Kingston Lark Sparrow

On this warm spring evening Erica and I were pulling in to our local mini putt establishment when I got a text message from Mark Read that read "Just found a Lark Sparrow at Lemoine Point.". Yep, he didn't even include an exclamation mark. So, with less than an hour of daylight left, we headed for Lemoine Point.

As we arrived we could see Mark and fellow Kingston birder James Barber up ahead on the path, faithfully keeping an eye on the prize:

So there it was. We all enjoyed this rare bird from the mid-west before it eventually flew into some nearby pines to hopefully spend the night.

As mentioned above, Lark Sparrow is primarily a bird of the central US, regularly reaching into Canada in southern BC and the southern prairies. It is also rare but regular in southern Ontario with up to about 5 records per year. It is a species that could be expected here more often in years of extreme drought in the core of its range, like this year. This must be one of the earliest spring arrivals of this species in Ontario - the only earlier date I could find was one on 10 April 2010 from Pelee Island - most records fall in late April or early May.

The great thing about seeing this bird was that it meant two rare birds in Frontenac County in two days after Mark and I found this wayward White-crowned Pigeon on Wolfe Island yesterday. 

Fall counts

Several clubs across Ontario host fall roundups in their respective bird study areas and as far as I know, these all happen the first weekend of November. I know Hamilton has a big one (I have participated many times) and so does Ottawa, Thunder Bay, and Kingston. This year I did the Kingston count for the first time.

The Kingston count covers the Kingston study area (see the Ontario Birding areas page for map) and unlike the Hamilton count that I have helped with in the past, the Kingston count covers a 24-hour period overlapping two days, starting at 3pm on Saturday and finishing 3pm on Sunday. So yesterday I met up with Mark and James and we headed for Prince Edward Point. We decided we'd spend the 3 hours of daylight on Saturday there to get our start. We weren't disappointed as within a few minutes of the clock hitting 3pm we had our first good scores:

Rough-legged Hawk

Red-necked Grebe

The Red-necked Grebe was the only one of any groups and not many people had Rough-legged Hawk either. A little further on and we had another raptors coming in low...an adult Golden Eagle!

Golden Eagle

We got another (this time a young bird) a few minutes later so were quite pleased with ourselves! It wasn't much after that that we picked up a flock of Cedar Waxwings, our only Ruby-crowned Kinglet, White-crowned Sparrows, and Brown Creeper. Just past the bird observatory we managed to get all three scoters before it got too dark to see much. On the way back home we made a few stops for owls but the howling wind didn't help much, however we still managed to get one Barred Owl and best of all a flyover nocturnal migrant Swainson's Thrush!

Saturday morning we caught the first ferry to Amherst Island and quickly saw lots of loons on the water and started added to our 51 species from the previous day. Amherst was good to us with the best bird being a Vesper Sparrow that flushed from the road and perched long enough for James to grab a photo. We were off the island by 10 and headed for Morvin Creek to look for shorebirds (picked up both yellowlegs) and on the way back east from there we stumbled on our best bird of the day, a Cattle Egret!!

Cattle Egret

Cattle Egret and cow

From there we picked up a ton of new ducks (check out lists from Cataraqui Bay, Marshlands, and the Montreal Street apartments) but we were running out of time. We added one last species, Wild Turkey, with ten minutes left to round out our list of 88 species, not a bad 24 hours of birding in November! We did well but had some big misses: all Accipiters and falcons, Belted Kingfisher, Hermit Thrush, Wood Duck, Killdeer, and of course more than I can list here :)

Thick-billed Murre in Kingston

Yesterday afternoon Janice Grant found a Thick-billed Murre on the Kingston waterfront. She called Mark Read who was able to confirm it as a Thick-billed Murre, follow it as it swam east along the lake shore and get a few local birders on it (side note, in two weeks Erica and I will become local birders in Kingston!). Mark posted to Ontbirds late in the day and not surprisingly many birders made plans to be there for first light.

I wasn't one of them because I had a meeting in the morning (which was cancelled due to the weather) but once the freezing rain cleared I made it out to try my luck before working the rest of the day from a local library.  Initially when we arrived my heart dropped a bit because there were only two birders present and all I saw were a couple of Common Loons in the harbour. However, a couple seconds later and I realized I was looking too far away - the bird was only about 20ft from the birders!

Needless to say, great views of this rare bird

I even took a short video - Erica's commentary sums it up:

Apparently, Thick-billed Murre used to occur semi-regularly on Lake Ontario in late fall/early winter but that hasn't been the case since the 1950s

The Birds of Hamilton by Bob Curry has a good summary of Thick-billed Murre in Ontario listing records from about a dozen years before the mid 1950s, some with fairly extensive "wrecks" of multiple birds.

[EDIT: Thanks to Glenn Coady for the following references if you are interested in Thick-billed Murre history:
Fleming, J.H. 1907. The unusual migration of Brunnich's Murre (Uria lomvia) in eastern North America. Proceedings of the IV International Ornithological Congress, pp. 528-543.

Hoyes Lloyd's review of the Birds of Ottawa:
Lloyd, H. 1923. The birds of Ottawa, 1923. Canadian Field-Naturalist 37: 101-115; 125-127; 151-156.
Lloyd, H. 1924. The birds of Ottawa, 1923 [conclusion]. Canadian Field-Naturalist 38: 10-16
Lloyd, H. 1944. The birds of Ottawa, 1944. Canadian Field Naturalist 58: 143-175.] 

However, since then there have only been two documented records for Ontario:
1995: 5-6 December, Deschenes Rapids, Ottawa River, Ottawa. Found by Bruce Di Labio
1998: 29 November, Burlington Ship Canal, Hamilton. Found by Robert M. Sachs, Sheila Bowslaugh, Eleanor Sachs, and Carl J. Rothfels

The Ottawa record apparently was originally identified as a Razorbill (pretty easy to do when it isn't at your feet!) and it wasn't realized what it was until the morning of December 6. Since many birders already had Razorbill on their Ontario lists many missed out on this bird even though it was technically chase-able. Even relatively local birders missed this bird for that reason because there was only a couple hours between when its real identity was realized and the time it disappeared [edit - according to an anonymous comment it was killed by a Gyrfalcon!!].