Notes From a Northwestern Ontario Backyard – June 2019

Hello again!

After weeks of chilly temperatures, the season is finally improving up here. Even though the first day of summer is officially tomorrow, we are now getting late spring weather with temperatures finally getting into the high teens and low 20’s C. 😀 Trees and shrubs are blooming beautifully but many other plants are behind normal schedules or lost completely after last winter’s brutal cold. Check out my neighbour’s flowering crabapple tree though! It’s so heavy with blossoms right now, the branches are drooping!

 

 

To get you caught up on my spring season, I completed my annual Great Canadian Birdathon on May 20th. Considering the slow, very chilly weather conditions we had, my husband and I actually did fairly well with 60 species in about 12 hours. We had very few Warblers, finally tallying only 3 for the whole day. The highlight of the day was hearing (and tallying!) the call of a Barred Owl when we were leaving our last trail for the night. What a way to end a count. 🙂

A few photos from our sightings that day:

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband and I took a day a couple of weeks ago to go out and get some of next season’s firewood and had a few good sightings out around the bush roads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last weekend in May, we went to Dorion, Ontario … about an hour east of Thunder Bay (and 3 hours west of here), for their 11th annual Birding Festival. The original committee retired in 2018 after the 10th year and the Lakehead Regional Conservation Authority from Thunder Bay took over management of the festival. They did a fabulous job! It was kept as close to the original format as possible with very few discernable changes. We are thrilled that it was not cancelled completely! My lifer sighting for the weekend was a pair of Blackpoll Warblers but I couldn’t get any photos. As a group of about 120 people, we tallied 118 species from Saturday morning to early Sunday afternoon. Here are my two favourite photos from that weekend.

 

 

 

I’ve had no time with the camera in the past couple of weeks as my husband and I are super busy helping his parents as they buy a house here and move into town. My lens is also threatening to act up again and may need to be sent in for more repairs soon. Anyway, here are some of my recent sightings in my backyard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll end this month with my most special visitor this spring. A beautiful female Baltimore Oriole graced my yard for 4 days at the beginning of June. I have never seen one here before. I had been hearing tons of reports of Oriole sightings throughout this region so thought I might as well put some oranges out … what can it hurt? She showed up on one the very next morning. She ate 3 whole oranges in total before moving on. 🙂

 

 

And that’s it for another month. Fingers crossed that my lens, Big Bertha (a Tamron 150-600mm with a Nikon D3300 camera body) continues working for me and I’ll try my best to get some use out of it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime ….. HAPPY SUMMER!