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muskrat love: part three of our point pelee, ontario trip report

2007-05-04 - 8:01 p.m.

all photos © 2007 by elaine radford

OK, I've added simply tons of birds to the trip list since last we met our heroes. Hold onto your hat.

Before we headed back to the park Thursday evening for the twilight hike, we stopped by the Seacliffe Inn for an early dinner. I tried the Lake Erie perch, which was OK, but maybe won't replace good old catfish. (Sorry, folks!) We also raised a glass of the local Pelee Island Winery Merlot. Not bad, not bad at-tall. By the way, we were the only people in the restaurant taking advantage of the super early dinner hour, which actually starts at 4. People, use these little benefits, or they'll go away. It was great to be able to get real food in a cozy setting and still be able to go back to the park for some late afternoon/twilight birding.

We got to the meeting point a little early, so that we could kick around and scout out the area for ourselves. It was near the old homestead, and we soon located a fine stand that for whatever reasons had attracted a great deal of warbler activity -- most of it the usual (honorary warbler hanger-on) Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, and Yellow Warbler, but also front and center a special display from a beautiful Black-Throated Blue Warbler male. Hard to believe that the last (and first) time I saw this bird was in Puerto Rico.

The guided tour led us through a variety of trails. One highlight was a tree that drew such beauties as (full adult male) Blackburnian Warbler, (full adult male) Black-Throated Green Warblers, Palm Warbler -- oh yeah, and let us not forget the usual Yellow-Rumped and Kinglet hordes. The Blackburnian male was simply breath-taking, as always. A more humorous note came in a tree where a male Yellow Warbler and a male Yellow-Rumped Warbler were flycatching. We could see the huge cloud of insects that they sought above the tree, yet the selfish Yellow-Rumped attacked the Yellow and tried to drive him away. Without success, I might add. The Yellow stood his ground, and the Yellow-Rump seemed flummoxed. A few minutes later, they drew close again, and I thought the YRWA would attack the YEWA a second time, but he decided to save his energy and invested in a bitter staredown instead. It was equally effective at ridding the tree of his smaller competitor, who could see for himself that there was plenty there for everyone and who refused to be egged into being the attacker.

We saw our first Raccoon of the park, a huge fat animal checking picnic tables for scraps.

The efforts to attract Bald Eagles back to the park have succeeded, and a Bald Eagle was sitting on the nest, the cold wind blowing through her feathers.

The grand finale of the day was the American Woodcock courtship dance. Boy, I had the wrong idea about those guys. They are fat and dumpy, right, sort of shaped like a jelly doughnut with a long unwieldy beak? Well, when those things go up, they go up like a rocket out of hell. I could not track how quickly they rose and fell. And I couldn't believe how high they went. Impossible to focus my glass on them in the dark when you consider my slower-than-average reaction times and their bat-out-of-hellness rush for the zenith. Fortunately, one of them took pity on the "Special" birder in the group and took a slow return directly over our heads so that I could actually see him as a bird instead of a blurrrrrr.


some old-time scrap from the pioneer homestead near the woodcock area of point pelee

The weather has been glorious, which is sort of bad. We need a good night-time or even afternoon thunderstorm to scare down a fall-out. But instead we've had an endless sequence of beautiful if cold sunny days. The Yellow-Rumped hordes apparently fueled up and moved on. In fact, for the entire day Friday, we saw only one Yellow-Rumped, the same number of Nashvilles that we saw today! Still good numbers of RCKIs though. We ran into our twilight hike guide about to add a note to the so-called "book of lies," and his addition was no lie. He scrawled a map on a small piece of paper, and we followed it to a Marbled Godwit in the field just outside the park. Afterward, we strolled the Woodland Trail in search of the Northern Waterthrushes (they stiffed us) and the Cooper's Hawk nest (she sat with just her tail hanging out, the brat). We also checked the tip, but it was very quiet today. Oh, a cute thing we saw on the beach while we were enjoying a flock of Red-Breasted Merganser -- a Robin came up and bathed in the surf. It was just as cute as pie and a good reminder that Lake Erie is a freshwater lake and not the ocean, something I tend to forget when I hear the sound of the pounding surf.

In the late afternoon, we went to Hillman's Marsh. This isn't included in the National Park pass, but it's only $4 per vehicle, so who cares? We actually strolled the entire Hillman loop trail instead of going directly to the shorebird area. A lot of exercise, but we had close-up views of Muskrat (I know it ain't a bird, but at first I thought it was an otter!) and a perfectly splendid male Rose-Breasted Grosbeak.

Afterward, we sampled one of the many, many, many Mexican restaurants near the Mexican consulate. Who knew they had a Mexican consulate in Leamington? The steak fajitas were excellent, and the beans were unbelievable.

New birds in the order added:

  1. American Kestrel
  2. Red-Headed Woodpecker--official bird of the 2007 migration
  3. American Goldfinch
  4. Black-Throated Blue Warbler
  5. Eastern Towhee
  6. Blackburnian Warbler
  7. Black-Throated Green Warbler
  8. Northern Flicker
  9. Carolina Wren
  10. Bald Eagle
  11. Baltimore Oriole
  12. Northern Harrier
  13. Cooper's Hawk
  14. Caspian Tern
  15. American Woodcock
  16. Mallard
  17. Ring-Necked Pheasant
  18. Marbled Godwit
  19. Ring-Billed Gull
  20. Brown Thrasher
  21. Forster's Tern
  22. Great Egret
  23. Common Tern
  24. Mute Swan
  25. Rose-Breasted Grosbeak
  26. Northern Shoveler
  27. Bonaparte's Gull
  28. Dunlin
  29. Black-Bellied Plover
  30. Willet
  31. Rock Dove


hillman marsh

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