Following Tom Johnson's example I found some interesting birds on the BBS I completed on June 28 in Cedar County west of Tipton. It's 95% corn and bean fields but it amazes me that I find a few birds every year that you wouldn't expect to find in heavily cultivated, flat terrain. A Cooper's hawk flying over a bean field with few trees in sight, a bobolink flyover with no habitat in eyeshot, and a great horned owl perched in the loft of an old barn with no habitat to speak of in any direction. Among the less unexpected species, a family of kestrels at the same farmstead as other years, 5 pheasants, and 6 western meadowlark versus 12 eastern. The bean field where I had upland sandpiper last year is now planted with corn so no luck there. Many of the bean fields in past years were corn this year and this is the first year I didn't find horned lark.
