Smith’s Longspur

Well, I didn’t miss this one. Seems like everyone else got to see the Smith’s Longspur in the blogosphere- City Birder, Mike from 10000birds.com, Jersey Birder, etc. I was pretty sure that I was going to come up short again after searching for over an hour and only seeing Snow Buntings and Horned Larks. I had also wanted to see the Lapland Longspurs that it associated with but they were nowhere to be found.

Finally, after walking back and forth several times, scanning the different areas for any signs of movement we went back to the Snow Bunting flock. We had searched the group several times for longspurs but the flock was homogeneous. One last check and, oh what was that, thats not a bunting. The flash of the white outer tail feathers gave us what we needed, the Smith’s was still here. Searching this group also finally produced a Lapland Longspur as well.

It was a good trip, providing me with my second look at Smith’s Longspurs. My first encounter was in Indiana, on the western edge of the state where small flocks faithfully show up for a week in corn stubble before moving on.