So I promised biweekly post updates for my Big Year, and, in classic Ezra fashion, I left it to the last minute; I apologize for the belatedness. This will just be a summary of Jan 1, since it was an eventful day and warrants its own post. Expect the rest soon, but take my promises with a grain of salt! Before I begin, I’d like to introduce you to a phrase that was coined way back when I first set my sights on undertaking this crazy venture: “big year mentality”. BYM refers to maximizing potential for important year birds and not wasting time looking for birds that I will inevitably bump into during the year, and just generally doing anything and everything possible to beat the record.
Naturally, I started the year by immediately breaking the aforementioned rule. After staying up to call in the New Year, I headed out to get Eastern Screech-Owl (a bird I would undoubtedly encounter many times throughout 2022) as my first tick. I heard and saw a couple with no trouble, and, after a solid four hours of sleep, met up with Kiah Jasper, Nathan Hood, and William Konze before heading to Niagara-on-Lake (NOTL). Kiah is also doing a big year, and we and I will tackle most of it together, which I’m very grateful for. Check out his blog (he is much more consistent with his post schedule!).
Luckily for us, many rare birds that showed up late in 2021 continued into 2022. Our plan was to tick off as many of these continuing rarities on day one as possible. The plan was to try for Razorbill, Black-bellied Whistling-Duck, Rufous Hummingbird, and Golden-crowned Sparrow.
After getting off the QEW in Niagara, we pulled over in the hopes of hearing a Great-horned Owl. No sooner did we open the windows than we heard a choir of three Great-horneds. Thirty minutes before sunrise, we arrived at NOTL's Queens Royal Park where we were joined by Andy Nguyen. A modest winter dawn chorus gave us a handful of common year birds to add to the list. Thousands of Bonaparte's Gulls cruised upriver toward the Falls, and, with them, at least six adult Little Gulls, their black underwings and petit proportions giving them away. While a fairly easy species in Niagara and Long Point, Little Gull is a good one to tick off early in the year. William spotted the continuing immature male King Eider flying up river, and it must have quickly decided to turn tail for, soon after, we found it in among the hoards of Long-tailed Ducks floating out on the water. This is the best photo I could capture of it.
Sadly, despite thorough scanning with scopes, we could not find the Razorbills, which hadn't been reported for a few days. We did, however, see three boatloads of hunters who had come from the New York side of the river and were actively picking off ducks near the far shore, and who knows how well they could differentiate between a duck and an alcid. We hoped our target birds weren't mounted over a fireplace!
On our way to Dufferin Islands, we stopped at Adam Beck, a lofty vantage point overlooking a hydroelectric generating station on the Niagara River, where eddies of gulls swirled over the turbulent water. We picked out several "Kumlien's" Iceland Gulls among the Ring-billeds and Herrings.
Just after leaving Adam Beck, I got a phone call that informed me that a Boreal Owl that had been photographed a few days earlier had been refound, so we figured we'd squeeze a detour to see it in between the Whistling-Duck and Rufous Hummingbird.
At Dufferin Islands, the Black-bellied Whistling-Duck which had been around since July 2021 was almost too easy of a tick. Sitting on the bank metres away from our parking spot, the striking rufous and black duck was just waking up. I hadn't seen one in Ontario since 2016, when five showed up for a day at Bayfront Park in Hamilton, a ten minute bike ride from my house.
After spending a few minutes with the duck, we booked it to see the Boreal Owl. We found two squinting yellow eyes staring out of an earth toned ball of feathers from an exposed pocket of a large blue spruce. This top-heavy northern visitor was very lost in the Southwest, but seemed reasonably content as we viewed him from a stone's throw away. It was my second encounter with the species, and my first time photographing one. After admiring the Boreal Owl for a while, we poked around a bit and found three Northern Saw-whet Owls, tucked away in dense confiners.
Our next stop was Oakville where a hardy female Rufous Hummingbird was still visiting a backyard feeder near the lake. She was one of at least three Rufous Hummingbirds that showed up in the province last fall. She showed very well for us almost as soon as we arrived.
After spending some time with the hummer and her gracious hosts, we headed in the direction of Guelph. We had originally planned to go from Oakville to Toronto to see the Golden-crowned Sparrow, but we were making such good time (it was only noon), that we figured we'd try for a Mountain Bluebird that had been showing near a Home Depot in Guelph first. We pulled into the Home Depot parking lot forty-five minutes later and hurried down the train tracks beside the which the Mountain Bluebird was being seen. Luck was really on our side, as our target bird (an adult female) was giving good, if distant, looks alongside some of its eastern counterparts.
We bid adieu to our subtle western visitor and made a beeline for Scarborough's Rosetta McClain Gardens, where a Golden-crowned Sparrow had been hanging out since late November. This one might take a bit of patience. It showed up consistently at some seed that had been scattered beside a row a bushes, but, historically, birders had had to wait up to a few hours before connecting with the skulky western sparrow. Not us, apparently! The immature Golden-crowned Sparrow materialized out of a bush dense with House Sparrows no more than five minutes after we had arrived at the stakeout, and happily gorged itself on seeds.
We still had a few hours of daylight to spend, so we headed elsewhere in the GTA in search of owls. We managed to connect with a Long-eared Owl sleeping in a cedar tree, and we also got distant looks at a Snowy Owl. We called in the first Big Year sunset scanning from a lofty vantage for Short-eared Owls, but no dice.
We certainly couldn't complain. It was a bumping start. I had cleaned up four OBRC review list rarities, six owl species, and several other tricky birds, leaving my total for the year at fifty-five. You can check out my progress bird by bird on this Google Doc!
Lots has transpired since that eventful New Year's Day! Stay tuned for the next wrap up post.
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