Great Backyard Bird Count 2015 (Sun)

On day 2 of my Great Backyard Bird Count, I certainly felt like I saw more species. At the time of my hike it was near 8 or 10º above which definitely felt warmer than yesterday. And thank goodness the wind had subsided. The park felt more active for wildlife today and I was seeing Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers left and right. There were also a fair amount of Cardinals active today and both male and female were visible. As I exited the wooded area from the north side heading west, a Red-tailed Hawk flew right past me. This is in the area where I've seen 2 of them this winter but after looking around for a bit I could not find another. On the south side at the duck pond the open water has shrunken yet more in size forcing more Mallards to find water elsewhere. There's still good numbers of them here thought that I'd estimate at 70 to 75. On the wood chip trail here I took particular interest in both a White-breasted Nuthatch and another Downy Woodpecker. The Downy was in a bush of Red-osier Dogwood and busily pecking at it's thin twigs. I crept up on it and took a few successive photos in burst mode. When I got home I was surprised to find that I'd captured the very moment when it pulled some kind of insect larva from the shrub! Essentially this happened within 3 frames I'd taken at 6 frames per second –meaning it found and pulled the larva in about one half a second. I find it incredibly interesting how skilled Woodpeckers are at finding and extracting something like this during the height of winter. Quite amazing. Further along I found a male Great Horned Owl standing guard near his now nesting mate. This big, snapped off tree wasn't exactly the place I would expect to see an Owl perch. He looked kind of like a king on a throne up there. The light here was terrible and I shot through a lot of brush for the photo and it turned out pretty grainy. My last good sighting of the day was quite a good one for many reasons. I was hiking on the wood chip trail heading towards where Shingle Creek empties back out of the lake. I was about to turn the corner at the creek when I thought I saw some wadded up old newspaper caught in a tree down near the frozen creek. Upon closer inspection it was a small raptor! Because of the birds vibrant orangey tone, I firs thought it was an American Kestrel –which is our smallest species of Falcon. But the face didn't seem right. At the point of noticing the bird I was already only 30 feet away. As I stood there taking photos the bird hadn't really paid me any attention so I approached a bit closer, hiking down the creek bank and half way out onto the frozen water. At this distance I was more skeptical and my only other thought is that it was a Merlin. A Merlin is also a Falcon but slightly larger and slimmer than a Kestrel. I have only seen a Merlin once before in the Palmer Lake Park area, but I did have a good opportunity to view another wild one last fall at Hillside Cemetery in North Minneapolis. That one had a much more distinct "mustache" our dark, vertical markings extending down from the front of the eye. This bird did not really show that and also showed a fairly bright "blueish" colored cap on it's head. I posted the photo to the Minnesota Birding Facebook page and learned that it is a known subspecies of Merlin called the "Prairie Merlin or Richardson's Merlin!" I don't think I would count this as a new species for the park but it is certainly interesting to note! According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Prairie Merlin subspecies occurs in Great Plains states and southern Canada.