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From the Mountains to the ... inner coastal plain



All,

My work took me to the Linnville Gorge area late last week. On Friday morning I saw several red-breasted nuthatches near the NC Forest Service's Crossnore Training facility and five red crossbills in the Frasier fir seed nursery at the same site.

On Saturday afternoon, my family and I went down to Tri-State sod farm at Timothy, North Carolina between rain storms. This sod farm is located along Easy Money Road between the cross roads community of Timothy (approximately 8 miles south of the Meadow exit on I-40) and State Route 13 west of Newton Grove. (Easy Money is called Wash Mclamb in the Delorme). The sod farm has several hundred acres of turf fields of several species and in various states of management, and there are a couple of semipermanent (thanks to this year's incredible amount of rain) "marshes." This site is a bit more than an hour from Raleigh for triangle area birders. Saturday afternoon we saw about 100 pectoral sandpipers, 3 stilt sandpipers, 1 lesser yellowlegs, 1 black-bellied plover, and about a dozen least sandpipers, along with over a hundred killdeers. Most of the birds were in a bermuda sod field about 1/2 mile north of 13.

There is another sod farm located about 4 miles east of Newton's Grove (about 10 miles from the above site) on Rt. 13. We checked it as well but did not see anything apart from killdeers. Steve Shultz has had some goodies there, though, so I'll be going back.

I'll probably be checking both sod farms on Sunday afternoon if anyone''s interested in going along.

Take care,

Clyde Sorenson
Clayton and Raleigh, NC
clyde_sorenson@ncsu.edu