Every year Ecology North hosts a Mother’s Day bird walk for people to get out and meet fellow birders and inventory the species arriving in the North. This year the Mother’s Day walk coincided with International Migratory Bird Day and about fifteen people showed up to join the event.
We visited three different parts of the city including Rotary Park, Range Lake, and the Yellowknife River. This year the cold weather has delayed the arrival of a number of species but we still managed to count about 60 different species over the course of the 5-hour tour.
Some of the species we saw included a pair of belted kingfishers, a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a pair of surf scoters, red-breasted mergansers, osprey, tundra swans, red-necked grebes, a greater yellowlegs, a pectoral sandpiper, a bunch of lesser yellowlegs, long-tailed ducks, Widgeons, teals, mallards, Yellow-rumped warblers, orange-crowned warbler, Lincoln’s Sparrow, rusty blackbird, and chipping sparrows. And that’s just to name a few of them!
A lot of the birds were too far away to photograph (for my liking) but I did learn a few things and about how to differentiate male and female belted kingfishers (count the number of neck bands 1=male 2=female) and more tips about how to identify different bird songs. Areas where I definitely need improvement are in my auditory ID skills and figuring out how to tell the difference between all the sandpipers, plovers, yellowlegs, and snipes!
To be honest my sparrow ID skills could use some brushing up as well but I am definitely improved over calling them all brownish flappy birds! Anyhow here are the photos I took during the Mother’s Day bird walk and a couple of others from around that weekend.
Thanks for stopping by.