BIRDING THE BASIN

Late Friday afternoon Nancy and I birded Township Road, some ten miles south of us. We were responding to a report of Swainson’s hawk sightings that had been posted on our local bird alert web site.

The Swainson’s migrate into the Basin area this time of year from Argentina. They are here only a few months and then return on their southward migration again.

The big deal here about them is that they have just begun to show up again after several years of absense. The cause of their disappearance turned out to be that they were being inadvertently poisoned by farmers in Argentina. About ten years ago, in the region the Swainson’s migrate to, the farms began suffering from Grasshopper plagues. The farmers started trying to control them with DDT. The Swainson’s were eating the grasshoppers and dieing there, thus not returning to the U.S. on their migration. After a couple of years of the Swainson’s failure to return, some U.S. naturalists traveled down to Argentina to access the problem. Upon discovering the use of the DDT a substitute pesticide, that was not harmful to the Swainson’s, was proposed by the U.S. naturalists and implemented by the Argentine farmers. The Swainson’s stopped dieing; the numbers of them increased back to close to normal, and now for the past couple of years they have been showing up again, in the Basin, in noticeable numbers.

This was the best birding excursion Nancy and I have had for a couple of months. The birding here in the Basin is great all year around, but it’s at its slowest in the summer. I think were now entering the transition back toward peak season.

The reports were accurate. We spotted at least twenty Swainson’s along, the approximate ten mile run of, Township Road. Additionally, we spotted at least fifty Great Egrets, six Great Blue Herons, and a pair of hunting Merlins.
The Merlins: what a treat that was! We stopped the car to watch them just a couple of yards from a large fence post from which they were feeding on their prey. They were feeding on thousands of large flying insects that resembled giant moths. They were chasing and capturing them in mid flight. We were so close that they appeared, in our binoculars, to be at arms length away. It is not often that we get to witness a site as awesome as this one.