Today was a day for American Kestrels!  If we could count every AMKE that was seen, the count would have totaled 14.  However, six of them were sitting on power poles between Quincy and the junction with SR 283.  Since that was before the start of the official route, they couldn’t be counted.

The entire drive looked much more wintery this month than it did in December. A lot of snow, and all of the lakes (Soap Lake, Lenore Lake, Alkali Lake, Blue Lake and Park Lake) were frozen over. 

The drive north up the Lower Grand Coulee is a fairly heavily traveled road.  There are a lot of turn-out spaces to stop along the road, but not when there has been a heavy snowfall.  Fortunately, there were a few that were cleared off, so a person could stop and observe. We made several stops driving up the coulee.  We were hoping that a Golden, or a Bald, Eagle might appear above the rim of the basalt, but no such luck!

A stop at the Dry Falls Visitor Center parking lot revealed a pair of Red-tailed hawks dancing on the air currents.  One was a very dark morph, and the other almost white. 

When exiting the coulee region and heading east toward the farmland south of Hartline, the route map needed a little modification. The information gleaned from the county snow plow road map wasn’t entirely accurate, almost, but not quite. Some roads that had been marked for plowing, hadn’t been, so I modified the route slightly.

A lot of the land south of US 2 is farm land with no power poles.  So, when it has a deep snow cover, you don’t see any raptors gliding over the land looking for rodents that aren’t there.

However, driving down Pinto Ridge, a Bald eagle flew over the entire arc of the sky.  Judging from its trajectory, I would guess it was traveling from Banks Lake in the Upper Grand Coulee to one of the lakes in the lower Coulee, maybe Blue Lake or Park Lake.

Here is a summary of what was seen.

Red-tailed Hawk – 5
American Kestrel – 8
Bald Eagle – 1
Rough-legged Hawk – 3