One of the joys of birding (and there are many), is seeing a bird for the first time. Today was one of those moments. Reports of a Townsend’s Solitaire in the area surfaced about a week ago and one of my good birding friends called yesterday to say that she had just seen him at Vadnais Lake. Today I took off with camera in tow and fairly quickly found him in a stand of Junipers. Somehow this guy took a wrong turn at the Rocky Mountains and decided to visit Minnesota for a few weeks before heading south for the winter.
“A long-tailed gray bird of the high western mountains, the Townsend’s Solitaire descends in the winter to lower elevations where it feeds almost exclusively on juniper berries. “ All About Birds. http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Townsends_Solitaire/id
