A section of Frazier Pike near the Arkansas River and the Port of Little Rock has been a birding hot spot this winter.
Land along the paved road, about nine miles between Slack Water Harbor Drive and Asher Road, runs southeast of the industrial area that parallels the Arkansas River on the northern side, just east of the Interstate 440 bridge in Little Rock.
Unusual birds have found the area a nice place to visit. In early December, a snowy owl was seen west of Frazier Pike at a factory that makes blades for windmills. That bird was the Arkansas representative of a national flurry of snowy owl sightings broadly south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
One snowy owl went as far south as Florida.
Such instances of a specific species of bird seen out of place or in unusually large numbers is called an “irruption.” The Arkansas snowy owl was seen and photographed for about two weeks.
When the owl was no longer readily seen, birders and wildlife officials began searching for the rare wintertime visitor. No snowy owl, but they did find several other infrequently seen birds along Frazier Pike. Chief among them was seven sandhill cranes.Birders also saw a merlin (a rarely seen small hawk), rusty blackbirds, kestrels and horned larks.
On Dec. 27, Gail Miller of Conway found a dead snowy owl along the side of the road in Lonoke and took it to Arkansas Game and Fish Commission biologists. They determined that it was the same owl that had been seen near Frazier Pike, and that it had been killed by a collision with an automobile.
Miller had photographed the bird in Little Rock while it was alive. The biologists plan to have the remains mounted in a lifelike pose for display in the Witt Stephens Jr. Arkansas Nature Center in Little Rock.
ActiveStyle, Pages 28 on 02/10/2014