Dowitchers

The short-billed one comes through our county in small numbers in May and again end of August, in groups of 1-3. The long billed can be found in large groups in the fall. It took me 7 summers to find one. I found them in Washington state before, where large groups of a different subspecies gather on the coastal mud flats.

Long-billed Dowitcher

I don't seem to have a handy photo of the colorful spring birds, but here is one. 

The grayish winter birds are common, and easy to distinguish from the more squat and more colorful Wilson's snipe.

Summer

 If you stay in the same county all summer, nothing much new shows up. But I did get an Upland Sandpiper-.

Other photos were taken just because I had a camera along.

And from May

2021: Spring is here! A few warblers and a lot of shore birds migrating

 Willets

Other shore-birds

Pelicans. A few grebes were seen, mostly passed by now.

A few 2020 shots

 

Fox Sparrow

Western Grebe

Merganser

Gold-crowned Kinglet

Red-throated Loon

Pipit

Prairie Falcon

I had seen one in Nebraska once before, with no real good photo but very high in the air (you can see it is a falcon) and I had seen a couple in Wyoming. I went to one of my local places, adding a Western Meadowlark and hoping few more year birds. I got excited at finding maybe a Peregrine Falcon. At the end of my walk there was this lump on a bent tree:

It was too large for a kestrel or a merlin. Getting closer, and the light really was as bad as above, I got some photos of it. The couple of pictures in flight are from a bit of video I took. The line on the face and the white behind the eye make it a Prairie Falcon. Only in winter and early spring do they get this far East.

It flew low across a field of corn stubble to the next row of trees by a farm.

Barred Owl Hit by Car

This was my find on 14th Street South end this morning. It's a pretty good sized owl.

Very common for owls to hit cars at night.

I'm not great at owls, though in Finland my friend takes me night time birding, and I at least move around when they would be about. We found a curlew and a night jar last time, no owls, night time birding in Finland.

eBird APP changes

Just a few days ago eBird updated their phone app. The examples below are for iPhone.

You cannot start a list with the new APP without first downloading the Nebraska pack. I did that out there in less than 30 seconds. Started to bird. It works with your downloaded list and the calendar. At any time it will show a list of "likely" birds for that date. If  you turn the RARITIES on I believe it will give the entire state list rarities and all. But if you type the name of the bird, it will still pull out the bird from the list. I added Nebraska and a suggested list of neighboring states. Other than that, if you want the 50 states on the phone, you will have to add them one by one. Same with countries.

What most people end up doing is adding the states as you travel. You can do it at your motel or rest stop before venturing out to the weak signal areas. I added a few West coast states and Finland and my list of packet is now this. Note that country lists may be very small and have less data about the seasonal changes. Our US state packets may be as big as 5MB.

There is also a HELP tab, that takes you to your phone browser and will give help on various topics: