Chronicles of an Ontario Birder: Bruce migration update: Late March

Bruce migration update: Late March

It's been awhile since my last post about Bruce County, and since then lots of birds have arrived. Another new development since my last post is COVID-19 in Ontario.. which has certainly changed a lot in a few short weeks. My usual April birding experience invloves quite a bit of birding in the southern part of the county and outings with the Bruce Birding Club, both which will not be happening for me this year (Just to clarify, there are far more dire impacts of the virus than missed birding, but since my blog is about birds, that's what I'm focusing on). Anyway this means I'll be birding my yard and 5 Mile Radius a lot more than usual this spring (Edit - down to my yard/road now..).
I am participating in a few challenges for yard/patch birding already, so I decided I'm going to attempt a yard/5MR big year. For now anyway, this will be much easier to accomplish than my seemingly annual Bruce Big Year. My goal is to tie or pass my current all time yard/5MR lists, which sit at 171 and 210 respectively.. before next year. This will be hard to accomplish, but it'll be fun to have a challenge to work at and will help keep me busy during the pandemic. To keep content up on my blog, I'll try to do posts frequently about new additions or just good days of birding. Let's see if I can keep it up.

Anyway on to the point of this post, recent migration in.

Raptor migration has picked up in the last week, however the winds haven't been favorable so I haven't had a good hawk flight yet.

To date my raptor numbers are;

Turkey Vulture – 31
Northern Harrier – 5
Sharp-shinned Hawk – 1
Cooper's Hawk - 5
Northern Goshawk – 1 (+1 adult that's been wintering around here)
Bald Eagle – 48
Red-shouldered Hawk – 3
Ret-tailed Hawk – 4
Rough-legged Hawk – 6
American Kestral - 3
Merlin - 4

So yeah, not too bad.. but still quite low for number so far. Hopefully it'll pick up in the next week or so. Some raptor pictures below..

- Bald Eagle

- Red-shouldered Hawk

- Rough-legged Hawk

- Merlin

As the inland lakes and rivers open up again, the waterfowl have started to return in mass. Ring-necked ducks are abundant, with smaller numbers of both scaup species of Redhead hanging around.

- Ring-necked Ducks

On the puddle duck front; Green-winged Teal, Blue-winged Teal, American Widgeon and Northern Shoveler have all returned in the last week and Wood Ducks are starting to trickle through as well.
I've had a few Great Blue Herons flying over my house in the past few days, which were my first ones this year.

- Great Blue Herons

American Woodcocks are displaying almost all night now and it's a fun daily activity to watch them in the evenings. I tried taking a video a few days ago and got ok results.

Link to the video here...

Tree Swallows, Northern Flickers, Belted Kingfishers, Fox Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers have all arrived in the last week and lots of new migrants will be here every day now.