It has been a little while since my last update, but I can assure you that I am alive and well! I had a busy winter of travel interspersed with some quality time back home in Hamilton, Ontario. For the month of February, my wife Laura and I ventured to northern Peru. We rented a vehicle for the first 17 days and completed a big loop in the northwest, followed by a flight to Iquitos where we spent around 10 days in the Amazon at three separate lodges. The trip was amazing with innumerable highlights, and I have been posting daily blog posts on my travel blog. In March I was off on my next trip, this time to Jamaica to lead a tour for Quest Nature Tours. Jamaica is a wonderful country with friendly people, amazing food, beautiful scenery and quite a lot of biodiversity for its small size. My group had an amazing trip, highlighted by finding all 29 endemic bird species found on the island. I returned from Jamaica around two weeks ago, and in the time since I have been busy editing photos, wrapping up everything from the Jamaica tour, prepping for spring fieldwork, and generally just gearing up for the next few months which are always the busiest months of the year for me. Cold and rainy weather meant that I didn't venture outside to look for birds very much. That changed this past week. We experienced a glorious weekend with warm sunshine and a cool breeze, and a good friend of ours visited us from Barrie for a few days. We even made it out to a golf course for the first round of the season! A hike at my "local patch" produced a few First Of Season birds including several Tree Swallows, as well as two species of snakes. Ah, sunny days of April. A few days ago, I had a private birding tour booked in the Point Pelee area, the day after a total solar eclipse was scheduled. I made plans to drive down to southwestern Ontario to experience my first total solar eclipse, lead the tour, and catch up on some early spring birds. The weather forecast was looking good with far-reaching south winds and warm conditions; surely there would be a lot of birds around! On the morning of the eclipse we received some clarity on where the viewing conditions would be best. The Hamilton and Niagara areas were likely to see cloud cover, while conditions were looking much better towards Lake Erie. This worked out perfectly with my plan for the day: I would bird westward along the Lake Erie shoreline while keeping an eye on the cloud forecast, and find a clear spot with no people by 3 PM for the eclipse. In the end my plan was very successful. My first stop was the Calton Swamp in Elgin County since there had been some Red Crossbills reported there in previous weeks. This is a rare and irruptive nesting species in southwestern Ontario but there are a few spots where the species can be found at the moment. I had never seen a Red Crossbill in Elgin County, and so I made a brief but successful stop. No photos, unfortunately. I continued on to Port Stanley. The eclipse watchers were already starting to gather at the harbour even though we were still over four hours away from totality, but luckily I was able to grab a parking spot to bird the harbour before the crowds really filled in. On my first scan of the breakwall, I was surprised to see two female Harlequin Ducks! This is a rare species on Lake Erie and there aren't many records for Elgin County. I later learned that these Harlequins had been present since February, though they hadn't been seen in recent weeks. A little far for photos so I settled for some poor digiscoped shots. The sun came out at this time, much to the delight of the eclipse watchers. I left the harbour (and all the people) behind, and drove up to the Port Stanley lagoons/wetlands. These are some of my favourite lagoons in southwestern Ontario and I have found a few good birds here over the years including Western Sandpiper and Eared Grebe. There are always large numbers of ducks there early in the season. I wasn't able to procure any rarities this time around, though it was nice to see a few year birds including Blue-winged Teal and Wood Duck. Just as I was about to leave, a car-full of familiar faces pulled up. It was Rob Dobos, Cheryl Edgecombe and Dave Don from Hamilton, and they had traded the cloudy skies of Hamilton for the clear viewing conditions of Port Stanley. After chatting with them for a bit, I wished them well and continued to the southwest. I was hoping to be in the Rondeau area for the eclipse. I checked out a few spots including Keith McLean Conservation Area and the town of Shrewsbury, and then drove a little further to a farmhouse where a pair of Black-billed Magpies were setting up shop. This is a very rare bird in southwestern Ontario, but there has been a rash of records in the last year or so. It's difficult to know the origin of these birds, especially when magpies aren't really supposed to migrate. Sometimes, the Ontario Bird Records Committee has accepted records of Black-billed Magpies in southern Ontario, while some of the other records have been turfed. Ultimately, none of us really know where these magpies came from; it is just a guessing game. These Shrewsbury magpies were quite accommodating, hanging out at the roadside upon my arrival. The lighting was very harsh with heat haze coming off the road, making photography difficult. A neat bird to see in southwestern Ontario! I continued on to the village of Erieau where the eclipse watchers were out in full force. There was a kind of nervous energy in the air, as people gathered along the roadside and waited. The partial eclipse had begun as I walked along the Erieau Rail Trail, though you wouldn't know it unless you looked up at the sun with solar glasses. The walk at Erieau produced a few birds including a flock of Lapland Longspurs that settled in a nearby field. This species is not frequently detected in the spring, probably because they prefer to hang out in open fields far away from the roads (and the birders). I ventured over to the Blenheim lagoons as the minutes ticked down to totality. My goal was to be in an open area with a good view of the sky and with a lack of people. Several others had set up on the main berm with telescopes, so I slunk away to the north end of the lagoons where there were no others. As the minutes ticked down to totality, the landscape appeared to dim. It was a different kind of lighting than what you see at sunset; it was more like the overall brightness settings were just turned down. Shadows were still fully crisp; It was a really weird sensation! And then totality hit. A wave of darkness appeared on the horizon and almost instantly, we were overtaken by it. Just like that, it looked like late evening, with a "sunset" on the distant horizon in all directions. The air cooled by a couple of degrees. A lot of the birds quieted, other than the robins which began singing their dusk song. The minutes of totality where incredible and I scrambled to ready my camera for a few photos. I also made sure to observe it through my spotting scope. The solar prominences were easy to see and it was just an awesome experience. And then, about two minutes after totality started, the sun peeked out from the other side of the moon. The landscape quickly brightened, the birds began singing again, and quite a few ducks took off from the lagoons. A few minutes later and everything appeared to be back to normal. I scoped the duck flock and many of them were glancing nervously up towards the sun, as if they couldn't trust it. I continued on with my day, knowing that nothing else would top the strange sensation of witnessing the solar eclipse and the few minutes of totality. I drove to Wheatley harbour and then Hillman Marsh, finding a few new year birds including Marsh Wren and American Wigeon, plus a Fox Sparrow and some American Tree Sparrows. I then bumped into Steve Pike and we drove over to the Mersea Road 1 fields which have some standing water and which often attract ducks and shorebirds. We found a flock of Dunlins and some Greater Yellowlegs before calling it a day. That evening, I met up with a good friend of mine in Kingsville for dinner, a great way to end the day. I had a tour organized with a couple visiting Canada from the U.K. on Tuesday. Before meeting with them, I scouted out the shorebird cell at Hillman Marsh and found a Common Gallinule. This is a surprisingly scarce species in the Pelee area and this was the first sighting of the year. The tour itself was perfect. I had a lot of fun birding with Rosemary and Tony, and fortunately for us, the birds even cooperated! Quite a large number of early April migrants were in, including swarms of Dark-eyed Juncos and Northern Flickers. Many other sparrows were mixed in including Field, Chipping, American Tree, Swamp and Eastern Towhee. I was happy to find my first Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Hermit Thrush and Black Scoter for the year, as well. The rarest find was surely the bright male Nashville Warbler that was popping around at the south end of the Redbud Footpath. I am quite sure it is a new spring arrival given its appearance and its frantic foraging for insects on the ground. I am not sure what the record early date is for Point Pelee or the province, but this is surely up there with the earliest. I normally see my first Nashville Warbler of the year in the last week of April. We concluded at Hillman Marsh where we found quite a few new species, including Trumpeter Swan, Osprey, Pied-billed Grebe and Forster's Tern. A beautiful day with good company; can't ask for much more! I drove back to Hamilton, content with how the past few days had gone. The eclipse experience was perfect and something I will hopefully remember for many years to come. But the birding had also been a blast, and the tour had gone off without any issues and with a ton of great sightings.
Every day brings new sightings as we move along in mid-April. Before long the "most wonderful time of the year" will be here - May in southern Ontario. I'm looking forward to it!
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Since my latest post, I have done a little bit of wandering here and there in search of birds. Though - to be fair - I haven't done much actual birdwatching. Instead, I have been on a few rare bird twitches. In recent weeks, I have taken advantage of the poor weather and lack of sunlight by staying inside and chipping away at the to-do list. I just haven't had much motivation at all to go look for birds; after Indonesia and Ecuador, walking around Hamilton in the cold and the rain and not seeing much just hasn't seemed that enticing. My work schedule has filled up as well, leaving not as much free time for the birds. But, as is typical at this time of year, unusual birds have been reported on numerous occasions, and some have been too tempting to ignore. On November 29, a birdwatcher named Julie Belliveau discovered a very out-of-range Fieldfare in her front yard in Sturgeon Falls, Nipissing District. Fieldfare is a Eurasian species of thrush, one that I had seen previously in the UK and Turkey. It is a rare but consistent vagrant to the east coast (and occasionally the west coast) of North America, with Atlantic Canada receiving the bulk of the records. Ontario had three previous records of Fieldfare, from the years 1967, 1975 and 1981. Since it had been 42 years, this Fieldfare caused a bit of pandemonium.
It has been a busy autumn for me. Field work had occupied my time all summer and by September, I was off to Indonesia to lead a birding tour of Sulawesi and Halmahera for Quest Nature Tours. I was home for a couple of weeks and then off again, this time to Ecuador to lead a tour in the Galápagos as well as to spend a week on my own afterwards, in the lower foothills of the eastern Andes. (By the way, if you want to read about these international travels, I post regularly on my travel blog Explorations Of An Ecologist, linked here). However, since my return I have been trying to get out birding every now and then. Most of my wanderings have kept me local. Where Laura and I are situated in Hamilton it is only a 10 minute walk to our local park, Falkirk Woods. This park has a lot of introduced plants and human disturbance so it is not exactly an area of high ecological value, but us naturalists can find interest in just about any space, no matter how pristine or degraded. Falkirk Woods is of sufficient size that, if nothing else, it's good for a nice long walk. Since moving here in June I have been keeping track of the total species that I have documented from Falkirk Park and I am closing in on 800 species. This includes over 150 plants, over 500 insects (of which ~60% are Lepidoptera, mostly from evening mothing sessions) and around 100 vertebrates. Nothing crazy, but it has been fun to document the biodiversity in an area so close to home.
The last month and a half has been a whirlwind to say the least. Laura and I returned from Brazil on April 27, just in time for the peak of spring migration here in southern Ontario. But of course, we couldn't just drop everything and go birding as our plates had been full with other important items. Finding a rental house, for one. Becoming gainfully employed, for two. And, most importantly, reconnecting with friends and family. As I write this now, I'm sitting in the living room of our new place in Hamilton, Ontario, sipping coffee and enjoying a furry friend on the couch beside me, as I enjoy my first day off in 22 days. Over the past six weeks, Laura and I have successfully checked off the big items on the to-do list. Both of us have found more work than we know what to do with, the house-finding mission was surprisingly easier than we had envisioned, and we are settling into the next phase of our life. But even with all of the busyness of the last little while, there was always time for birding (there always is, somehow!).
It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog! Life has been busy over the last few years in the time since I started ONshore Birding. I just wanted to provide a brief summary of the history of Onshore Birding, what I have been up to, and what plans I have in store. Back in the summer of 2019, I was working as an ecologist for an engineering company while my wife, Laura, was employed as a veterinarian. We were living in Niagara Falls at the time and planning a big life change. That summer, we quit our jobs to travel, mainly in Latin America, for around two years. We both have a love for international travel (and international birding) and this would be a great opportunity to spend a lot of time in some really amazing places. Six months in, things had been going very well. We had undertaken private Spanish lessons in Ecuador and then traveled throughout Ecuador and Colombia. Our trip to Costa Rica had just begun when the pandemic hit and we were forced to retreat back to Canada. Once it appeared that COVID-19 would not be going away quickly, our international travels were put firmly on hold and I settled back into the Ontario birding and nature scene. I decided to start ONshore Birding that autumn. Guiding had been a passion of mine for years and I had led some tours locally in Ontario. Since 2015, I had also been working part time as a tour leader for Quest Nature Tours, having led birding and nature tours to far-flung destinations such as Galápagos, Colombia, Spain and Cuba. I saw a need for guided nature tours here in Ontario, and since I had the time, I created the company, set up the website, and led a number of tours throughout the remainder of 2020 and into 2021. But by the summer of 2021, Laura and I had the opportunity to continue our travels in Latin America; to finish what we had started. Therefore, ONshore Birding went on hiatus. Laura and I have been fortunate to travel without incident in the time since, and we have explored Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand since. Currently, we are in Argentina as we push through the final leg of our adventure. Our plan is to return home by the end of April. I am excited to focus much of my time to ONshore Birding during the upcoming years! This spring, I will be leading a number of small group trips to several birding hot spots on the north shore of Lake Erie including Long Point, Rondeau, and Pelee Island. Unfortunately, leading these tours at Point Pelee is not in the cards this year but I hope to include Point Pelee starting in the spring of 2024. Details about the spring tours can be found here. I will have some availability for private tours as well; available dates are shown in the link, above. I also have details about two June tours to Carden Alvar on the website. I will be adding additional dates to other locations for the summer and autumn of 2023.
Thank you to everyone who has joined me on a previous tour, as well as to those who have helped to spread the word about ONshore Birding. Hope to see you in the field! Since Laura and I left Canada and embarked on our travels in the autumn of 2019, my Ontario bird list has moved to the back burner. Spending months at a time out of the province ensures that I will miss some birds, but I’m ok with that. Visiting other parts of the world and seeing the diversity found in those places is far more important to me than a couple of extra ticks on my Ontario bird list! Though, of course, it still stings a little when I hear the news of a “mega” back home in Ontario. Last fall was particularly painful as I was not around for Groove-billed Ani (7th Ontario record and 1st since 1988), Burrowing Owl (7th record) and Glaucous-winged Gull (2nd record).
Luck has been on my side since the calendar flipped to 2022. I caught up with my first Rufous Hummingbird for Ontario in early January during one of the few days that I was home over the Christmas holidays. This long-staying bird was attending a feeder in Oakville and I happened to be one of the last people to see this bird before it departed. It was a milestone bird too, my 400th species for Ontario. On Friday, July 23 I headed south towards Norfolk County for an evening of mothing at St. William's Forestry Reserve. I have experienced a lot of success here in the past; not surprising, really, given the high plant diversity in the general area, many with southern affinities. Tonight's weather was suitable enough (though a couple of degrees cooler than I would have liked) and I had high hopes!
Monday, July 19 was another hot and humid day. The rain held off and by dusk the conditions were excellent for another night of mothing. This time I met up with Moe Bottos to explore the King's Forest area in Hamilton.
For the second year in a row I participated in National Moth Week, an event hosted on the website iNaturalist. Between the dates of July 16 and 25, any observation of a moth that was submitted to iNaturalist would be added to a Project which aggregates all of the sightings. Here in Ontario, we have a province-specific Project.
The early summer is always a busy time for a naturalist here in Canada. My June and July have been pretty typical, with long hours in the field completing bird surveys and other inventories (my day job). I have been mothing in the evenings whenever my schedule allows, while I have filled in the gaps by searching for butterflies, herping, botanizing and the odd rare bird twitch. As a result, the blog often gets neglected. When I am home and in front of a computer, I have such a backlog of photos and recordings to go through and upload to iNaturalist and eBird that a blog entry isn't even considered.
Now that I have crested the peak of my busy early-summer work schedule, I will be attempting to write a little more frequently than just monthly. We will see how that goes! First up - a post about some of the rare bird highlights from this month. |