Spring promises!

It’s already been over 2 weeks that migration monitoring has started again at Cabot Head, on the beautiful Bruce Peninsula. As usual, yours truly prefers to spend most of his time out in the real world instead of the cyber one, which explains the very irregular posting on this blog. True that you could get a horn of plenty at your fingertips, but it is so deprived of actual sensations, like a soft breeze filled with the beeping of spring peepers and the smell of warming earth…

The monitoring season started at Cabot Head on 16 April and the first week was warm and very pleasant. It is always a joy to see old friends coming back to their summer haunts and new species have been seen almost daily. We’ve been delighted to watch a young Golden Eagle seen for a few days; 3 Bald Eagles (2 juveniles and an adult) in residence around Wingfield Basin, exploiting a fish run on a small creek. It was interesting to see the adult bald eagle arriving a few days after the young ones, but quickly claiming the place for itself, scaring away gulls, ravens, and the loose congregations of scavengers (including a red fox, seen twice dragging a fish back to the wood).

Swallows, the harbingers of spring, were back already in mid-April: First Tree Swallow on 16 April, Bran on 18 April, Northern Rough-winged on 20 April and Bank on 23 April. Other birds strongly associated to the renewal of spring, the warblers, have started to trickle back too: the first Yellow-rumped Warbler arrived on 16 April, Pine Warblers on 18 April, Palm Warblers on 22 April, Nashville Warbler and Black-throated Green Warbler on 1 May.

Some birds were very early or unusual, like the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher on 17 April and the Spotted Sandpiper 2 days later. Large kettles of Broad-winged Hawks (up to 150 birds together) were seen in April, very unusual to see such large flocks that early!

But then, the weather turned cold during the last week of April; it even snowed on 30 April, a nice treat for one volunteer’s birthday! Migration has slowed since: a cold, north wind is not very enticing for long nightly flights. And when it turns warmer, it is to bring rain. In short, the exciting pace of migration has taken a break, waiting for breaks in the horizon to resume.