[TN-Bird] Rankin Bottoms (east Tenn, Cocke County)
- From: David Trently <dtrently@xxxxxxx>
- To: TN-Bird <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 08:08:19 -0400
Wednesday night, Rasmus Larsen and I visited this area on the east side of
Douglas Lake. We first looked for the Mottled Duck that had been seen near the
23E bridge, but only saw over 100 MALLARDs. There were 2 LAUGHING GULLs
feeding in the area of the bridge. No terns were seen.
From there, we headed to Rankin Bottoms but found the road over the railroad
tracks blocked by heavy machinery which was doing some serious work on the
railroad crossing. We had to park and walk in.
This wasn't a bad thing, as we found a place to go from the road, through the
trees, to open space where we could see that there were over 100 GREAT EGRETs
on the quite extensive mud flats. In this area there were also lots of
swallows - mostly TREE, with a few NORTHERN ROUGH-WINGED, BANK and BARN mixed
in. (if we can find a late Purple Martin, Rasmus will have seen all the
Tennessee swallows).
I had recently told Rasmus that we get mostly Lesser Yellowlegs, but as we
scanned the hundreds of shorebirds, we realized that there were quite a lot of
GREATER YELLOWLEGs. A flock of about 25 LESSER YELLOWLEGs flew over and landed
in the distance, but other than that, it was like 5-10 Greaters for every
Lesser.
US bird number 100 for Rasmus was a good one - AMERICAN AVOCET. This single
bird was easily seen, and gave us pretty close views.
One bird that flew over that unfortunately Rasmus didn't get a good view of
was a surprising AMERICAN BITTERN. It flew toward the area of the coal tipple
and disappeared.
Other birds of note:
Mallard
Wood Duck
Double-crested Cormorant
Green Heron
Black-crowned Night-Heron
(no other herons, besides Great Blue and Great Egret)
Osprey
Semipalmated Plover
Killdeer
Solitary Sandpiper
Sanderling
Least Sandpiper
Western/Semipalmated Sandpipers, too far off to tell. There was one probably
Western close by, but we never saw it walk, and so didn't have enough of a
look at it.
lots of Pectoral Sandpipers
Belted Kingfisher
David Trently,
Knoxville, TN
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