Birds
Three of us birded Horseshoe Lake for a couple of hours on Sunday. It was fairly warm (50° by the time we frove back to Saint Louis) and the lake showed barely a ripple.
There were hundreds of coots, around 150 Red-breasted Mergansers, 1 Common Loon in breeding plumage (first spotted by Paul Bauer on Friday), and several Horned Grebes in various stages of plumage (as reported by the Thursday WGNSS group). One of the Ruddy Ducks along Big Bend Rd. was very handsome in his breeding plumage, with his rich chestnut back and powder blue bill.
The Harris’s Sparrow remains elusive. I’ve made several trips to Horseshoe hoping to see it—I could have made one trip to Busch and seen the cooperative one at Lake 6.
Butterflies
There were at least 2 Cabbage Whites on Big Bend Rd. One of them had a bite-sized chunk missing from a wing. Later that day while I was digging a new hole for the redbud, a Cabbage White fluttered across the yard.