Rough-legged Buzzard

Rough-legged Buzzard Buteo lagopus

Waterloo County, ON

28 December 2013

    The annual Linwood Christmas Bird Count is usually the highest, or close to the highest, for raptor concentrations on the continent. Among the species located in this area are Rough-legged Hawks, visiting from their high arctic nesting areas, to spend the winter here, in what must seem to them benign conditions, with abundant rodent prey.

    This is a difficult species to photograph. It is very wary of humans, and flies at the slightest interaction with birders it perceives as being too close.

    While the following pictures are hardly of superior quality, they do show a magnificent dark morph bird we located in a field. Dark morph plumage is very much in the minority of birds found here. You can clearly see the feathered tarsus, so common on birds from the far north.

    The concentration of Rough-legged Hawks is one of the very special benefits of living in this area.

    I might point out that this year there has been a heavy influx of Snowy Owls Bubo scandiaca also, and we (Fraser Gibson, Ken Quantz and I) started our day's count with nine Eastern Screech Owls Megascops asio.  

  

Common Redpoll

Common Redpoll, Carduelis flammea

3 January 2013

    I seem to be blogging quite a bit about Common Redpolls recently, but the fact is that we are experiencing one of the greatest redpoll invasions in living memory. For example, our count on the Linwood CBC was a staggering 2,965 individuals, demolishing the previous record of 79! Most days we look out the window at our feeders and see up to a dozen or so but today we were visited by a flock of at least fifty birds and probably more. The pictures above, while not great, (taken through the window in poor light just after daybreak) show the extent of this event. It may be many winters before we have a repeat of this phenomenon. In fact in many years we do not see a redpoll at all.