I’ve gotten a bit behind on my posting, so I’ll do a few updates before I get even more behind.
The Saugeen Shores CBC was on the 4th, so that’s as where I’ll begin. In a usual CBC fashion I was up and out the door before sunrise, heading down towards Port Elgin. This year I was covering area 5, which consists mainly of farm fields and a bit of the Saugeen River. Usually I cover area 1 (the Southampton townsite, lakeshore and the dump), but since I’m the compiler I thought it wouldn’t look good if I took the best area..
I arrived shortly after 8am and started by doing the boundary of my section, just to get a feel for the new area. Normally there are 3 or 4 people in each area and they carpool, covering the whole section together.. but obviously that wasn’t possible this year due to Covid. The way we worked around this issue was by cutting up each area into smaller sections, then assigning one person (or household) to each section. I was splitting area 5 along with Doug Pedwall, so the area was smaller than normal. Basically it contained 3 county concessions, a few sideroads that connect them, a section of a major highway and a small conservation area that borders the North Saugeen River. The habitat all around here tends to be a good place to see overwintering raptors, so I figured it wouldn’t be that bad (plus I might get some yearbirds).
Am I ever going to get to the part about the birds? Yes. I was building to that.
The day started off fairly quiet, a few Bald Eagles, a Rough-legged Hawk and the odd Common Raven out in the fields, but not much besides that. Such is the norm for Bruce birding in the winter, the first few hours of the day tend to be unproductive as the songbirds wait for it to warm up a bit before coming out in numbers. Since the fields were dead I decided to take a walk along the river and see what I could find, which turned out to one of my better stops of the day. Nothing crazy, but some pishing produced a Brown Creeper and both nuthatch species, a start anyway. The river itself had a few Common Mergansers and Common Goldeneye on it, which were my only ones of the day. A few Blue Jays, Dark-eyed Juncos and a Pileated Woodpecker were around too. The weather remained the same all day, overcast and 0°C. Even though it was fairly damp out, it was a lot better than some of the CBCs I’ve been on!
The next few hours were spent covering the field areas, where the birding had picked up considerably since my first pass in the morning. Highlights included; 2 American Black Duck, 7 Rough-legged Hawks, 4 Red-tailed Hawks, 8 Bald Eagles, 1 Merlin, 16 Horned Larks, 3 Pine Grosbeaks and a mega flock of Snow Buntings (at least 400).
And guees what?! I finally took photos!!
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| Snow Buntings |
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| Horrible Merlin photo |
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Slightly worse photo?
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| Red-tailed Hawk |
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| Rough-legged Hawk |
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Rough-legged Hawk
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The activity started to die down mid afternoon, so after a final drive around, called it quits and headed home around 3pm with a solid 28 species.
Stopped briefly at the Southampton Harbour on my way through town, where I picked out a Glaucous Gull and a Great Lakes Gull (Herring x Great Black-backed) amoung a massive flock of Herring Gulls.
How’d the count do overall you may wonder? Slightly down on total numbers of individual birds, but we got recorded a new high number of species.. 67! Highlights were Tufted Titmouse, Bohemian Waxwing and Eastern Meadowlarks. Notable misses included Snowy Owl and Golden Eagle... yikes..
All in all not a bad day!
That's all for now..
