The following is an excerpt from the Owen Sound Field Naturalists November Column.
Submitted by John Dickson
I continue to see the occasional butterfly and a few bees on wildflower blooms, and like others, have discovered a few bird nests which had been hidden until the past week or two. I have also been hearing and seeing more woodpeckers than usual. Many backyard feeders have been visited recently by boisterous and colourful flocks of Evening Grosbeaks as they cruise throughout the region.
Bo Penny of the Beaver Valley had a marvellous treat – “What a surprise! Seven snapping turtles hatched today. I’ve never seen them hatch this late (November 4). We had a bunch that hatched in September from the same nest so I was very surprised to see little black heads poking out of the gravel.”
The Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory (BPBO) has wrapped up its banding and monitoring operations for 2022, and has set some records along the way, as shared by Stéphane Menu:
“This more than remarkable season didn’t end in a whisper but with more remarkable sightings and banding. On October 27, while watching a distant bird on the bay through the scope, white ghosts appeared on the hazy horizon. Flapping strongly, the large pure white birds could only be swans, Tundra Swans – only the fourth observation of Tundra Swans at Cabot Head over 21 years.
There were more surprises: on October 28, we banded a beautiful adult male Northern Parula. Later the same day, on the very last net round, a flashy yellow big bird was waiting for us in a net: An adult male Evening Grosbeak! Its namesake bill was something to behold and… avoid, with not much success. This species had never been banded before at Cabot Head: it tends to fly high and stay high in the canopy. It was such a remarkable bird to band.
On the last day of monitoring, October 31, the banding total was a solid 17 birds, bringing the fall season total to a stratospheric 2,925 birds banded, almost 450 birds more than the previous record of 2,476 birds in fall. A small flock of 17 Evening Grosbeaks was flying around but no amount of incantations brought them down into our nets. An eerie whinnying was appropriate on that Halloween evening: there are no ghosts in my world and the call came from an aptly-named Eastern Screech Owl.”
