There has been a fantastic movement of Lapland Longspurs and Snow Buntings
with this last storm. As Debra's picture showed they are here in big
numbers!! Driving between Oxford and College Corner today we literally saw
hundreds of Snow Buntings and tens of Longspurs. In some of the backroad
areas between Oxford and Brookville pure flocks of both Snow Buntings and
L. Longspurs were numerous and large numbers of both species were mixed
with the hundreds of Horned Larks. We saw over 500-600 Snow Buntings and
200-300 Longspurs in only a couple hours this afternoon. On the
downside--so many Horned Larks, Snow Buntings, and L. Longspurs were
flocking along Hwy 27 between Oxford and College Corner this afternoon that
birds were getting regularly hit by cars. We salvaged four Horned Larks
(and couldn't use two others) just between CC and Oxford, amazingly we
found no Snow Buntings or Longspurs although we had several near misses
ourselves.
I have enclosed a couple of pictures from this afternoon--I shrank them to
800X600 pix--hopefully this will help the downloading process--if I need to
do something else please let me know!
Dave