Toronto Islands - Aug 23rd

[Anonymous]

Good evening all.

 If I had known retirement would be as good as the last few days I would have retired sooner but then of course I would have had a long wait until I got to the last few days.

 Today Ian Cannell, Margaret Liubavicius, Ed O'Conner and I birded the Toronto Islands and you should have been there. There was a medium fallout (maximum for Waterthrushes) and as we slowly made our way through The Islands on another beautiful day we encountered some nice birds despite only finding 77 species and the following are some of the high lights.

 Great Egret, Long-tailed Duck, 2 Black-billed Cuckoos, 5 Belted Kingfishers, R-T Hummingbirds, again 9 Flycatcher species including Olive-sided, 11 Yellow-bellied, 10 Great Crested, and 16 Eastern Kingbirds, Blue-headed, Philadelphia, Red-eyed and Warbling Vireos, 75+ Cedar Waxwings, Veery and Swainson's Thrush, 10 Gray Catbirds, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, Purple Martins, 21 warbler species including 9 Tennessee, 24 Chestnut-sided, 104 Magnolia, 11 Black-throated Blue, 17 Blackburnian, Pine, 11 Bay-breasted, 12 Blackpoll, 28 Black-and-white, 25 American Redstarts, 89 Northern Waterthrushes (yes I said 89), 2 Connecticut, 19 Wilson's and 10 Canada Warblers.

 We probably miss at least 25% or more of some of the above birds as you can't check every tree down there, but we did our best and with the good company that I had it was a pleasure all day. It is hard to believe that others are avid enough to spend 12 hours down there and walk 9 to 11 kms with no complaints, except for me saying my feet hurt, makes the outing that much nicer.

[Bruce]

Birders,

I had the opportunity to visit the Islands last night, Thursday 24th, not for a marathon visit like Norm's but for a short family walk instead.  While birding wasn't the #1 priority this time, I did keep my eye out for anything close by.

I was reading on the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station Blog page, recently, about how earlier migrants appear to move through quite quickly e.g. they get relatively fewer recatches at the Bird Banding Station earlier in the season, indicating that the birds are not hanging around.  This seems to have been the case on the Islands yesterday because there were relatively low numbers of birds around, and the species were quite different in terms of ratios, compared with Norm's report from the day before.

Most notably, there were more American Redstarts than almost all other warblers put together.  I had close to double digits of these compared with ones or twos of Black and White, Magnolia, Yellow-Rumped and Chestnut-Sided.  And not a single Waterthrush (although, again, I didn't go far out of my way to look, and covered only a small part of the islands). What was also interesting about the American Redstarts is that they were all female (or possibly Juv) birds.  

I was surprised to still see so many Robins around because they seem to have moved on from many of the other places that I usually see them.  

It will be interesting to see what we all find passing through this weekend :-)

Good Birding,
Bruce