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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Rare appearance of White-winged Crossbill & Yellow-billed Loon (1 Viewer)

lulubelle

Well-known member
A beautiful White-winged Crossbill has shown up at a private residence in Norman, Ok and the Yellow-billed Loon is hanging out at Lake Hefner, which is very close to Norman. I did drive up to hopefully spot both birds, but only got the crossbill. We had a cold snap come through and Oklahoma was colder than the Dallas-Ft Worth area. I froze my hiney off waiting to see the crossbill - I finally couldn't tolerate the cold any more and birded by car till it showed up little more than an hour later. I didn't think I could tolerate the wind chill coming off the lake so I gave up on seeing the loon - for today at least! If it is hanging out for a little longer, I may drive up on a warmer day and look for it.
 
If you ever get the chance, take a trip to Dog Lake, Ontario, Canada. We were up there one year on a fishing trip and were out in the middle of the lake during heavy fog and you could hear the loons (common that is) calling eerily through the fog. Awesome experience.

-Matt
 
I went up to Norman/OKC Saturday. Went to Norman first and the crossbill showed up within 5 minutes. Hung around another 30 minutes or so to try and get a better picture. I finally gave up on the picture after freezing for 30 minutes.

So we headed over to Lake Hefner in search of the yellow-billed loon. Started at Prairie Dog Point but didn't see anything unusual. So we started around the damn and found some loons and common mergansers (lifer). The loons were so far out that we couldn't get a positive ID on them. Someone else said based on how that 1 loon was acting he would guess it was the yellow-billed. The guy was trying to get a better picture of the pacific loon. Later down the damn I saw him bring out the camera so I'm assuming that was the pacific loon we were seeing close to the damn, but I still can't be sure.

So to wrap up the day, I had 1 male white-winged crossbill (lifer), hooded mergansers (lifer), common mergansers (lifer), and a possibility of common, pacific, and yellow-billed loons (all 3 would be lifers).
 
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