Many thanks to Bruce Brydon for tipping me yesterday about a Snowy Owl west of Newmarket, just in time for the field trip I led today. We ended the day with this bird at about 4:00 p.m., scoping it from just east of where Jane Street meets Woodchoppers Lane about 2 kms north of Hwy. 9. As Bruce noted, the best reference point is "a truncated telephone pole with an orange band" on the north side of Woodchoppers Lane, about half a km from where that road meets Jane. The bird was northeast of this point, sitting on top of a hydro pole with an orange multi-doored building in the background.
For a closer look, we turned around and drove west along Woodchoppers Lane to where Jane continues north after a short jog. Jane then bends east, becoming Edward Street. Edward runs straight east, then bends north and becomes Aileen Street, but you can see a muddy extension of Edward Street running straight east into the flats of the vegetable fields. We parked here (there are vegetable storage buildings with wooden crates) and had better looks at the bird. It was directly east of us, at the end of the muddy extension of Edward Street where there is a big stack of crates in the field. We walked a little ways down the road, but didn't want to bother the bird, so we scoped it and had excellent looks. It was fairly heavily barred, appearing to be a first year female (at least like the one in Sibley's excellent guide). Interestingly, Bruce Brydon's message said the bird he spotted on Friday morning was "a brilliant white specimen", so I wouldn't be surprised if there are two Snowies out there. This area is just south of Bradford and west of Newmarket. Hwy. 400 runs right past it. Earlier in the day, our group had three Northern Shrikes in the Kleinburg area, two of them on Major Mackenzie between Hwy. 27 and Huntington Road, the other east of Kleinburg on Kipling Avenue just south of Kirby Road. We had a spectacular-looking dark adult Rough-legged Hawk hunting in the fields on the north side of Nashville Road where it runs east from Hwy. 50. Ron Fleming, Newmarket "Ronald J. Fleming" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
