This is a little belated, but last Saturday (Dec. 20) saw Mike and I completing our 15th Kitchener CBC. Our area covers the NW corner of the CBC; half our area is rural, with a fair number of woods to walk through. The area is quickly urbanizing, which is a bit of shame. Having said this, we had a great day, the morning started exceptionally calm, but cold (minus 9 Celsius at 0600hr), but needless to say the owling proved quite good, with 4 Great Horneds, and 5 E. Screech.
In the morning we did most of our hiking, as well as checking spots where we had put out seed in the previous days, hoping to bring more songbbirds in. We started off walking around a few protected forests, finding a scolding Winter Wren, our only Sharp-shinned Hawk, Red-bellied Woodpecker, and lots of other forest birds. After this we checked a favourite spot of ours, behind the old Erbsville Outdoor Education Centre, where we found 2 Song and 1 Swamp Sparrow, as well as a fly-over Great Black-backed Gull.
After this we decided to check a new area, behind the church that our parents go to. I had done a bit scouting before and had found 4 Red-winged Blackbirds, a Song Sparrow, and 10 Cedar Waxwings the previous week, so we were hoping some birds would stick around. Luckily for us, the Red-winged's did (which turned out to be the only one's on the count), but it was here that we had by far the best bird on the count - a Eurasian Collared-Dove. Mike spotted it as it flew and landed very briefly with a bunch of Mourning Doves. But unfortunately, the dove took off pretty much right away. It was noticeably larger (30% larger?), with its distinctly different tail (in comparison to MODOs).
We looked pretty hard for the bird afterwards but couldn't find it.
After this, we did some bush-walking, coming up with 3 Glaucous and 2 Iceland Gulls flying overhead in a large flock of gulls. Landbirds seemed to be abit quite, but there was a fair bit of activity in terms of flyovers (something we don't get too much of in our area).
We ended up with 42 species (not too bad for Kitchener...and for an area with no open water!).
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