Old Haunt Visit on New Years Day

Happy New Year to all!

Here's to hoping that 2016 brings only the best to everyone and to our world, Earth.

Husband and I took a walk to our old stomping grounds, Halls Rd., east of Toronto, on our way to an 85th birthday party of my friend's Dad. He is an awesome person and still goin' strong, living life to the fullest, at 85 :-)

It was a fairly dull grey day though the sun did come out After we'd left our walk and were at the party, of course lol! But, it was still an enjoyable time visiting the marsh, the paths, and the shoreline of Lake Ontario. It was not too cold, there was some wind out on the lake which created some nice waves. There were the usual cute creatures, the grey squirrel, red squirrel, the black capped chickadees, one lone little American tree sparrow, the red cardinal flitted by (no pics of the little bugger).

As we left, along the road, we saw a couple photographers standing outside their pulled over vehicle. One person was crouching further away, on the new cement paths that lead into Lynde Shores, apparently he/she had spotted something. These guys had large lenses, maybe 600mm, one with lots of camouflage on themselves and the cameras.

Because we had to slow and proceed with caution I guess is why John spotted a small hawk like looking bird land on a dead upright tree trunk just to our left. I grabbed my camera and peered through my lens. It looked to me to be a small falcon like shaped bird. Right away I'm thinking American Kestrel. It indeed Was! What a treat, and I believe it is a male. I took some pics out the car window, then when it changed to a tree behind, I got out and took some outside the car. The light was too dull for me to get real sharp images, especially given the distance of the bird still was not idea, a bit too far for my 300mm lens, plus the image stabilization made for some not too great haloing sort of bordering around the bird when I tried to correct the values in my RAW image. But hey, we were so thrilled to get to see this gorgeous little bird again! It's been a couple years since we've had the pleasure of spotting one.

I guess what the other photographers saw was probably the mate to this bird, as they were back behind us, and I guess were sighting the female.

All and all, a nice walk in our old much loved conservation area where we used to live.

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!

Baby Animals Abound!

We took a brief jaunt down to Halls Rd. the other evening, and were treated with all kinds of baby animal sightings. We even saw a wild turkey cross in front of us as we left the area. One thing you can be sure of, you will always spot wildlife, and I use that term loosely since many will come right up to people, at Halls Rd.

Jay with eggs.

Lottsa Birds Today!

Another partial day off before a late shift at a trade show my work participates in. Good time to hit Halls Rd. while the hoards of kids and birders are (hopefully) at school and work.
Sure enough, it takes a couple minutes, but the tons of chickadees and eventually the other birds, smell food and begin to appear. There were again, hundreds of bombing by your head chickadees. Then, the downy woodpecker shoots out of nowhere and is on John's hand.
I got some cool pics. One, a one second chance capture of one of the red squirrels as it climbed around on the tree in front of us. So cute!!!