The winter of 2018-19 saw the initiation of the Pond Creek National Wildlife Refuge's Christmas Bird Count. I had birded this southwest AR refuge with a friend during the summer of '17 and we had joked about the idea of starting up a CBC circle for this area. However, by December of '18, we had the paperwork submitted and were well on our way to circle status. We picked the very last day of the count season (1/5/19) for our count, hoping to pick up any volunteers looking for one more count before the season ended. Unfortunately, all of our other counters had to cancel for the count, leaving just the two of us to survey the entire 15-mile diameter circle.

As my earlier post stated, I was trying to photograph a larger percentage of birds observed during my outings. I failed at this during the CBC season up to this point. This count wasn't much better in the way of photographic documentation, but I was able to manage a few pics of birds and other wildlife.

We started out before dawn, trying to find some owls. We did manage 3 Barred Owls, but had no recordings. Most of the refuge was under water, due to recent rains. Fortunately, this didn't seem to phase the birds at all. We found almost all of the woodland passerines that we were hoping for in the first couple of hours. Most of the refuge surveyed was mixed pine-hardwood forest. While cruising around different tracks of forests and bits of the Little River, we picked up large amounts of American Robins and a surprising total of 4 Blue-headed Vireos. The following were photographed in and around the forest and adjacent creeks/sloughs:

Hooded Merganser https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479765
Pileated Woodpecker https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479766
Double-crested Cormorant https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479767
Bald Eagle https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479768

While stopped at an oxbow called Red Lake, we found one of the more surprising finds of the day, a Variegated Meadowhawk (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479769). I had mentioned earlier in the day, when we saw that the temps would get into the upper-60s, that I would like to see an ode for the day. I said this in jest and was completely astonished when my friend exclaimed, "Dragon!" We were very happy to find this ode and were treated to at least 3 more during the day.

In the afternoon we birded more fields than anything else. We focused on pastures to try and add to our woodland species dominated list. We both had scouted out the area in November and had found several different open country birds. Unfortunately, we missed many of these on the actual count day. There were some consolations, though, as we found a rare winter resident Lark Sparrow and an uncommon winter resident Merlin in this region. Here are some of our other finds:

Northern Mockingbird https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479771
Dark-eyed Junco https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479770
Red-shouldered Hawk https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19479772

We ended the day with a decent count of 71 species, several of which were unexpected. However, there were many horrible misses on the count, as well (Mourning Dove, Killdeer, American Kestrel, and others). Our last observation for the counts was a series of flyovers by at least 100 Wood Ducks at dusk.