This evening I headed to the Townsend sewage lagoons with Brett Fried with the hopes that the looming thunderstorms would ground some shorebirds. The first lagoon has had decent shorebird habitat all summer and good numbers of peeps had been reported. This was my first visit to the site in over a year.
The weather hadn't grounded as many shorebirds as we had anticipated but we still had good numbers of 11 species. Highlights included:
-Thousands and thousands of swallows. Brett and I estimated that there were somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 present. All 6 species were there including 3 lingering Purple Martins. Tree and Bank Swallows made up 95 percent of the swallows.
-1 White-rumped Sandpiper (adult)
-1 Short-billed Dowitcher (juv)
-3 Baird's Sandpipers (adult)
No pictures due to the weather.
Tomorrow I will check out Tilbury on my way to work. I'm getting pretty excited - only 2 more weeks of work and then I am done. My job is great, don't get me wrong (after all, I spend all day wandering around in tallgrass prairie!) but I am ready for a change. I have a flight booked to Nova Scotia on August 26th, where I will spend 10 days with my lovely girlfriend, Laura. I doubt I will get out birding much, but we might do a bit of shorebirding on the coast, a much more scenic location than the stinky sewage lagoons of Ontario. After that I will be back in Guelph for my last year at the university.
1 comment:
Interestingly, I was at Townsend earlier in the day (around noon) and had 3 White-rumps, no SBDO and no BASA. Amazing how much turnover there is during a few hours.
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