Wheatley area - 3/25

I had a field site yesterday in the Wheatley area, so I brought my 'pa with me for the day and ended up doing some good birding around the area. Driving through the field site I was pretty impressed with the number of American Kestrels. We ended up having 10 through the site alone, and another 6 for the day!

The best bird of the site was a Wilson's Snipe in a roadside ditch; a foy for me. Moving on, we checked Hillman. Hundreds of dabblers were present, including about !190 Green-winged Teal and ~270 Northern Shovelers; definitely some of the better numbers I've seen of these species recently. No dice on the Common Teal from last week(?); I still haven't seen a Common, though in 2007 I found an integrade near Belwood Lake. The best bird here, however, was an early Dunlin (thanks Jeremy).

We checked PPNP after, briefly and scanned the lake at the tip parking lot. Thousands of Greater Scaup were present with at least 2 Surf Scoters and several Horned Grebes mixed in. On our way driving out of the park we spotted a Great Egret in the marsh, just north of Blue Heron.

On our way home we checked Erieau and had an almost pure white Snowy Owl just west of McGeachy's Pond. At Erieau proper we checked for the pair of Harlequin Ducks and spotted them pretty quickly, as they flew in just after we got there, coming in from the west. They landed on the other side of the channel where we were able to scope them and get some digipics.

After that we headed for Ridgetown before getting on the 401. Coming up to the lagoons we noticed several large flocks of geese heading in and after scanning the flock on the water came up with 17 Greater White-front's!

In total we had 66 species for the day, with 9,521 individual birds.