Red Tailed Hawk Surprise

Last weekend, we decided to go to a different location, a park down in the east south end of Scarborough, for a change of scenery. We ended up parking and basically turning around as we reached the top of the steep park entrance path - I'm just Not keen on people's large dogs running off leash :-( I had had a feeling we would encounter that there too, similar to the whole of Greenwood, because it isn't signed as a sensitive wild life area. I am just too scared of strange large loose running dogs and it is a terrifying anxiety filled venture then, unfortunately. So, we headed back to Whitby, and the Lynde Shores/Halls Rd. areas again as we'd spent a lot of the time driving already.

Lucky we did because we ended up seeing some pretty cool and exciting things.

As we stood on the bridge over the water at Lynde Shores, John spotted a red-tailed hawk fly across from one side to the other, landing in trees on either side of the narrow marsh. We waited to see if it was going to attempt to grab one of the many mallards below. Walking into the path, John spotted it fly over the forest path and swoop at a Canada Goose. It then went into the forest area and hung around on some low lying fallen brush and tree branches. A possum was looking through the debris on the ground, the hawk seeming to not be concerned with it at all. It then flew into a tree just above where I was standing. I got a couple images of it before it again took off. We thought it may still have been a juvenile one, from its behaviour and the head markings and yellow still present at the beak.

At the marsh, 4 of the Trumpeters were up on the roadway, hunting for food. Probably the babies from last summer we think. There were also 2 adult pairs in the water, mutes and trumpeters. The ducks were crazy as usual and we saw a weirdly marked male mallard, maybe a mix of some sort. We also saw hybrid female mallard/american black duck mixes.

There were also rabbits, squirrels, American Tree Sparrows, chickadees - as usual. One funny sight was a sparrow bathing in a small amount of icy and dirty water on the ground.

What began as a sort of disappointing outing ended up being a fun one back in our usual haunts.

Leucistic Black Capped Chickadee

Recently, during a visit to Lynde Shores, where the chickadees go insane feeding from your hand, we noticed an odd looking one. It had white spots in the dark areas of its head and face, pink legs and a bit of pink in its beak. I had heard of other birds and animals with pigment missing but couldn't quite recall the term for them. We went home and looked into it and remembered it is called "leucistic". This chickadee we saw though was not quite as extreme as other examples we viewed.

Quite an exciting find as they are not too common to see. I took some shots on 2 different days in a row. One was overcast so more difficult to get a shot, one was sunny.

Some Cool Sightings!

It is amazing what you can see practically in your own backyard. Any time I happened to be outdoors or up north, I had always heard the singing of birds, the overlay of so many unknown calls, but they always fell into that category of background music. Getting to know the source of the sounds is neat. Now, myself and my partner can identify blue jay, cardinal, song sparrows, ravens, yellow warblers, orioles, the sora, swans, the moorhen, and even muskrats, on our ventures. Recently, we've seen baby rabbits, a baby muskrat,  mom and baby geese, a moorhen, an egret, painted turtles laying eggs, cormorants, a bobolink, a black bird chasing a king fisher, turkey vultures overhead, baby raccoon, the blue heron as close as we've ever seen, and to top it all off, we saw 2 Sandhill Cranes fly over, circle, then come back to the water and land, at Cranberry Marsh in Whitby. It was awesome! I had seen photos by others of them, so immediately their shapes said Sandhill Crane to me, but I didn't think they were in Ontario. Well, they do migrate for summer breeding to Ontario, but they don't venture into this eastern area too often, so it seems. However, they have been spotted in the Whitby area before, research shows us. They were a pretty amazing sight, flying in synch, over our heads then landing. We realized, 3 mins before or after, standing in some different spot, we'd have missed this!