So for 2018, my first year as a full-time birder, I set out to see 250 bird species in Ontario. By mid-October my year list was at 270, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new targets. I opined that there were maybe five more birds that I could reasonably hope to find by year-end. So how did that bold prediction pan out?
October continued to be good to me, and I was able to add a Hudsonian Godwit on Ault Island (near Morrisburg), a Lesser Black-backed Gull at the Lafleche landfill site, and a Eurasian Wigeon (the foreign cousin of our American Wigeon) along the St Lawrence Causeway.
November
Then, depression set in. I contracted some sort of perfidious virus and was essentially out of commission for the month of November. My November list was the nine birds I could see out the back window. Sadly, this meant that I missed out on a mega-rarity: the first Ontario record and third Canada record of a Calliope Hummingbird, which hung around Goderich until it was seen by every birder in Ontario except me. J’étais triste en maudit.
December
Fortunately, the worm started to turn in December. I headed off to Niagara Falls with my new birding pal Bruce to take in the
the Ontario Field Ornithologists’ Gull ID weekend. The event consisted of an ID lecture on Saturday afternoon and a field trip to the Niagara Gorge on Sunday. The gorge regularly produces rare gulls in the winter when conditions are right, so hopes were high.
Most participants arrived at the Falls on Friday evening, so Bob Highcock and the Peninsula Field Naturalists kindly organized a field trip on Saturday morning to the piers at Port Weller. It was an excellent day out and we had great views of, inter alia, Red-throated Loon. I had seen the species in May at extreme telescope range, so it was nice to see one cavorting in the water 100 metres offshore.
I also was fortunate to add a new bird to the year list – a small flock of Common Redpolls made a brief appearance. Redpolls are normally a bird of the boreal forest, but 2018 was an irruption year, where a shortage of food drives finch species farther south than they normally roam. This turned out to be the first of several sightings of Common Redpoll, including a lone individual that visited our backyard feeder a couple of times.
Gulls
The Gull Weekend itself was a slight disappointment. The ID workshop, run by Justin Peter, was excellent, but sadly we were blessed with unseasonably warm and sunny weather on Sunday. On the plus side it was much more comfortable as we spent motionless hours telescoping gulls in the windswept Niagara Gorge. On the minus side there was no reason for deep water gulls to come in off the lake and seek shelter in the gorge. As a result, no real rarities were seen, though we had good views of Iceland, Lessser Black-backed and Little Gulls among the hordes of Herring Gulls. And on the way home Bruce introduced me to Earl the Eastern Screech Owl, who was roosting happily in a spruce tree.
Finding the Last Bird
Pine Grosbeak is another bird that irrupted south in late 2018, so when a flock was reported to have visited a crab apple tree in nearby Amherstview I went on the prowl. Two hours of watching the tree in question produced but a chickadee or two. With a heavy heart I turned for home, only to note a commotion in a mountain ash bush in the parking lot of an apartment block one street over from the Tree of No Birds. And there they were, happily feeding. Bird #275.
On Dec 16th I participated in the Kingston Christmas Bird Count, which was remarkable only for the extreme paucity of birds in the area covered by me and Chris Heffernan. However on the ferry ride back from Wolfe Island someone mentioned that a Greater White-fronted Goose had been spotted on the grounds of the Royal Military College. Needless to say we sped there with all dispatch and spotted the blighter almost immediately. So a bird that I had chased unsuccessfully four times in the bleak fields outside of Ottawa turned up fat and happy about 900m from my front door. I admired the beast at close range, suppressed the urge to throttle it for its perfidy[1], and made off.
One Last Twitch
It had been agreed that we would spend Christmas with my brother-in-law’s family in Mississauga. This was not a hardship because (a) we all get on well, (b) our niece’s firstborn would be there, and (c) several juicy rare birds had been seen recently in the Golden Triangle. For boxing day my bride kindly agreed to accompany me on a birding foray, and though we dipped on the Eurasian Collared-doves in Hamilton, we managed to spot and photograph a flock of 58 Bohemian Waxwings near Caledon. Bohemian Waxwing is a holarctic species, meaning it breeds in the boreal forest in North America and Eurasia. They regularly irrupt from Scandinavia to England and Scotland in winter, but in seven years of living in the UK I had managed to see exactly 1/58th of the number we saw in Caledon. And since I had also managed up to then so see exactly zero in Canada, it was a great find.
So the year was just about up, but there was one potential target left. Short-eared Owls are annual, though scarce visitors to Wolfe and Amherst Islands. Most owls are nocturnal hunters and thus hard to see, but Short-ears are crepuscular – they tend to hunt at dawn and dusk as well. (They are known to hunt during the day when vole populations are high, including on 19 January 2019… but that’s another story). So in principle it’s a simple task. All one has to do is go to Amherst Island, find a vantage point that looks over short grassy fields, and wait, with one eye on the landscape and the other watching the clock. And in the fifteen minute window between sunset and the last safe moment to catch the five o’clock ferry, owls might appear. And since I have gone through this long-winded exposition, you have doubtless already guessed that this is exactly what happened.
So there we were – year bird #278. Being a good citizen I drove home and parked before breaking out the single malt.
Good Company
As I noted in an earlier post, one of the essential elements of birding success is good company. I was privileged to share the long miles, long hours, hits and misses with a fine group of birders. I will no doubt forget a few names, but key birding pals in this endeavour have included:
- My bride Lynn (“Sure, let’s go to Rainy River”)
- Andy and Mike from the AOS (3663km, 198 species, 10 Tim Hortons, 12 beer species)
- My birding mentor Dr Paul (“Let’s go get that Kiskadee!”)
- The North Leeds Birders, especially Jim, Ken, Janis, and Kathy (“What time is coffee break?”)
- Erwin and Sandra (“I know a few good spots for….. “)
- Richard and Dianne (“We’re in!”)
- OFO trip leaders Justin, Pete, Tyler, Josh and Jeremy (“Gulls are cool”)
- KFN trip leaders including Peter, Kurt and Gaye (“You never know what we’ll see”)
- Jon Ruddy and his gang of Eastern Ontario Birders (“I will find you a Ross’s Goose!”)
- Pauliina and Meg (“Sure, let’s go there. It’s kinda on the way”)
- Bruce (“It’s always the right time to chase a rarity”)
The final statistics are:
- 278 bird species in Ontario, of which I saw 277 and heard but didn’t see one (Eastern Whip-poor-will – an invisible bird with a very distinctive call)
- 1 additional species seen from Ontario but sitting in Lewiston N.Y. (Which I refused to include in my Ontario list. Unlike, harrumph, at least 30 eBird listers who apparently take a more expansive view of what goes on their ONTARIO lists).
- 17 new life birds
- 24 species seen previously but not in Ontario
(For comparison purposes we saw 266 species in Costa Rica in ten days).
Sites Visited
- National Parks and National Wildlife Areas – 6
- Provincial Parks – 6
- Other parks – 11
- Conservation Areas – 17
- Bird Observatories – 2
- Sewage Treatment Facilities and Landfill Sites – 11
Distance Travelled – approximately 19,000 km
Circumference of the Earth – 40,075km
[1] To be precise for the perfidy of its species. It seemed unfair to make this one individual a scapegoose.
