Continuing from my last post, now for my November and December highlights.
The month started off with a bang ~ A Summer Tanager (fairly) close to home. On November 6th a Tobermory resident was walking past a stand of fruit trees when she noticed a bright reddish bird fly up from the ground. Luckily she had an interest in birds and sent a message to a few local birders. Her best guess was Vermilion Flycatcher, which is quite a rarity anywhere in Ontario. The following day Ethan Meleg and Arni Stissennen drove up to investigate... and found an immature male Summer Tanager at said location. While not as rare as the flycatcher would have been, the tanager is still a great bird for Bruce County, with only around 10(ish) all time records. One of those was from my yard actually.... Way back in 2017. My first self found rarity in fact! That bird disappeared before I could obtain good photos though, so I thought I would try for the Tobermory bird. I had to work the next day, however I was off around 3pm so I zipped up to "The Tub" with just enough time to get a good search in before daylight faded. Located behind the town's grocery store are several large properties containing a mix of apple trees as well as various ornamental fruiting species. To me it's always seemed like a spot something interesting would appear... a good food source right near the end of the peninsula ~ a vagrant trap if ever there was one. It had been overcast most of the day, but just as I was arriving the sun came out, casting the area in a soft late afternoon light. I strolled around the street looking from tree to tree when I heard a familiar call.. a Yellow-rumped Warbler. Not my quarry, but a nice bird for November and my first in a few weeks. A few minutes later a flash of orange flew off the ground and landed on a branch only a few meters away. This bird was my target, the tanager. It didn't seem to care at all about my presence, and I actually had to back away to fit the bird inside my camera frame (with a 300mm lens). I enjoyed a few minutes of amazing views with the bird, then left him in peace and headed home. Definitely a good way to start the month!
Next up was one of my best finds of the year, a Black-legged Kittiwake. On November 11th I was signed up to lead a hike (which involves driving, standing and interestingly enough very little hiking) for the Owen Sound Field Naturalists, which was focused on waterfowl of the Owen Sound lakeshore. I've done this hike for a few years, and while it's not the best for a big species tally, there have been some nice highlights including; Red Phalarope, Red-throated Loon and a flock of 70 Greater White-fronted Geese. This year the weather decided to put on a show and we were treated to one of the first snowfalls of the year the night before. The drive in to Owen Sound in the morning was quite nasty, sloppy roads and patches of slick ice. I honestly wondered if anyone would be attending, but as I got into the town area and dropped in elevation the snow changed to rain and it looked slightly more promising for an outing. I was surprised to see almost 20 people showed up, a good turnout for sure. We spent the morning touring the east shoreline of Owen Sound, seeing not a whole heck of a lot and getting wet and damp. It's always worse being a leader on these sorts of things. The participants are normally just happy to be out birding, seeing whatever is around and chatting with friends. For the leader though these kinds of days are the ones you dread. It's not the leaders fault that there aren't many birds around, or that it's raining, but nonetheless you feel bad. By lunch we had seen close to twenty species, with a few highlights including Long-tailed Ducks and Red-necked Grebe. Everyone was sitting in their cars eating lunch in the parking lot of an arena, when I wdecided to scan the adjacent lake for birds instead. This tactic had paid off in 2018, when I had found a Red Phalarope bobbing around just offshore while the others were eating. It was still lightly raining out, but I walked to the shoreline and started scanning the water. My binoculars fell on a small group of gulls sitting on the water, so naturally I started going through them for something interesting. All I had seen were Herring Gulls, when my eye caught a small gull sitting near the edge of the group. It looked mighty convincing for a Black-legged Kittiwake, which would be a real rarity for the area, but it was near the other side of the inlet and just a bit far for binoculars. I sprinted back to the car, grabbed my scope and waved at the other birders to follow me. Luckily it was still there when I set the scope up, and indeed it was a juvenile Black-legged Kittiwake! Everyone got good views and the mood of the group seemed to instantly improve. One of the cars had been at Tim Horton's when they saw my message on the rare bird alert and came rushing back to the parking lot. Unfortunately two people had gone home for lunch and missed the bird (it left 20 minutes later). This was a first record for Grey County, and all of Georgian Bay actually, so I was quite thrilled to find it! The rest of the day was rather uneventful, but one bird makes it worth it : )
My decision to go birding on November 20th was quite spontaneous, as is often the case. It was a day of strong southwest wind, and was also a weekend which meant I wasn't working. I decided to drive down to Port Elgin and lakewatch for a few hours, with hopes of having something rare fly by. However as is the case with 90% of Bruce lakewatches, it was a bust. An hour in and I had seen little besides some mergansers and goldeneyes. I was considering my options when I got a text from Bob Taylor that he and Anne-Maire were heading down to Lambton to chase a Townsend's Solitaire that was found a few days before by James "rarity machine" Holdsworth. Bob said I was welcome to tag along, and I decided to jump on it as it was more appealing than the current options (continue watching an empty lake, or driving home). I needed the solitiare for my Ontario list, I've had multiple chances to chase other ones, but it's an annual rarity in the province so I had never been enticed to drive a few hours for one. Two hours later we had arrived at the said location (near Ipperwash) and rolled up to a few cars parked beside the road with birders milling around. According to them the bird had been seen all morning, however it only popped out briefly from the red cedars in which it was hiding. We didn't have to wait long though, twenty minutes later the bird popped up and let us admire it for a few minutes before disappearing again into the shrub. I only managed a few poor record shots, but the views were very good. After that we drove east, as I had received a tip about a Rufous Hummingbird that had been visiting a feeder not far from our location. Unlike the wheatly bird I had seen in October, this bird was a female and thus was much harder to distinguish from the very similair Allen's Hummingbird. Good photos had been taken by local birders and the key distinguishing field marks were visible, confirming that it was in fact a rufous. Bob and Anne-marie had never seen one before, and hey, how often do you get the chance to see two Rufous Hummingbirds in one year here in Ontario?! We didn't have to search hard for it, shortly after I pulled in I spotted it sitting on a coniferous tree in the lawn. 2/2, quite a successful day! Certainly better than my lakewatch was.
On the last weekend of November I joined the Bruce Birding Club for their annual Hamilton/Niagara birding weekend. That could honestly be a whole post in itself, but this is about rare birds so I'll keep it brief. The Saturday was spent birding the Hamilton area, seeing all the usual suspects (scoters, Canvasbacks, mockingbirds and 1000s of Long-tailed Ducks). In the evening a few of us drove to watch the Niagara-On-The-Lake evening gull flyby, when all of the Bonaparte's Gulls that have been foraging on the Niagara River fly out to Lake Ontario for the night. We were hoping to see some rarer Little Gulls mixed in too. I have to say though, watching the flyby that evening was definitely one of my birding highlights this fall. The wind had died, and the warm evening light was making the passing flocks of Bonaparte's Gull pop against the dark water. We estimated close to 10,000 passed by in the hour we spent there, truly a spectacular sight. Amoung them I saw 18 Little Gulls, the most I've ever seen at once in Ontario.
The next day the focus was on the gulls of the Niagara River, and the weather was making this as difficult as possible for us. Heavy snow came down for the entire day, making scanning for white birds a real challenge. We did see 7 gull species (including Iceland, Little and Lesser Black-backed), however it was quieter than previous years. The highlight of the day came in the form of a duck though, a Black-bellied Whistling-Duck. This bird had been found at the Dufferin Islands park back in the summer and has since taken up residence there with the local Mallards. Some concerns were raised about it being an escapee, but current consensus seems to support a wild bird (it showed up during the same time as the whistling-duck invasion of the summer was happening, and it shows no signs of captivity like clipped wings etc). We pulled into the park and found the duck swimmig amoung a large flock of Mallards right beside shore. It, like most park waterfowl, seemed quite habituated with people passing nearby and even paddled closer to look for handouts. Certainly not the most exciting way to get a lifer, but it's still a really cool bird and I'm not complaining! (Even took a selfie with it)
They say there's no rest for the wicked, and there certainly isn't any for bird chasers either. While I was in Niagara I saw on the provincial rare bird alert that Justin Peter had found a Glaucous-winged Gull in Barrie. This bird represents only the 2nd record for Ontario, with the first coming from Sault St. Marie last year. The sault bird wasn't refound though, so this was really the first chaseable record for the province. Needless to say it generated a lot of excitement, and over the weekend 100s of Ontario's keenest bird chasers drove up and saw it. Since you never know how long a bird like this will stick around, I wanted to be on the safe side and see it as soon as possible. I had to work on Monday, but Tuesday morning I slotted a few hours off in the morning for bird chasing (easier to do when you work from home). Jarmo was going to see it too, so on November 30th I left my house at 8am and drove towards Barrie with him. On route we picked up a few Grey County birders (Lynne Richardson and David Turner), as it's always nice to carpool when you can while chasing to cut down on the carbon footprint. There were positive reports as we drove over, which is always encouraging when you're chasing a rare bird. We pulled up to Spirit Catcher, a small bayside park in downtown Barrie and started looking. The bird had been hanging out on the nearby docks, so we set up our scopes and started scanning. There were under 50 gulls perched on the docks, so it wasn't that difficult to pick out the larger, mottled grey one amongst the herrings. It was sleeping for most of our time there, but it did stand up and look around a few times before we left. I didn't get as good of pictures as some of my friends did, but I enjoyed awesome views through the scope. An epic bird to end the month, definitely the rarest species I've seen this year.
The last highlight of the month was another repeat rarity, this time in the form of a Townsend's Solitaire. I was just finishing up work for the day in Ferndale, when I got a text from a local birder named John saying that he just had a possible Solitaire in Tobermory. He was out without binoculars and it flew over his car, perched on a tree limb for a minute and disappeared down the road. He had a poor cellphone picture that sure looked like a solitiare, so I called Jarmo and twenty minutes later we were heading up the highway. John was waiting for us when we arrived, the bird however was not. The area it was seen in was in the Tobermory townsite right beside the water, which is an area dominated by dense cedars. This makes searching yards for a small bird quite challenging! After half an hour we split up and expanded our search radius to nearby roads... which turned out to be a good idea as a few minutes later I see Jarmo briskly walking back towards me waving his arm. He had refound the bird down the road by a stand of junipers. We jumped in his car and raced back to the spot.... and sure enough it was still there. Unfortunately I had left my camera at home and my phone had run out of battery... so I didn't get any photos. Jarmo got some great ones though, so click here for those. This was a Bruce lifer for me and a nice end to my 2021.
that's all I've got!
