On June 3 & 4, 2005, Dave and Mary Elder led 17 birders on a tour of the Rainy River area. About 90 species were seen in total and everyone had good looks at everything. The special birds of the area were concentrated on and included American White Pelican, Sharp-tailed Grouse, Sandhill Crane, Wilson's Phalarope, Red-Headed Woodpecker, Black-billed Magpie, Sedge Wren, Yellow-throated Vireo, Connecticut Warbler,Clay-coloured Sparrow, LeConte's Sparrow (arms length views), Western Meadowlark, Yellow-headed Blackbird and Brewer's Blackbird. Best of all, at least 20 calling Yellow Rails (1 briefly seen) were noted along a 1 km. section of wet grass meadow on the Wilson Creek Road. Due to lots of rain this spring, the fields were very wet and may have created lots of suitable habitat for the rails. Also, Eastern Bluebirds were seen in good numbers and Western Meadowlarks were more common than in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, no Piping Plovers were present on Windy Point for the second year.
Dave Elder Atikokan, Ontario From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mon Jun 6 20:56:14 2005 Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from tomts10-srv.bellnexxia.net (tomts10.bellnexxia.net [209.226.175.54]) by king.hwcn.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 908666496F for <[email protected]>; Mon, 6 Jun 2005 20:56:14 -0400 (EDT) Received: from sympatico.ca ([64.231.45.9]) by tomts10-srv.bellnexxia.net ESMTP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for <[email protected]>; Mon, 6 Jun 2005 21:15:19 -0400 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 21:15:58 -0400 From: Bruce Parker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: [email protected] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Ontbirds]Piping Plover Still at Presqu'ile. X-BeenThere: [email protected] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:56:14 -0000 Hi Ontbirders, Thanks to Fred Helleiner's update this morning, we were able to locate the Piping Plover this evening at around 7:15 pm. The bird was foraging along the shoreline in the algae piles between Beach 3 and Beach 4. It was feeding with 2 spotted sandpipers, 2 semipalmated sandpipers and 1 semipalmated plover. We had spectacular views in perfect sunlight - a great sight! The group was still in the same location when we left around 8:00 pm. Presqu'ile Provincial Park can be reached from Brighton by following the signs. Allyson & Bruce Parker
