PeregrinePrints highly irregular quiz!!! - Condo Birding Edition

All photos taken from my balcony this morning... I'll post the full ebird checklist at the bottom, but if you don't want to spoil the fun - do the quiz first! 

Canada Goose  12     FOY goslings

Wood Duck  1

American Black Duck  1

Mallard  12

Surf Scoter  25

White-winged Scoter  60

Long-tailed Duck  200

Hooded Merganser  2

Red-breasted Merganser  40

Ruddy Duck  10

Common Loon  16

Double-crested Cormorant  150

Green Heron  1     foy

Turkey Vulture  7

Osprey  2

Cooper's Hawk  1

Broad-winged Hawk  1

Killdeer  3

Spotted Sandpiper  2

Ring-billed Gull  40

Herring Gull  18

Great Black-backed Gull  1

Caspian Tern  15

Common Tern  20

Rock Pigeon (Feral Pigeon)  3

Mourning Dove  12

Chimney Swift  18

Belted Kingfisher  1

Downy Woodpecker  1

Northern Flicker  4

Eastern Kingbird  1     foy

Warbling Vireo  1     foy

Blue Jay  350

American Crow  8

Horned Lark  1

Northern Rough-winged Swallow  20

Purple Martin  15

Tree Swallow  45

Bank Swallow  1

Barn Swallow  30

Cliff Swallow  5

Black-capped Chickadee  2

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher  1     foy

Ruby-crowned Kinglet  2

Eastern Bluebird  2

American Robin  30

Brown Thrasher  1

European Starling  100

Nashville Warbler  1

Yellow Warbler  7

Palm Warbler  8

Pine Warbler  3

Yellow-rumped Warbler  14

Prairie Warbler  1     rare. first for condo. male arrived around 10am, sang 3 times, then never seen or heard again... probably just wandering around looking for a good place to spend the day? (not a dirunal migrant)

warbler sp.  25

Chipping Sparrow  29     diurnal migration

Song Sparrow  2

White-throated Sparrow  5

Northern Cardinal  2

Bobolink  4

Red-winged Blackbird  750

Rusty Blackbird  10

Common Grackle  300

Brown-headed Cowbird  175

Orchard Oriole  1     foy female type - dirunal migration

Baltimore Oriole  1     foy dirunal migrant

House Finch  5

Purple Finch  9     first condo record. dirunal migrants

Pine Siskin  24

American Goldfinch  500

House Sparrow  10

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It was a pretty exciting morning... Most of the birds moving were blackbirds, but there was also a large movement of Blue Jays and American Goldfinch... There was just enough neotropic migrants moving to keep me really excited...

A quick walk around edgelake park turned up more FOY - including Black-and-White, BT Green, Norther Parula, Scarlet Tanager etc. 

I'll be back at this tomorrow, and hopefully with a new photo quiz! I'll post the answers to this one tomorrow (hopefully) - so do it fast if you're interested!

It's the most wonderful time of year! Migration thoughts are still appearing on twitter... I'm keeping a very close eye on next Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday...... Very close indeed...... 

Hybrid Red-shouldered X Red-tailed Hawk!?

Saw this guy on Eastport Drive in Hamilton yesterday evening, and went back this morning for more photos. The collection here is a mix of both times, taken with my point and shoot (yest) and my DSLR (this am)...

The weather is too nice to hit the books much, but here are my thoughts:



- GISS is crazy. I did a a serious double take when I first saw it

- appears quite small

- perches upright (when not agitated by me)

- belly markings are an odd shape (for RTHA)

- white "V" on the back (of RTHA) is poorly defined

- has RSHA like markings on the secondaries and coverts (above)

- pataginal bar (RTHA) is poorly defined

- feathers of the pataginal bar are oddly marked

- primary projection is VERY SHORT

- upperside of the primaries and tertials look odd to me, not sure why though (tertials are pale)

(hopefully more to come - later...)



I know there have been adult RSHAxRTHA in the NE USA in recent years (Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts), but i'm not sure if anyone has been dumb confident enough to claim a bird in juv. plumage like this...


Here you have it! The bird is pretty WARY of slow/stopped cars and people getting in/out of cars. If we want it to hang around (and molt), I suggest we give it some space... It hangs out along eastport and both sides of the QEW... If we chase it too close to the Peregrine nest, I highly doubt it'll stick around...

PHOTOS!

Not all rarities were created as proper species. Very exciting! 

Book Review - The Crossley ID Guide to Raptors - Part 2 !!!!

If you've read any of my past book reviews for the Crossley series, you'll know that I have a hard time figuring them out... I like the photos - but how well do they really "work" as a field guide???

A co-worker of mine recently took a shine to hawkwatching - as one of our projects required some field work and there were some openings for any capable observers. As someone who was just beginning to learn the craft - I offered up my copy of the Crossley ID Guide! Seems nice of me, doesn't it? 

Well it came at a price! A book review would be required upon return... Which recently transpired (kind of makes you wonder why she still talks to me) - but that should be of no concern to you! Because now, you get an in-depth review from an extremely talented writer, ecologist and (now) expert hawkwatcher presented here on the blog. 

The Crossley ID Guide - Raptors, as reviewed by Melissa Cameron:

Hawk watching for me is about as familiar an activity as walking on my hands. My natural history inclination has been, until now, toward the sedentary taxa – trees and turtles – so the idea of studying an animal which moves faster than I can follow, well out of my view, and which looks different from every angle and in changing light conditions is disconcerting to say the least. Add to this an impression (admittedly a false one) that birders take themselves very seriously and a personal dislike of doing things poorly, and hawk watching with an accomplished birder becomes a terrifying prospect.



Yet, somehow, as my favourite season (fall) approached and the opportunity arose to spend more time at a study site along the stunning Georgian Bay coast if I was only willing to participate in the raptor migration surveys, I became … gasp! … a novice hawk watcher. As any good armchair ecologist knows, the first order of business in learning to identify a new taxonomic group is to sign out from the library the largest reference book available and to read this, cover to cover, all the while pretending to understand (and care about) the differences in size, colour and pattern of the different sexes and age classes. Memorizing details of anatomical features you never knew existed is important! Days of study passed, and the most significant result was that my fear of misidentifying hawks had become crippling now that I realized not only how many species there were, but how much variation existed within each species!



Amused, perhaps, by my academic approach to learning raptor ID, a good friend suggested I take a look at the new-ish Crossley Guide for Raptors. Previous reviews of this book by experienced birders have called its teaching style “revolutionary”, “multi-dimensional” and “mind-blowing”. I think I’d be more inclined to label it “amusing”, “unpretentious” and “forgiving”, because what I really like about it is the simple acknowledgement that raptors don’t sit still and that, therefore, trying to identify them in flight, at a distance, and under changing light conditions means that sometimes you’ll just get it wrong. The authors of this book aren't embarrassed to admit that a gull can be mistaken for a osprey or that it takes more just than memorizing the field guide to tell the difference between a female Sharp-shinned Hawk and a male Cooper’s Hawk. Don’t believe me? Check the answers to the mystery photo quizzes. For nearly every quiz there are answers conceding defeat in identification, whether the unknown element is age, sex, or colour morph. Oh the humiliation! Serious birders, this is where you point and laugh.



The photo collages in this book are also really entertaining. They remind you that raptors aren’t the most widely-recognized group of birds among non-birders because of their poise when perched at the roadside. They’re awesome because they are hunters – they soar, they dive, and some can apparently explode smaller birds on impact! And each of the species can be differentiated, to a large extent, by their movement and behaviour even if you’re not able to see their markings. Once you narrow down the observed characteristics to size, movement, wing shape or angle, habitat and time of year, identifying raptors in our area is so straightforward it’s almost like cheating. It helps, of course, to have said accomplished birder at your side to confirm your observation (if correct) or help steer you in the right direction when you’re missing something important.



So, thanks to Messrs. Crossley, Liguori and Sullivan, I’m not ashamed to say in front of a serious birder that I am a novice hawk watcher. True, the sum total of hawks I’ve successfully identified this fall has probably amounted to fewer than 30 individuals, and certainly no more than 5 species. I still can’t tell the difference between a Cooper’s Hawk and a Sharp-shinned Hawk (though I’ve read how!) and I’ve nearly steered my bicycle into on-coming traffic while trying to figure out why the hawk overhead that so clearly exhibited the characteristics of a red-tailed hawk didn’t have a red tail (maybe it was a juvenile?). But I’m okay with this now. Experience is really the only way to learn a new skill, and it will take more than just acing the quizzes at the back of the Crossley guide to pick up raptor ID. I have learned, however, that hawk watching is at once exciting and relaxing, that it’s okay to squeal with excitement when a bald eagle flies right over your head, and that watching hawks is among the best ways to enjoy cold weather in beautiful surroundings with a good friend. And if I’m very lucky, by the time spring migration takes place I’ll have sorted out the accipiter dilemma.

Weather makes it happen! Good bird forecasting...

A few thoughts...

1.) - Monday is looking pretty good
2.) - Rare birds occur with unique weather (a recent case study)
3.) - Late April looks bad :(

NAM 4km model run for 8am Monday... South winds, STRONG low... Although it's looking occluded, so maybe short lived (and not a "rarity alert" type storm)...  

Winds Sunday evening. Blistering NE winds brought a LOT of Bonaparte's to my place on Lake Ontario and two big year Little Gulls... The low is pretty nice lookin!

For tomorrow, I'm hoping for a full day of good birds... Morning flight of waterbirds/songbirds and hopefully a flight of Broad-wings during the day. We'll see how it all shakes down though - little bands of rain can really mess things up (and are impossible to know exactly when/where they'll be)...

(Sunday PM)

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RARE Birds = Awesome weather!!!

The forecast for tomorrow is exciting to me, but it isn't a perfect situation... The good thing about birding is that a single Smith's Longspur or Glossy Ibis can make the day :)

We've had an excellent start to the spring vagrant season in southern Ontario... Some notables include the spectacular Tricoloured Heron, Avocets, Yellow-throated Warblers, Henslow's Sparrow, Lark Sparrow and more! 

Now, I'm going to tell you something that will blow your mind.

All of these rarities came from a SINGLE day & weather event... It happened back on April 9th .... There was a severe weather outbreak in the United States, bringing vagrants on strong 850mb winds below the subtropical jet. It brought us all of these birds!!! The main reason we (as birders) don't really recognize this, is because we don't find the vagrants as soon as they arrive. They get scattered all around the great lakes, take time to be found, and then *gasp* they may fly somewhere else and get found days later.

Case in point - the Tricoloured Heron. Darn thing showed up at Pelee, then days later appeared at Holiday Beach. Had the bird not been seen at Point Pelee immediately after the spectacular weather on Apr 9 - it would have been much harder to see the correlation to it's occurrence in Ontario with the weather. 

Surfacce archive from late on Apr 9th... The subtropical jet is pushing over Ontario and violent winds/tornadoes are smashing the USA... This is a SUPERB rarity setup for the spring (it's different in the fall)... 

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SO - is this going to happen again soon?

No...

CPC 6-10 day climate outlook... WOW that looks bad eh? This map is telling us that there is a 70-90% chance that temperatures will be BELOW seasonal from April 25th-29th... This is my favourite time of year for birding (sometimes) if things get warm and we have severe weather in the old'e USA... Some MEGA rare birds have occurred at this time (Black-capped Vireo)... But it's hard to get too excited about this forecast....

The 8-14 day outlook is similar. 50-60% chances of below seasonal through MAY 3rd! Yikes... Things change, and it only takes 6 hours of 20C weather to bring migrants and vagrants, but i'm predicting the start of insane migration (neotropical) won't be until May 3-6th ish... Check back here for updates ;)

It still only takes one bird! 

Nostalgia

Well, not really... I found a bunch of old "banners" from the blog - and I thought "hey! that could make for useless blog filler when there is nothing to write about!"

(this may have been the first)

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In other news, I think I may have finally figured out why some of my images (posted here on the blog) look like DOG SPIT... I thought it was my new laptop/editing, but I believe Picasa - which I use to upload blog-only photos - was applying some sort of "auto enhance" to the images... TURRIBLE I say! TURRIBLE!

So I think I've turned it off... Hopefully it looks better now (and hopefully I get back to editing/working on my website again in the future... It's soo neglected) :( 

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In my last bit of news, I thought (a few months ago) that I was going to dive into social media... Since that time, I've confirmed that I'm not much of a "social media" person! BUT - I think I'll be posting a lot of (short) weather notes on my olde Facebook page... Specifically related to Great Lakes birding and migration! 

Check out the page here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008814760809

I THINK (I think...) I've made the weather posts "public" - so even if you aren't on Facebook - you can see them... Let me know otherwise... Stupid Facebook...

50+ Greater White-fronted Geese - finders account

So there I was, drivin along hwy 6, just north of Hagersville, ON... Just north of town there is a few farms with a lot of pasture, where a few years ago I spotted a Raven in the summer - a neat little spot. I had the old'e cruise control set at 99kph, and while driving past I noticed some waterfowl in the field (geese)...

Hey... I think one of those geese looks a lil funny...

Maybe I'll stop...

*stops car*

*raises binoculars*

Dang, that there's some odd lookin geese in those fields...

*raises binoculars again*

wtf is goin on out der?!

*sets up scope*

Dang!

Dat der is a whole lotta GWF Gooses der!

Then I poste to Ontbirds:

Just found a group of 50+ Greater White-fronted Geese north of Hagersville, ON (Haldimand County).... East (or southeast) side of the road, directly across from house #4353 on Hwy 6. Many birds are sleeping and some are below a hill, but a rough count hit 52 birds at one point... 

This ebird checklist shows the location of the birds (Under green location - click map for a google map point) - http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S22742102 Birds are a bit distant but identifiable with binoculars (scope is better!) 

Good Birding 

Brandon (shameless plug - www.PeregrinePrints.com)

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There you have it! An account for the ages... (I just wanted to share the photos)