News and Notes for January 2020

New Year, new events The Columbia Audubon Society (CAS) event calendar will kick off 2020 with an afternoon First Day Hike on the Grasslands Trail at Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, in coordination with Missouri State Parks. On January 15, the first CAS meeting of 2020 will feature State Ornithologist Sarah Kendrick. She has exciting

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Destination: Audubon, Iowa

by Louise Flenner In September, George and I decided to travel home from our RV vacation on the North Shore of Minnesota by taking the long way home down the western side of Iowa along Hwy. 71.  The destination I was looking for was the town of Audubon, Iowa.  I had noted this place on

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Birds in Big Numbers: Flocks of Blackbirds and Starlings

Part two in an occasional series, Birds in Big Numbers by Joanna Reuter Blackbirds can congregate in enormous numbers, sometimes in mixed-species flocks with starlings and other birds. In eBird’s current dataset, Red-winged Blackbirds hold the world record for the high count of a single species, with an estimate of 40 million individuals during a

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Sightings: December 2019

Raptors: Winter is a good time to view raptors, and many photos demonstrating their winter diversity were submitted to eBird and the Macaulay Library this month from Boone County. Here’s a selection:  The final photo in that sequence is a Prairie Falcon found by Shelby Thomas at South Farm on December 7. This was

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