North Carolina county #98 Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge
The trip to Richmond County is a continuation of the trip to Anson County. Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge is on both sides of the Pee Dee River, which is the border between the two counties. Around noon, the group of us left the refuge, got back on the main road and crossed over the river to go to the Richmond side of the refuge.
The Richmond side is much smaller, but sometimes you can get different duck species there and of course, you never know what you will find at Pee Dee.
There is a lot of land at the refuge that is farmed and then left for the wildlife as habitat. There is also both purposeful and random flooding of various areas, and this can attract a lot of waterfowl at times. As I mentioned in the Anson post, the numbers of waterfowl were not high yet here since I suppose there are many lakes up north that have not started to freeze yet despite the time of year. That said, we did manage to spy an additional species of duck, the Ring-necked Duck.
You can see they are actually swimming on what would normally be a road. Both times I have been at this location, it has been flooded.
To be honest, from a birding perspective, the Richmond side of the refuge was not very exciting, beyond the ducks above. There were some moderate sized blackbird flocks around which were fun to look at, but I spent most of my time socializing, which is a main attraction on trips like this. It is always fun to chat with like-minded folks from all kinds of background.
ebird checklist
