Gidday Folks! A short visit last evening to some lagoons in our area prior to bringing the kids to the July 1st fireworks display yielded an interesting and rare find. A breeding pair of ruddy ducks swimming around with the families of lesser scaup, ring necks, mallards, and Bonaparte gulls.
Coincidently these lagoons are in one of the squares I am atlassing for the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, so they will make the list. In flipping through the currrent 1987 Atlas, and various bird books, these 2 may be the furthest north of any recorded breeding pair in the province. These were not there when I left on June 13th for an Atlassing trip along the Albany River in the Hudson Bay lowlands, so they apparently are late arrivals with no young that I have noticed. Apparently they have been known to return to the same nesting locations in subsequent years if there are no major alterations of habitat, so it will be interesting to see if this comes about. The male is very skittish, and it has been difficult to get any close pictures and I do not want to stress them by getting closer than my telephoto lens will bring me. He dives at the drop of a hat, and will surface with only his head above water which looks rather comical. I have some distant pics of the pair of them if any one is interested, and a few closer ones of the female. Marc Johnson Senior Fish and Wildllife Technician Hearst District Ministry of Natural Resources Hearst ONT 705-372-2213 work 705-362-5280 home 705-372-5671 cell From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Jul 2 16:58:28 2005 Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from tomts36-srv.bellnexxia.net (tomts36-srv.bellnexxia.net [209.226.175.93]) by king.hwcn.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 40DE064169 for <[email protected]>; Sat, 2 Jul 2005 16:58:28 -0400 (EDT) Received: from sympatico.ca ([64.228.47.83]) by tomts36-srv.bellnexxia.net ESMTP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for <[email protected]>; Sat, 2 Jul 2005 17:01:49 -0400 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:02:36 -0400 From: Stan Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-SYMPA (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en,fr-CA MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Ontbirds]apologies X-BeenThere: [email protected] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 20:58:28 -0000 Apologies re my email of yesterday which may leave some birders thinking that there are hundreds of Great black-backed gulls in Ontario - what I was looking at were immature Herring gulls - blown out of proportion in my eyes by my constant refocusiing of both telescope and bins with the afternoon sun against me - like the Yellow warbler I saw on a TV screen at Sears enlarged to about 2' across I was "taken in"- so gull for dinner tonight which will be a nice change from crow!
