A bit behind on my posts... Friday afternoon I headed to northern Ontario with Ezra and William for a whirlwind 5 day trip. I'm going to wait to write about the tript until next week so I can put everything together in one post ~ feel like that will make more sense!
For now here is what I was up to on Friday...
On January 7th I woke up at 6am to try and refind the Glaucous-winged Gull that had been found in Hamilton the previous night by Alvan Buckley. I rolled out of Guelph with William (who's house I was staying at) shorty after and we drove to Bayfront Park in Hamilton. It was quite crisp beside the lake when we got out of the car, but the sun was just rising, and with it the promise of warmth to follow. We quickly got down to the edge of the park and began scanning some gulls that were sitting on the water. According to local birders a number of gulls spend their nights here, then at dawn they leave the waterfront and make their way inland to forage for the day (a nice way of saying eating garbage at dumps). There were several hundred gulls present on this particular morning, most taking flight shortly after we arrived. Despite some intensive searching we failed to pick out the gull in question. We did see a few Iceland and Glaucous Gulls however, which was nice, even if I didn't really pay them any attention at the time : )
We met up with Ezra here, and together we drove up to Brantford, where a lot of the gulls that roost in Hamilton seem to spend their days at the landfill & surrounding area there. I have had a rocky relationship with gull chasing in Brant County... to put it mildly. I used to visit family in Paris (a town which borders Brantford) quite often and during a few of my stays there I chased rare gulls that were being seen at the Brantford Dump and adjacent Mohawk Lake. The gulls were common (formerly Mew) and slaty-backed, and I missed them 2 and 8 times respectively. I did all the right things too, spend time at both those locations and went at the right time of day. Twice I got positive reports that the Slaty-backed Gull was being seen, immediately left Paris and arrived 20 minutes later only to learn that the bird had taken off and I had missed it by 2 minutes. Needless to say I had some negative feelings towards the Brantford landfill, and even warned my travelling companions that me being there would likely jinx their chances of seeing the Glaucous-winged Gull.
We began our search at Mohawk Lake, which is often the preferred spot for the gulls to hang out when they're not eating trash at the dump (which is a mere kilometer away. When we arrived there were 0 birds sitting on the lake, so we spilt up, me heading to the dump and Ezra & William remaining to keep a vigil on the lake. Unfortunately the Brantford Dump doesn't allow birders to enter, so I positioned myself on the berm which surrounds the perimeter of the landfill. From this location I couldn't see the birds on the ground, but I could see when when they flushed into the air and circled above the treeline. (happens quite often due to raptors & vehicles). This wasn't exactly ideal, as they were fairly distant and I didn't usually have much time to scan them before they landed out of sight again. It seemed to be my best bet though, so for two hours I lost myself in the repetitive process of identifying flying gulls. My best estimate was around 2000 Herring Gulls, with a few other species, mixed in (Iceland, Glaucous, Lesser & Greater Black-backed). I've always enjoyed going through large flocks of birds like this, and honestly it was quite peaceful there, sunny and relatively warm for a January day. It would have been a lot more enjoyable with my target bird though : )
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| - Brantford Dump |
Just around 11am I drove back down to Mohawk Lake to check on the the others, but they reported no luck there either. While we were chatting an alert came on our found that the Glaucous-winged Gull had been refound on the Grand River just 8 minutes from our location! There definitely were no speed laws broken to get there. We screamed up to the parking lot beside the river and full out ran up to the crowd of birders gathered there. It seemed that Brantford had decided to cut me a break, because the bird was still there! We were lucky too, as it flew off ten minutes after we arrived (it did return later in the day, but). I was thrilled to get this bird, as I was frankly expecting it to take several days to find it, and was considering the possibility that the northern trip would have to be moved back a week. There were also Lesser Black-backed and Iceland Gulls present, and this time I actually got photos of them.
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| - Glaucous-winged Gull |
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| - GWGU |
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| - Glaucous-winged in flight |
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| - Herring, Lesser Black-backed, Greater Black-backed, Iceland & Glaucous-winged!! |
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| - Iceland Gull |
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| - Glaucous, Great Black-backed & Herring |
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