I apologize in advance… my blog posts are about to become a bit out of order and confusing to follow. The main reason for this is I still want to write a post or two about my weekend birding in southern Ontario, but I also want to detail today’s events. I have decided, against my better judgement that doing both of these and staying up late isn’t a good idea… so this will be about today, and I’ll write about my Pelee birding later this week.
The chaos all started yesterday afternoon, when I saw that Susan Nagy had found a Barnacle Goose in Ottawa. It was near 5pm at this point, so chasing the bird the same day definitely wasn’t in the cards. The second, and more dire issue was that my car is out of commission for a few days as it’s at the mechanic (making odd noises… hopefully nothing too serious!). This threw a bit of a wrench into my plans, but luckily my parents were kind enough to drive me down to Waterloo, where after catching a solid 2 hours of sleep I l left for Ottawa with Ezra… at the lovely time of 2:00am.
After a long and rather uneventful drive, we rolled up to the spot where the goose had been seen the previous evening. In all honesty, my hopes were not high, as after spending 8 days in Ottawa over the past month goose hunting I had a feeling that rare geese just had it out for me. There were lots of Canadas in the fields to scan through though, so that’s what we started doing. For the next 45 minutes we carefully picking through every Canada Goose, looking for anything different. Then I heard Ezra say “I’ve got the goose!”, and sure enough he did. When I looked through his scope and saw a gorgeous goose with a grey and white body, a black neck and a white face, I was relieved to say the least! It was fairly distant, but hey I wasn’t complaining. We watched it for a while, then bailed and headed back towards southern Ontario. Such is the life of a big year birder, constantly on the road.
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| - Barnacle Goose |
On the way back to Hamilton we stopped in Napanee Limestone Plain IBA, where in less than 10 minutes we spotted a pair of Loggerhead Shrikes. This was a lifer for Ezra and a new bird for the big year. The views were really good, the photos on the other hand were not. While there I also saw my first Field Sparrow of the year.
That’s all for now! Another early morning tomorrow… heading back to “Blufftown”.
Ontario Yearlist @ April 11th - 186
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