!), 8 to 12 cardinals, 2 goldfinches, and a Blue Jay.

A walk through Tower Grove Park early this afternoon turned up more birds than my quick drive through last Wednesday did. There were robins throughout the park, as well as several flocks of juncos and 50+ Red-winged Blackbirds (all but one of them males) in a flock of starlings.

The highlights were found off-road and would have been missed if I had been driving:

• Red-breasted Nuthatch, 1 or 2. One was south of the pavilion just east of the Arsenal entrance to the park and one was at a feeder at the brick house (same bird?).
• Eastern Towee, 1 male in the bird garden
• Fox Sparrow, 1 on the edge of the swale south of the woodland pond

By the end of the walk, my thoughts were focused more on the left-over spinach pie in the fridge than on birds, but an accipiter flying out of the park east of the Palm House brought me back to the moment. I couldn’t make a definite ID, but the wing beats looked slow to me, suggesting a Cooper’s Hawk.

From NPR’s Morning Edition today:

No one knows what birds see when they look out at the world, says ornithologist Daniel Klem, but he’s sure they don’t see glass. He estimates that at least 1 billion birds are killed by flying into windows every year in the United States.

The full story can be found here.