Brown Thrasher

Paletta park, Burlington, ON. April 30 2020.  It was wet here all morning, our share of an ugly looking weather system that swept south to east across North America. That system probably impeded much of last night’s spring migration flight but when the skies cleared around lunch time, staying indoors any longer seemed like a bad idea. So, I went over to a local park known as a good place for birds and a particularly good spot to find spring migrants. It lies perhaps 10 kilometres from a similar park on the opposite shore of Lake Ontario and it’s easy to imagine that birds take a shortcut crossing the lake, park to park, rather than going all the way around the heavily urbanised west-end shoreline of the lake.

The park was very active with hordes of White-crowned Sparrows working through the thick undergrowth of the naturalised creek floodplain. If anyone had asked me how many there were I’d have said at least 200 – although it would have been a wild guess. But the same, equally wild guess might just as easily have applied to Ruby-crowned Kinglets busy picking through the thick upper reaches of a bank of White Cedars; each one a mere 6 grams, little more than a 25-cent coin. Just those two species alone made the trip worthwhile but a Swamp Sparrow, a Yellow-rumped Warbler and a few late-leaving Dark-eyed Juncos added a bit of variety and made the afternoon complete. Complete that is until a Brown Thrasher flew past me. Brown Thrashers are always worth stopping what you’re doing for, so I moved towards it hoping for a better and confirming view. It wasn’t very keen about my approach but a long lens enabled me to get a few satisfying photos and the smile to myself said Bird of the Day. Yep, and so it was.