American White Pelican

Royal Botanical Gardens. Arboretum, Hamilton. ON. September 14 2022. A few disruptions in my social calendar and weather mean I’ve had little good birding for the past week or two. But today I walked one of our transects with a new recruit to our team. We enjoyed good birding in fine weather.

Much of what we saw was indicative of the fall migration now well under way: Lesser Yellowlegs picking patiently for wriggly stuff in the mud; Palm and Yellow–rumped Warblers flitting about tree-tops, almost impossible to track, and a handful of Chimney Swifts in wheeling arcs high against a clear blue sky. Out on the shallow water were herons: 24 Great Blue Herons and a siege of 75 Great Egrets. This has become a staging area for egrets who don’t breed locally and 10 or 15 years ago were uncommon here. We examined small groups of Green–winged Teal and Northern Shovelers, both rather hard to make out in difficult light and both in a stage of molt that sees them in mottled greys and browns.

We quite easily compiled a list of 42 species and would have been quite content with that. Then as we walked the last few metres to our cars we made a quick scan of the horizon and saw a soaring American White Pelican some distance away. It certainly seems incongruous, pelicans in Canada, but they breed around large lakes across a large part of the continent roughly from Manitoba to Alberta and south to Kansas. They have to get to and from their wintering grounds somehow, right now they’re heading to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast, so it’s not a big surprise that a few show up every year even if maybe blown a little off course.

Today’s American White Pelican was an easy Bird of the Day, quickly displacing those Great Egrets and Chimney Swifts.

The pelicans in the photo above were a  group that stopped here one June day about ten years ago.