March 7 2019. Lake Erie at Selkirk, ON. Mid-morning I canvassed four birder companions to see if anyone would be up for an afternoon drive seeking interesting sightings from an all-white winter landscape. On-road birding is not my favourite but I really needed a change of scenery and winter birds are few and far between.
Two of us made our way towards the north shore of Lake Erie making stops at a few favoured spots. It turned out to be a quite rewarding few hours and our tally included a large flock of Snow Buntings coming to a baited area where banders were at work trapping, banding and assessing them before release. From years of banding at this site, the evidence is that Snow Buntings wintering in Southern Ontario probably breed in Labrador and/or Greenland.
Along with the Snow Buntings were many Horned Larks and, to my companion’s particular delight, we found a single Lapland Longspur feeding with one of many roadside flocks of Horned Larks.
As hoped for and expected there were several Rough-legged Hawks hunting the wide fields although most were very far away and we watched one first-year Northern Harrier quartering some roadside fields.
Most exciting though, and Birds of the Day, were a couple of sightings of Bald Eagles. First an adult eagle sitting, apparently incubating eggs, in a large tree-top nest on the edge of a small woodlot close to the Lake Erie shore. It may only be early March (and still cold and snowy) but Bald Eagles in Ontario start egg-laying in mid-February.
Second, and dramatically, a little later we spotted a large bird flying low and purposefully about a kilometer away over frozen Lake Erie. Through binoculars we could see it was a Bald Eagle giving chase to a duck which it had chosen for lunch. Skimming just above the ice, the duck managed to stay ahead of the eagle until they vanished from our line of sight around a headland. Then they apparently reversed direction and we were able to continue following the low-level chase back in the opposite direction. But now a second Bald Eagle came onto the scene following the chase from a polite distance. The flying-for-its-life duck maintained a lead for quite while but eventually flagged and the eagle grabbed it, swooped up and handily passed it to the second eagle who had moved in ready to assist, they then both settled down on the ice out of our line of sight.
Since they evidently shared the catch, it seems probable that either the eagles followed a practiced, cooperative hunting strategy and/or we had watched an adult continuing to support and teach a young eagle how to survive on winter duck.
