Time for the Christmas Bird Count!

For the third year in a row, we are participating in the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count.  We have a certain route to cover and on a certain day--today, the 29th--we drive our route a couple times, morning and afternoon, and see what birds we see.  We can also informally record birds we see around here for the three days before and three days after the official bird count day.  Here are some of the roads on our route.

That's Lake Superior WAY up there to the north.

And this is another one of our pretty, wintry roads in the afternoon sun.  To do the bird count, we just watch the trees for any movement there or over the roads and in the fields.  We record the time and location of the sightings.  And...we didn't see a great variety of birds today--crows, blue jays (LOTS of them), pine siskins, chickadees, possible a sharp-shin hawk, ravens (although it's hard to tell them from crows), and an eagle--but he wasn't on our official route.  And that's the moon up there.

And we saw this coyote, also not on our route.  He was sitting right by the road like he was someone's pet and didn't run away until after we drove by.  

When we were done with the afternoon drive, we finished up with a trip down to The Lake, because that's how we roll!  The angle of the sun gave everything a reddish tint.

The ice is back in the channel and near the shore because we're back to being REALLY cold!  And it's hard to see in the picture, but we could see the jagged line of big waves out in the middle of the lake.

I just love those colors!

We were headed home when we saw two fishing boats heading in to the harbor.  And that was strange because the boats that usually are anchored here were already in and tied up.  So we went back to watch them come in through the ice.  First one...

Then the second one.

The second one pushed in ahead of the first, followed by lots of gulls.  We're not sure how the boats decide who is going to park where, but at least they were safe in the harbor.

And then we saw a fitting end to our bird count day!  Hundreds of seagulls!  (And some drops/smudges on our windshield.)  But we didn't record these guys.  Too many varieties of gulls to differentiate and how to count this???