Outdoor Ontario
Birding Reports => Southern Ontario Reports => Topic started by: annie on March 16, 2014, 07:16:13 PM
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I was out with the Naturalist Club and we had an outing to Turkey Point and Long Point and the sideroads around Port Rowan. The farmer's fields are just full of migrating swans as they are not able to be on the lake yet due to the extensive ice. We must have seen more that a thousand of them.
(http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3803/13198742084_0e1f2fc6be_z.jpg)
(http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3676/13198443085_d9d9ce00d5_z.jpg)
(http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2716/13198545793_93893c9331_z.jpg)
(http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7250/13198547873_8ef725aeac_z.jpg)
(http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3807/13198447375_f086dfeed9_z.jpg)
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Do you know what kind of swans they are? I work at a park where we have pinioned swans- Trumpeter, Whooper, Australian Black, and Royal Mute.
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These look like Trumpeter swans with their black beaks.
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They are most likely Tundra Swans because, as I've recently learned, they're more likely to migrate in mass numbers such as the Swans in the above pictures.
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If you save the photo of the 6 swans on the ground and open it in a photo program so you can zoom in further, you can clearly see at least 2 of the swans have that yellow teardrop thing that Tundra's have.
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Definitely Tundra Swans, can pretty much ID these birds without looking at them, by numbers (Trumpeter Swans don't gather in these large flocks, at least not in Ontario), location (Long Point area is a well known staging area for Tundra Swans in March, while Trumpeter Swans are uncommon there) and habitat (Tundra Swans regularly feed in fields and I haven't seen Trumpeter Swans away from water, although they do feed in fields on the West Coast).
And as pointed out above, when examining the picture you can also ID them as Tundra Swans.
/Thomas
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I saw a lot of swans in a flodded field yesterday near Lynden Ont. I was not sure of the type but reading this they must have been Tundra Swans.