Thursday, September 22, 2011

Port stanley birding on Sept 19

I did some extra curricular birding on Monday... Why? Wind!



Wind and Lairds of course... Port Burwell was kinda smelly, but multiple reasons (not including smell surprisingly).. But I did turn up 4-5 Little Gulls.... Will elaborate on this in the future (maybe)




The real highlight was Port Stanley Harbour, which had the lions share of Larids of the places I checked.


Some rough totals:

~3000 Ring-billed Gulls
~750 Herring Gulls
1 Great BB Gull
~5 Lesser Black-backed Gulls
2 Little Gulls
~1500 Bonaparte's Gulls
~15 Caspian Terns
2 Common Terns
1 Parasitic Jaeger


(also 30ish Sanderling and 1 Ruddy Turnstone)




Tons of birds were taking shelter from the winds and waves (50kmh, 2 meter waves) even the Parasitic Jaeger (a light Juvenile) spent about 15 mins inside the breakwalls... Only chasing gulls infrequently. Looked happy to be off the rough water.


Thankfully I stopped at my trusty bread locale and had a very large supply. I busied myself throwing out huge amounts of the wheaty good-stuff, and took a bunch of gull pics (baby Herring Gulls, Lesser Black-backs and even the Jaeger)... May not sound terribly exciting, but throwing bread and photographing Larids is probably one of my favourite activities there is.....

Some of the documentation (just a sample, maybe I'll do more in the future)

Some of those crazy Herring Gulls I like to doccument.. Check out that tail!


One of those crazy Lesser B-backs that probably summered on Lake Erie (centre) 


One of my favourite gull/plumages by far - fresh juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull.. Is there any chance this sucker was born in North America?! I sure think so


And of course, the terror of the Larid world... The Parasitic Jaeger 



1 comment:

  1. Moving to Toronto from London means less access for me to Lake Erie... bummer.

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