So, the thing about birding is sometimes you travel three times and stand in freezing temps for 7 hours to get a bird, and sometimes you just have to roll out of bed at 5:30am and step out onto the porch to hear a Great Horned Owl hooting and then crawl back into your warm bed! Bird 114 Heard Only. We have had 3 days with no new birds added this week and that will start happening more as we have most of the winter birds and will have to wait until spring for fresh species to arrive. We tracked down a few Rough-legged Hawks up Kitchener way and found a Snowy Owl near Elmira. Most years we have many young Snowy Owls move down from the Arctic to winter around the Great Lakes but this year the lemming population crashed in the summer which meant that Snowy chicks did not survive in their usual numbers resulting in almost no Snowy Owls being seen down here.
At the end of the week the Eared Grebe once again appeared in Etobicoke, same park, and we decided to try for that bird again. A Red-shouldered Hawk had been reported in a park nearby so we tried for that bird first and quickly found it sitting in a tree, I like when the day starts on a good note! An hour later we were staring at a rare Eared Grebe in close to the shore at Colonel Sam Smith Park, bird number 2 for the day.
We decided to stop at LaSalle in Burlington on the way home as we had missed two birds there a few times. A birder told us where the Tundra swan was sleeping and we had nice close views of bird number 3. We started chatting with a photographer comparing notes and places birds are seen and while we were chatting suddenly a Green-winged Teal appeared! The extra bird that Jerry got and I didn’t. Bird number 4 for the day for me!
Another bad weather day kept us close to home so we just walked to our local woodlot yet again. Both of us were missing a bird the other had seen. In my case I had gone 27 days not seeing a Brown Creeper. A small bird that clings to the trunks of trees and moves up and around like a Nuthatch or Woodpecker. We never really search for Creepers as we see them fairly regularly, I had seen and heard 7 of them on Dec 31 and Jerry had seen one the first week in January and I was about 50 steps away and waved it off, “I’ll see a Brown Creeper” I boasted. LOL and then nothing, reports filled my email of every other birder reporting Creepers and suddenly I found myself actively searching tree trunks for the little birds. Finally, on the 28th I spied a small bird at the base of a tree and I was one bird ahead of Jerry and 15 minutes later we both saw the local Pileated Woodpecker, we were tied again. A few minutes later we saw three Brown Creepers on the same tree! A four Brown Creeper day!
Week 4 – 8 rarities seen for the year , 2 more owls added, 8 species added – 121 species seen (E&J)