With a week of warmer weather behind us, I had a feeling that today would be good for the first expedition of the Spring. I rose at 5 AM, careful not to wake Sue, dressed quietly, packed my binoculars and camera, and pulled my bike from the basement. I then cycled over to Elgin Street and ate breakfast at Dunn’s. After breakfast, I carried my bike on to a 95 bus to Orleans, in the east end of the City.
From the Place D’Orleans Shopping Centre, I headed south on Tenth Line Road. I passed out of the urban area, into the farm fields, where I stopped to admire two eastern phoebes flitting around a derelict barn. It looks like a good place for barn swallows. Dropping down into the lowlands around the Mer Bleue bog (a globally significant wetland), I almost immediately came across a beautiful northern harrier, which drifted away across a damp, grassy field.
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I turned on to Smith Road and climbed a low rise, getting my first glimpse of the fields and floodplain east of Mer Bleue. A flock of geese cackled in the pasture beside the road. In the scraggly hayfield behind them, a dozen sandhill cranes gleaned through the hummocks. Unfortunately, my camera is limited to optical 5x zoom and digital 10x zoom. But you can just make them out the photos.
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From Bearbrook, I headed a little east and then north into the Cardinal Creek area. I cruised the roads for several hours, exploring some of the places that I’d featured in a recent planning study (the Greater Cardinal Creek Subwatershed Study): woodlots, karst pavements, the Proulx sugarbush.
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- Ring-billed gull
- Song sparrow
- Robin
- Black-capped chickadee
- Canada geese
- Mallard
- Pintail
- Wood duck
- Common goldeneye
- Bufflehead
- Great blue heron
- Sandhill crane
- Killdeer
- Woodcock (heard)
- Wild turkey
- Kestrel
- Northern harrier
- Red-tail hawk
- Turkey vulture
- Mourning dove
- Pigeon
- Common flicker (heard)
- Yellow-bellied sapsucker
- Eastern phoebe
- Tree swallow
- Crow
- Raven
- Red-wing blackbird
- Brewers blackbird
- Common grackle
- Starling
- Cardinal
- Chipping sparrow