Neighbourhood in Chaos!

 We have a new friend in my Chatham neighbourhood! When I got back home a week or so ago I noticed that quite often, birds in the area would be in a panic, flocks of them out fly very fast past the window...strange isn't it!?  I figured something must be there scaring them off, whether a person or predator.

One day while sitting at the table I saw a flash of a larger bird going by following a flock of mourning doves.  I think I scared my parents by how fast I jumped from the table!  "IT"S BACK!  THE COOPERS HAWK IS BACK!" I screamed!  I remember last winter when I was home, I saw a Coopers hawk hanging around the neighbourhood, and that time it was in my tree!  Now, although I am not overly sure if it is actually the same one...I have a feeling it is!  You could say my Camera and Binos have been on high alert and stationed 24/7 on the kitchen table.

While outside one day I looked up and noticed a red-tailed hawk circling!  I was actually really surprised as I've never seen one around my home before.  It circled close over my house and then suddenly a second one joined in!  I'm not very good at ID'ing hawks at a distance...and unfortunately my hawk book is already packed away.  Based on it's tail (spread out and no barring) and wings, I know that it was different than the Coopers.  The tail had a reddish glean to it leaning me to choose Red-tail.

Two days ago, my dad and I came home from doing some chores and I spotted the Coopers Hawk in our neighbour's tree.  What a beautiful sight it was!  It stayed for a few minutes and let me take a few shots of it, but unfortunately flew off once I came a little too close to it.

I spotted the little guy today in the middle of a snowstorm perched on the back fence a few houses down.  I wanted to go take another photo but walking to a house and saying "Hi, I noticed a hawk in your backyard, I like 5 houses west of you...can I take a picture of it in your backyard?" was just a little bit creepy...

It has been so much fun looking out of different windows of my house and seeing flocks of birds scattering from a certain direction.  It is something that I think most people in my neighbourhood wouldn't think twice about, but now I (and even my parents!) think "oh hey, that hawk must be over there!".  It's been my latest source of entertainment being able to guess where abouts it is in the neighbourhood and even guessing by the flocks when it will fly over our house.  Let's say I haven't been getting too much packing accomplished...

Someone posted in a local site asking what to do in Chatham for the day, they were tired of only going to a skating rink. I replied to the post saying that it is an amazing day and we have many local places to walk and hike like Rondeau, Paxton's Bush, or St. Clair NWA.  The lady said "Oh that's always the same old".   This comment really struck me as being funny and strange. When I look in my backyard, that I have seen for the past 11 or so years, I barely ever see the same old thing.  Sure the same tree is there, the garden is in the same spot, but there is always something new to see.  I've been to Paxton's Bush ever since I was 6 and there is still always something new to experience, I guess you just have to be open to looking and seeing the differences.

A Hoot of Time!

On Sunday I got a report of a Snowy Owl fairly close to my house.  I get all excited when these come in because it gives me a bit of a "starting point" when I want to head out and look for some.

When I got to the area the bird had been reported from...there was absolutely nothing. I parked on the roadside at various angles and searched with my binos everywhere...not a sign! I figured that I was already out here looking, so I may as well keep going!  I started to drive past Tilbury to a spot I remembered seeing one in the dark on my drive home from the Windsor Airport the week previous.  As I was driving and scanning the fields I suddenly noticed a bird flying!  My brain automatically assumed it was a crow (in Chatham...you tend to assume anything dark and flying is a crow..there's SO MANY OF THEM).  

I started to second guess myself when I was like "Shit...if that's a crow it has one hell of a wingspan, and is bicoloured...OMG IT'S A SNOWY OWL!!".  I hopped out of the car and watched in awe as it flew over. I had realized the true size of them before this moment.  Unfortunately I was in such a moment that I didn't take a photo. I drove over to where it landed in a nearby field and was able to spot it through my binos.  Of course it was smack in the middle of the field so the photo I was able to snap of it is the one below.  It adds a bit of a "game" to it...Instead of where's waldo it is where's the owl!.  With all the clumps of dirt and snow it certainly blends in well!

Snowy Owl in the middle of a field.

After a little while, I continued down the road and spotted this red-tailed hawk.

Red-Tailed Hawk

I continued up towards Lake St. Clair and zig-zagged my way through a variety of concessions to see if there was anything other than turbines around.  I spotted a flock fly across the road and land in a field. At first I assumed they would be snow buntings, but then with a closer look....horned larks!  First time seeing them this year.  I first ID'd these guys while working in farm fields and hearing their call. They would always dart away from me before I was able to find my binoculars to see what they were.

Flock of Horned Larks

 A little while later I was just north of Tilbury heading back towards Chatham when I spotted something out in one of the fields!  Pulled over and took a look hoping to find that it was another snowy owl (but meanwhile I was assuming it was just another large chunk of mud).  I was completely wrong!  It was actually a fox, curled up beside a frozen puddle, smack in the middle of the farm field!  I really wish that the fox was in focus and I could have zoomed the photo in a bit more.  It was really, really adorable!

Red Fox

It's funny. Having grown up in the Chatham-Kent area I always thought it was such a boring place that was just full of fields and nothingness.  Now when I come home with this appreciation for nature and addiction to constantly looking around me....I see that there is so much around us here...you just have to look for it.  The same can go for almost anywhere.  So friends...no matter where you are or where you go...always keep your eyes open and your binos ready!

Happy Naturing!

Winter Drive to St. Clair NWA

Well!  Finally home in Chatham and decided last Friday to take a little drive around the area.  I set out originally to find some Snowy Owls that might be around, but unfortunately had no luck!  But just because there were no Snowys, certainly didn't mean that it was a wasted trip, there were so many other birds that I was able to see, and firsts for this year!

I left Chatham and headed West towards Pain Court.  The first birds I saw were a flock of Snow Buntings!  They were very, very skittish around my car so I was unable to get an actual nice photo of them, but instead caught them in flight! Which is actually pretty amusing to see.

A little further down the road, the sound of vehicles passing flushed a pair of Northern Harriers! I was actually quite surprised to see them for some reason, but their flight patter and the iconic white rump patch gave them away almost instantly!

I then found myself practically right beside St. Clair National Wildlife Area.  As I worked here in the past, I've really fallen in love with this place.  It's really a Chatham-Kent Treasure that not many people actually know exists!  As I drove through the driveway, the first bird I spotted was a juvenile bald eagle.  I wish I had been able to see it from a little closer of a distance, but it was a pretty cool find either way!  Certainly much different looking than it's adult counterpart.

I continued along the trails towards the footbridge. I heard and saw a flock of Goldfinches fly by and land in nearby trees.  A Downy Woodpecker also began calling from high up...it took quite a while to finally pinpoint where he was, even with the trees bare I find Downy's to be quite difficult to spot with their fast and almost constant movements.  While looking around in the same area, I spotted some little birds jumping around in the Phragmites. These ended up being American Tree Sparrows!  I held one of these in the hand this past fall while banding, so I was actually quite excited to spot one and ID it in the field by myself! 

American Tree Sparrow

I unfortunately had to turn around at the bridge so that I would be able to drive home while it was still fairly light out, but it was certainly a beautiful winter walk.   There were quite a few trails on the ice of various critters.  A particular track I was able to easily see were Turkey tracks (or possibly pheasant too I suppose!).  Looking around all else was seemingly still and quiet, just incredibly peaceful!

Hopefully I will be able to make it back there once more before the big move to Peterborough!  The drive home didn't have any Snowy's in sight either, but another trip yesterday did prove to be more successful!  Hopefully I'll get a few moments today or tomorrow for another post.

Happy Naturing!

The Importance of Bird Banding

A few months ago I started a little volunteer gig to learn how to bird band with the great folks at the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Banding Station.  We saw so many different birds here and it was not only an amazing learning experience for myself, but also for the public who often stopped in to the station and see what was up. 

In a previous post I mentioned that many people question the work that bird banding does, saying that it is an unnecessary way to gather information on our feather friends.  "Can't you just look at them?  Can't you just count their numbers from the roads or some other way?  Isn't there another way to gather this information without catching the birds and handling them causing stress?" Although banding does impose some stress on birds, the short answer is No.  The information gathered is vital to understanding their life history, threats, health, migration, and basically every aspect about them!

Banding sheet in public display about retrapped birds

I received an email from our Head Bander a while ago and wanted to share the information in it with everyone, it was amazing! I truly shows the importance of banding and the information that we are able to collect from this. The information was specific to Owls that had been banded, but the same information and importance can be crossed to any bird group!

• On the 10th of Feb 1996 a Great Grey Owl was banded as an "After Second Year" bird in Alberta. On March 16th 2013 that owl was hit by a car.  Since it was banded, this code was entered into the database it was discovered that it was approx. 18 years and 9 months at the time it was killed. 

• A female "After Hatch Year" Snowy owl banded on Jan 17th 1994, also in Alberta she was retrapped and released alive on the 23rd of Feb 2013.  That means she was 19yrs 7mths and still going!

• A Barred owl, banded as a local in the nest, on the 24th of May 1986 was found dead, tangled in fishing line June 9th, 2010! This means that the Owl was 24 yrs old and did not die of natural causes! 

WOW Right!  The age these birds were found to be is outstanding. It means they were able to survive yearly elements, raise young, and found enough food to survive every year...amazing!  Without having been banded, we would have never been able to come across this information and much about bird life history and current threats would be still left unknown. 

TTP Banding Lab

Quick Trip to the Sault.

Happy 2014 Everyone! Hopefully everyone has had a great start to the New Year.

Drive out to Sault Ste. Marie

I started off the New Year with a quick trip to Sault Ste. Marie to visit some relatives. While there, of course, I tried to also get a wee bit of birding in!

We were able to visit some awesome family who took us on a snowmobile ride through the back bush of the Sault. I hadn't been on a Skidoo since I was super young, so it was really so much fun being back on one!  When we first started off we right away saw a Bald Eagle flying overhead while zooming under the powerlines.  Now, although they are not my favourite raptor, they are incredibly beautiful.  Later on the ride we came across a tree that had about 4-5 Bald Eagles perched in it! What a sight!  I was kicking myself that I had not brought my camera with me and it was so cold that my little powershot actually froze shut!  But, it was nice for once to actually just sit and watch.   There weren't too many other sightings, minus a few chick-a-dees and ravens, but I'm sure had the machines been quieter there would be a lot bustling back there!

Out on the Skidoo

View from the Skidoo rest stop!

 The last day we did a little bit of touristy things and although we didn't see too many birds I was able to get a nice shot of two!  The first stop was at the Sault Locks.  Here I was SO excited to see an Owl, that was oddly perched on top of a lamp post. Upon closer inspection it had a polka dot belly and was certainly made of plastic...oops!   Looking into the locks themselves there were a bundle of ducks diving and floating in the fast (and I mean really fast!) water.  We were finally able to spot one for a longer period of time to see that they were Goldeneye!  

Goldeneye in the Sault Locks

 Next stop was near the Roberta Bondar Tent Pavilion.  The snow was deep (and we had crappy boots on) but we managed to only see a few more Goldeneye and a flyby of some common Mergansers!

Common Merganser

That is about it for that trip!  We recently also took a stop at Kelly Lake here in Sudbury to look for the Gyrfalcons that had been reported but had no luck.  Seems like you need snowshoes to walk out to where they perch so looks like it may be a skunk for us!

Happy New Year and Happy Naturing!

Sault Moose!

Birding on Borrowed Time

With all the craziness of life I let the reading of this book slide a lot unfortunately. But before leaving Toronto, I finally did complete it!

Birding on Borrowed time is about the life of Pheobe Snetsinger who turned from being a stay at home mother, to hard-core extreme birder.  She saw over 8,000 of the world's 10,000 birds only beginning to count at the age of 34.  Although the book was completed after Pheobe's death, the majority of it was indeed written by her about all her various adventures.

I found the beginning of the book to be wonderful. The description of her seeing and identifying her first bird....

" the first thing I really saw through those binoculars was a fiery-orange male blackburnian warbler that nearly knocked me Over with astonishment - and quite simply hooked me forever" page 18. 

...really reminded me of the first time I got hooked onto birding. I had always liked birds, but never really understood the whole "birding thing".  I remember being out on a Breeding Bird Survey and heard this crazy and awesome sound, which my coworker ID'd as an Upland Sandpiper.  It was so cool that I then wanted to find it and see what it looked like...and well. That's the first sign of becoming hooked.

 Pheobe, like me, found questions about absolutely everything and learnt to look at life through a different set of glasses.  The following quote really struck me as I read it as I realized that many times I do view everything from a human perspective and standard and well, for somethings you just need to step back and be amazed:

" I observed those flimsy and seemingly precarious stick nests in the top of dead trees, attended by the gangly (great blue heron) adults. "How can they ever get food Ito those fuzzy chicks without stabbing them to death with their bills!?" Watching those creatures do what they had been doing successfully for millions of years, without any help from us, finally let me learn not to judge everything by human standards. Page 19" 

Unfortunately, as the book progressed I did get a little more tired of all the lists...it took a while to finish.  Many of the pages i scanned over as they were just list after list and place after place. However, her descriptions of how she lists and records, as well as her counting ethics, was fascinating and I have started a full list myself!  Once in a while she would go in greater detail about a location she was visiting and it made me really interested to go there...other times it was just a blip on the page.

There were many, many, things that I admired about this amazing woman. Not only did she push on with hope after being diagnosed multiple times with cancer, survive a rape while on a birding trip, but she was also brilliant and competitive defying many odds. She also passed on this love of the outdoors and birding to her children who went on to work in the environmental field.  There were some things that I did question however, for example, to the point that this hobby and obsession became too much of an obsession. For example she noted in the book that at one point her husband had considered divorce as she was never around or that she missed her own daughters wedding because she had already planned a birding trip somewhere.  

In her final trip she unfortunately died during a bus crash, but it was exactly how she wanted, with binoculars in hand.  Overall, I thought it was a really lovely book to read and would suggest it!   

A Snowy tale...

Well! I have officially moved out of Toronto and now that I have a little more time on my hands, I can finally catch up from a few posts that I have been wanting to write!

On my second last day of work a few co-workers and I wanted to take a second stab at heading to Downsview Park in search for the Snowy Owl.  I had received an alert the night before notifying me that it had been seen again by someone on Tuesday, which means that there is a pretty large chance that it would still be in the area. We got all excited and our hopes up (again!) and set out on our lunch break.

We first arrived and walked into the wooded area.  Unfortunately we didn't spend a lot of time actually looking around for the Short-eared Owl that was also spotted there, but went straight for where the Snowy "should be".  One little bird caught my attention almost immediately and it turned out to be a very friendly Mockingbird!  I had never seen it THAT close up before but it looked almost identical to the one on the front of my Peterson ID book, so I was able to ID it almost immediately.

Northern Mockingbird

We met a lady on the paths who had been looking for the Snow Buntings but was not having any luck finding them.  She ended up tagging along behind us when we told her that we were there looking for the snowy owl.  We continued to walk towards a "hill".  The bird-alert noted that it was seen on top of a hill, but looking around, there were at least 4 hills and we only had about a half hour!

We took a shot and walked towards the largest, and BOY were we lucky!  We saw a flash of something on the top of the hill and our binos would only show something dark. The photo below shows the tiny little dark bump that we actually saw...nothing right!?   Well we kept our eyes on it and suddenly it turned around and exposed it's very white face.

Owl on top of the hill

 We ran off in a flash towards the other side of the hill to try and get a better look at it.  When we came around the corner we were slightly worried as we couldn't see it anywhere on the hill, when we looked in front of us, and there it was!!  Perched right on top of a lamp post!  What a BEAUTY.  From what little I know about age/sex of owls I would say this is a young female. But could also be a young male.

Snowy Owl on Lamp

All my coworkers got a great look at this "little" one and we were all so excited as this was a lifer for all 4 of us.  Supposedly I, in particular, turn into a giddy little 12 year old girl when I saw it for the first time!  We continued on our photo spree from a pretty good distance and eventually she took off.  Later on our walk back to the car we found it perched on top of one of the lighting displays!  We unfortunately needed to hurry off, but what a great lunch break that had been!

Perched on a Christmas Display.

After work I was picked up by my boyfriend. He had also been wanting to see one of these Snowy Owls everyone is reporting, so since I had seen it that day and knew it was there, we decided to go take a quick look before it was too dark.  We spotted the Snowy on a different hill then before, but it was just as astonishing seeing it a second time.  And I do believe this must be the first time a photo has ever been taken of a snowy owl on top of a juggling, dancing, purple dragon!

Snowy admiring the dragon's talent

As it got darker we made our way back to the car and saw a flash in the fields right by the parking lot, thinking (and excited) that maybe the snowy followed us so I could get a field shot of it.  I looked in my binos and spotted a smaller, brownish owl.  The area near the tips were lighter, and the underside was very light.  It was flying fast over the fields almost like a harrier, or butterfly would.  There was only one thing it could be...a Short-eared Owl!  The second one I've ever seen and one had had been reported here earlier this week.  Unfortunately, it was too dark to get a photo of it, but still just as exciting!

Snowy!

The Snowy invasion is still on throughout much of the area so hopefully will be seeing more this season!!

Hope everyone has a "Snowy" Christmas!