At dawn today (and at dusk on Thursday) I had two American Woodcock "peenting" and displaying along St. John's Sdrd., one of them just west of the railway tracks between Kennedy and Warden Avenues (on the north side of the road), the other at the T-intersection of St. John's and McCowan Road (on the east side of McCowan). After some initially disappointing efforts to call up owls the last little while, I lucked into two Great Horned Owls this week(both visuals and not in response to a tape). I saw the first one at dusk Thursday on the south side of Bethesda Sdrd. just east of Warden Avenue; the other was pointed out to me by a marauding mob of crows this morning on the east side of McCowan Road about a km south of Bloomington Road. The crows were mobbing it mercilessly in a woodlot that sits about a km east of McCowan along a dirt lane (public access by foot). I simply followed their noise and found him at the epicentre of the corvids' black halo. A little later in the morning a single male Pine Warbler was singing and showing off his bright yellow plumage in the western section of the Porritt Tract. I had a large accipiter respond to my approximation of a Barred Owl call in the same area, but the bird only came to the path's edge briefly before retreating back into the pines; it did not allow me good enough looks to see if it was a female Cooper's or a male Goshawk (both of which nest in the area). In several of the regional forest tracts and meadows between Woodbine Avenue and McCowan Road you could see and/or hear Winter Wrens, Brown Creepers, Eastern Meadowlarks, Tree Swallows, Killdeer, Northern Flickers, and Song & Savannah Sparrows. Male Belted Kingfishers were back in several of the wetland areas. The tracts I visited were Porritt, Hall and Robinson, all of which are within a few kms of Aurora Road, which runs east-west between Aurora and Ballantrae in York Region. Ron Fleming, Newmarket
