Hello Folks, Today, myself, Ethan Huner, Peter Mills and the lovely Lyndsey Friesen ventured into the wilds of Amherst Island for our most frigid birding "adventure" yet...
We didn't see the BROAD-WINGED HAWK, and while we weren't specifically looking for it, we checked the area thoroughly several times. We saw several ROUGH-LEGGED HAWKS throughout, and the ratio of light/dark morph birds was about 4/1. We didn't see any harriers! We did, however, see some other interesting winter birds nonetheless. There were a couple of RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS and some BROWN-HEADED COWBIRDS on a feeder on Front Rd. between Emerald rd. and Dump rd. There were SNOW BUNTINGS at some places as well. A couple of BALD EAGLES were seen as well, on the eastern side of the island. The AMERICAN COOT was still around the Milhaven ferry terminal. A NORTHERN FLICKER was a highlight, flying over the South entrance road to Owl Woods. Be forewarned..my low-clearance vehicle had a little bit of trouble navigating through here, and if it wasn't for Ethan and Peter's help pushing the car, we'd still be in there. Even the behavior of my car changed due to the cold - the alarm went off for mysterious reasons and refused to react to any attempted methods of arrest, one of the doors would refuse to close, the breaks sometimes failed...it was an "adventure". There were RING-NECKED PHEASANTS near Owl Woods. We spent a lot of time desperately trying to cough up a Snowy Owl...and failed miserably. We saw the obliging NORTHERN HAWK-OWL, though, on South Shore Road. It looked fairly content sitting on a wire, and we decided to step outside to see if it would eventually do something interesting. This was a bad idea - we lasted about two minutes. How this thing was able to just sit there and take it is amazing. Save for moving its head a little bit, it didn't want to do anything and so we wished it well and left it there as we continued our search. As dusk was nearing we were desperately hoping for a SHORT-EARED OWL and Peter was our saving grace as he spotted one flying high in the sky near the Ferry Terminal. All in all, it was a really enjoyable (if not insanely cold!) trip and it was amazing that we saw anything alive at all! DIRECTIONS: Amherst Island can be reached by taking exit 593 off of the 401, following Highway 7 south to Millhaven. The ferry to Amherst is located 100m to the right of the intersection of Highway 7 and Bath Road. Good Birding, Lev Frid spruceblog.jitjit.com Maple, ON _______________________________________________ ONTBIRDS is presented by the Ontario Field Ornithologists - the provincial birding organization. Send bird reports to [email protected] For information about ONTBIRDS visit http://www.ofo.ca/
