May 22 2013. Hendrie Valley RBG Burlington ON. I had the pleasure of showing two visitors from the U.K around one of my favourite birding spots today. We’d never met before today but through the Birdingpal website , an excellent way to find local birding help when you’re travelling, we arranged to share some good Ontario birding. I’ll admit that I harboured some minor concerns that the valley and trails I’d pre-selected might not live up to expectations but I needn’t have worried, indeed it would be pretty hard to fail at this time of year with so many migrants around. The local birds were in full feather and voice and we enjoyed a good three hours and compiled a tally of about 40 birds.
The chosen trail is always popular with visitors, especially families, because Black-capped Chickadees, White-breasted Nuthatches and sometimes Hairy Woodpeckers will happily and greedily take sunflower seeds from your open hand. This experience is always a showstopper and it can take half an hour or more to cover the first leg of the trail. We enjoyed the chickadees and nuthatches for a while and then reveled in close encounters with a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a singing Common Yellowthroat and an inquisitive Baltimore Oriole.
Moving along a woodland trail, we encountered a lone female American Redstart bouncing around in some bordering dogwood bushes, searched tree-tops for a singing Warbling Vireo and watched an Eastern Phoebe sallying out for flying insect food and proclaiming territorial ownership with its wet-throated ‘wee-bee’ call.
We found a Green Heron standing motionless in an about-to-strike pose on the edge of a woodland-edge pond and a trio of Wood Ducks, a female and two handsome males, perched warily on a downed tree limb.
The Bird of the Day, for me anyway, was a Scarlet Tanager found as we were winding up our morning’s birding. It’s been a while, but as soon as I heard the tanager’s distinctive “chik-brrr…….. chik-brrr”, I knew we had a very special sighting to close the day with. It took a while to find him, he was high up in a Red Oak and cussedly determined to stay just out of sight. A Scarlet Tanager is always a winner for me because of the red-hot intensity of the breeding male’s plumage. This photo was taken last year before it was possible to hide.