This winter has been a great one for snowy owls with sightings across the north, and around the marsh we have had 5 or 6 sightings. Our area has also produced a great grey owl and a northern hawk owl. To help protect owls from overzealous birders, Ebird and birders themselves rarely pinpoint the exact location of owls.
This I believe is more of an issue in the south, but it is best to be safe than sorry.
The other part of winter birding is finding birds that decide to over winter. Whether these birds are fool hardy, lazy, initially injured or stubborn, the north is always host to birds that just decide to stick around. I have heard of quite a few robins that stayed north this year, as well as grackles, a few redwinged blackbirds and quite a few juncos. Robin sightings in February always get people excited, as winter wanes we all look for any harbinger of an early spring. Despite my protests that a robin in February means nothing, a pair of trumpeter swans arriving Feb. 24 at the hills lake fish hatchery outside of Englehart does represent a true arrival of migrants.
Speaking of migrating, I am off to Long Point bird observatory on the northern shore of Lake Erie to go to the Ontario bird banding conference in March and everyone down there tells me that spring has arrived and there are all sorts of migrants waiting for the chance to head north. Yet, as any northerner would say, March weather is certainly unpredictable, and winter is not over yet, so any bird that pushes the migration does so at its own peril. One aspect of the migration that I have always found fascinating is how the birds know when to migrate. One of the triggers to migration is called photo period which means the length of daylight, so a bird that is wintering in a coffee plantation in Nicaragua has no idea what conditions are like in the boreal forest. Yet when the length of daylight gets to a certain point they are pulled north by a drive they may not understand, they only know they have to go north. My fondest wish is that these birds will find their way either to your garden to be photographed or just admired, or perhaps one may find its way into a mist net at the Hilliardton marsh to help us as we try to understand what is happening to the wave of migrants that make our boreal their nursery and home.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the warbler migration does not arrive until May and for now I will enjoy the crimson colour of pine grosbeaks and the sheer numbers of redpolls at our northern feeders and relish the last month of winter birding in the boreal.
One aspect of the migration that I have always found fascinating is
how the birds
know when
to migrate.