Friday, April 17, 2015

Spring Birding (Part 2 - St. Vital Park Birding)

Hello again! This is the post you've all been waiting for! Spring Birding #2! (applaud) I will be making these Spring Bird posts all spring, to document the birds that we see in Winnipeg during the spring time, for you're enjoyment (and mine, I like doing these). So if you ever wanted to know what spring birding is like here, read these! I will hopefully post them at least weekly, probably more frequently. So stay an active reader! And enjoy!


William's violin teacher's place has a lot of birds at it. One of them is a Merlin.

Merlin
During migration, we always have quite a lot of birds hit our window. Primarily Redpolls, Purple Finches and Juncos. A few weeks ago we had a horrible amount of redpolls hitting our window. It was after they left that we remembered we had a screen for that window! I was trying to think of some way to stop them from hitting, and the screen would have solved all our problems.
So, here's a female Purple Finch that hit the window. I'm not sure if it died afterwards.
Purple Finch
Okay, now for the Saint Vital Park birding. We went here for our homeschool group, as it is nearby to the place we meet. It has a duck pond and some woods, nice for taking a walk. Actually, next month, Christian Artuso is giving a speech for our homeschool group, then we will go birding at St Vital Park! That's going to be one of my favorite times.

There were mostly Canada Geese at the duck pond, but there were some other birds also. Many of these photos are William's! I didn't feel like trying to figure out which ones were who's, so I just put them all as (c) Josiah ....... He doesn't care a whole lot.

Just warning you, we took a lot of photos! A lot.... Maybe I should have split it into two posts.... Well, I hope you are a persistent reader and won't give up half way through when you realize it never ends. ;)
Canada Goose

Canada Goose
Mallards were one of the other birds we saw there.
Mallard

Dabbling it's beak.
Mallard

Mallard

Canada Goose
Male and female Mallard. The male seems to be have a snack. Yum Yum! Aquatic plants!
Mallard
Ring-billed Gulls were another of the birds that were at the pond.
Ring-billed Gull
This picture isn't to good, but it looks just so funny! So I thought I'd include it anyway.
Canada Goose
I like this photo, I kept the Mallards in color and made everything else black and white. Two male Mallards hangin out together.
Mallard

Mallard pair
They slip into the water from the ice.

Mallards

female Mallard
One of my favorite birds at the pond was, Wood Ducks! They were mostly hiding along the island in the middle under cover of bush, so it was hard to get good pictures. One female came out onto the ice
female Wood Duck
A beautiful portrait shot!
Female Mallard
Another beautiful portrait shot!
Mallard
And another!
Mallard
We decided to go walking through the woods, maybe look for some birds as well. We crossed a marsh (and I just had shoes (and was holding the camera)) on logs and made it safely across. It was actually a flooded out path. We found a feeder, and some friendly chickadees that landed on our hands. After staying by the chickadees a while we started back. Suddenly a Great-horned Owl flew out and landed in plain view for all of us! What a spectacular bird they are!
This one looks rather white, compared to ours that we have come back every winter. After taking a billion photos with the camera, it finally flew off. I actually only have two photos on the blog, which I'm kind of surprised about. I usually put on like ten for a bird like this ;). I think everyone agreed it was really fantastic to see it, even if they weren't into birds like us.

Apparently it was really sleepy, it kept yawning. I would be sleepy to, if someone woke me up in the middle of my sleep, and started taking pictures of me! Actually... that would just be weird! Anyway, in the pictures it looked like he's singing.

"Grumble, groan. Yawwwwn. Why'd ye wake me up so early? YAWWWWWNN!" 
Great-horned Owl
"AAAAAAHH! EEEEEHH AAAAHHH!!" he sings.

Great-horned Owl
We had looped back to the duck pond. Perfect! The wood ducks were out! So we got some good pictures of them.

This photo isn't the greatest, but I love the Mallard squaking at the Wood Duck, and the Wood Duck is swimming away as fast as possible.
Mallard, Wood Duck, Canada Goose
"Get away from here!"
"On my way!"
And the flashy wood duck showing off his beautiful hair. My friend now calls it the 70's duck, with it's funky hair.
Wood Duck
"Look at my nifty hair!"

Wood Duck

Wood Duck

And yet again, Wood Duck! :D

That's all folks! Thanks for reading! It is a long post, but I'm glad you read through it.
Please Comment and share! And stay tuned for the next Spring Birding Post!

4 comments:

  1. Nice pictures! I love Wood Ducks. We just saw them yesterday, in fact. We have had problems with birds hitting our windows, mainly White-winged Doves and Cassin's Finches, but fortunately all of them survived and were only stunned. Having chickadees land in your hand sounds fun. I've tried doing that but for some reason it just doesn't work. And seeing a Great-horned Owl that close! I've seen Great-horned Owls many times but none have ever landed in plain view like that. Enjoy your spring birding! I am going to go out right now and bird around our neighborhood. If I can get enough pictures I'll post about it.

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    1. Thanks!
      We've had a lot of fatallties with our windows, we probably had like ten or more redpolls die. It was awful. By the time we remembered the screen for the window, the redpolls were already mostly gone, which was really too bad.
      They are probably the best photos I have of Great-horned Owls, it really surprised us at first!
      Go to a park or something for trying at chickadees. I can never get it at our house, but at parks they seem a lot friendlier!
      I'll be looking for the post then. :D

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  2. Wonderful photos! I especially enjoyed the one you captured of the owl yawning.

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