My husband and I had a great time on Presque Isle Saturday and Sunday. The warblers are everywhere! We saw two lifer birds, the Black-throated Blue Warbler and the Great Crested Flycatcher. The rest I’ve seen before but I still got excited seeing them again. Most are around such a short time and if you don’t get out there to see them you probably won’t see them again until the following year. They do migrate back in the fall but the colors aren’t nearly as pretty as they are now in their breeding feathers.
Saturday we hung out at Fry’s Landing. That’s where we saw the Yellow-throated Warbler the weekend before. This time it was filled with Palm Warblers. We also spotted some White-throated Sparrows in the bushes and a few Chestnut-sided Warblers. The little Gold-crowned Kinglets were there to greet us. They are so small and bounce around and seem curious. I heard some bird calls that I couldn’t place and recorded them. I’ll try to find out what birds I was hearing. It got a bit chilly with the wind blowing and it sure didn’t seem it was nearly as warm as the forecast had predicted. We left hoping that the forecast for Sunday would be wrong. On the way out we stopped at the parking area for Dead Pond Trail, across from the Thompson Bay parking. The bushes along the parking loop were full of Yellow-rumped Warblers (butter butts.)
The forecast wasn’t wrong, it rained, but there were several hours in the afternoon it stopped or just spitted drops so we went out to look for more warblers. We stopped at the different parking areas on the way at Presque Isle and watched the ducks. Not many left but we still saw two loons out there. We spotted a canvas back, some scaup and small group of ruddys are still around.
We pulled into the Niagara Launch area and walked behind the bathrooms to where they band birds. We didn’t see much except White-throated Sparrows and Palm Warblers. My husband spotted a Rose-breasted Grosbeak but it was gone by the time I got there. A Downy Woodpecker let me get really close to it.
The wind was blowing a pretty good clip. But between the paved path and the road at the entrance to Niagara Launch we spotted Chestnut-sided Warblers and a Black-throated Blue Warbler.
The Black-throated Blue Warbler was a lifer for my husband and I. We just never happened to see one before. So this was exciting to me and they are really handsome birds.
We moved on to Fry’s Landing and spotted a pair of Wood Ducks leaving the area. My camera just started to focus as the male was almost out of sight.
Again the bushes were full of Palm Warblers. We spotted an Osprey in a tree and watched it fly away. We took the little paths around the area. Where we saw the Yellow-throated Warbler the week before,
we didn’t see any birds except for the Gold Crowned Kinglets. The birds must have moved into the more protected areas to get out of the wind. We headed down a path under a canopy of trees and then spotted another Black-throated Blue Warbler. Some bird was calling out and we couldn’t figure out what it was. We finally spotted it and looked it up in our bird book. It was a Great Crested Flycatcher. That was another lifer for us. We’ve probably seen them flying around and but never questioned what they were. It wasn’t shy about making it’s loud call near us. Just as we were getting ready to leave, a most vivid male Redstart bounced on the bushes in front of us. I love Redstarts!
We left Fry’s Landing and parked over by Thompson Bay again. It was spitting light rain drops but we decided to take a walk in on the trail to see what we could spot. The Yellow-rumped Warblers were all over the bushes again near the parking loop and some White-crowned Sparrows eating some cracked corn someone had piled on the side of the parking area. We didn’t spot much along the trail except for an Eastern Towhee. We headed home but I can’t wait for a day without rain to go again.
