First Post-Incredulous Story to Start

My boyfriend and I live near Whitby Harbour in Ontario. We have lived here since summer 2011. We began taking walks often, to the waterfront. This Christmas, it became even more new and exciting to us, because we slowly discovered the huge bird watching community here. It began with seeing a huge cloud on Dec 26th of what we thought were mallards. This did not seem right, mallards in a huge group, apparently diving for fish!? No way. We also saw these patchwork looking ducks and other odd ducks we've never seen.
It never takes long on the net nowadays to find just about anything out.

I got home from work one day to hear, excitedly, that I won't believe something. Apparently some rare duck to North America was spotted over Christmas time in the harbour. This thing called a Smew. Needless to say, through much discovery of videos, blogs, posts on bird sighting sites, etc. we learned of this whole interconnected network of interesting birdaholics near us. It made for really, a fun Christmas and New Year holidays for us. I personally discovered some really great and exciting photo-blogs and we got to see photos of the snowy owl which we had seen for a while down at the harbour. We also learned that the ducks we were seeing there were Mergansers, Long tails (formerly Old Squaw), and Golden Eyes, and even a Bufflehead or 2.

I have yet to get an 80-200 zoom for my digital slr, I only have an old one that fit my Nikon FE film camera and it won't fit my D70s without an adapter. Need that for this coming spring!

This whole Smew thing and bird thing then took a humourous turn, as many things often do with me. I began to recall a movie called "Rare Birds", that was made from a really good Canadian novel. So, the whole episode of all this bird excitement over Christmas, then got even funnier when we discovered a Steve Martin movie called "The Big Year" Omg, we Had to find and watch that.

All has sort of calmed a bit for us on this whole Whitby Harbour bird matter but we still run down to catch sunrises and sunsets. During these times, we have spotted a swan with tag# C15. It is often right at the road edge by the bridge on Brock Street. We do not like to see this as we feel it is dangerous for it with cars. The first time we saw it, I grabbed some pics of it eating right out of a hand out a car window. We've seen it 2 times since now. We feel sad as it is looking for food and perhaps putting itself in possible harms way by doing this.

Today, my boyfriend discovered, on a website, that it was actually rescued by TWC from walking into a local grade school in Durham region! I then looked further, and I found that in Lake Scugog area in April, it was seen in a backyard by itself. Holy cow!

We chased it back into the water about 5 days ago, seeing it on the road yet again :-(
Here is the photo of the odd C15 swan. We worry about it.