Let’s see how much of October I can actually remember. Thank goodness for photos.

March 18, 2023 (okay it’s not that bad. Well, maybe)

Well I know that I spent a heck of a lot of time at Holiday Beach on the Hawk Tower, as was to be expected.

The birds did their gradual change from the Broadwing Hawks and Blue Jays of September, to the Turkey Vultures, Sharp Shinned, Red Shouldered and Red Tailed Hawks, along with the Kestrels, Merlins, Coopers Hawks, and later in the month if we are lucky, we can see the Goshawks, Rough Legged Hawks and Golden Eagles.

Thankfully the winds this year were quite favourable, and the weather stayed fairly dry and comfortable. It made for some very pleasant days on the tower.

Of course with clearer days it sometimes made the observing a little harder to do. Usually it’s better to have a few clouds in the sky so that we are able to tell everyone else where to look when we have a point of reference. Sure, I might be able to say “Incoming North-East corner, 30 degrees up, far out” but to be honest I don’t carry a protractor with me, so I am only estimating 30 degrees, as is everyone else, but by the time others have eyes on it, the bird could be at 50 or 60 degrees up, and more to the North, South, or even passed us to the West. BUT if we had a cloud, we could say it is just under/over, left/right, entering/exiting and so on. That is as long as it’s not too many clouds, then we are all just trying to figure out which cloud we are looking towards. And it gets even harder when there is more than 1 bird coming in at the same time. But we all have fun as the day goes along.

The banding station continued to bring up raptors for people to adopt, and we had close visits from a few Sandhill Cranes.

The Starlings begin to gather by the time October rolled through. It’s amazing to watch their murmurations as they jostle for position in the flock, trying to evade being eaten by the various raptors that would enjoy a quick lunch along the way.

Starling Murmuration. The large bird at the bottom is looking for a Starling take-out meal

Another rare bird that visited the tower this year was a Virginia Rail. This little waterbird usually hid in the tall grasses around the other pond by the tower, but once in a while popped out to search for some food. We had to stay pretty quiet in order for us to watch it, as any sudden noise or movement would have it skittering back into the underbrush to disappear for a few hours.

Virginia Rail with what looks like a Snail

This year the marsh became quite dry and we were pleased to see some of the shorebirds come in for a few days. Groups of Yellow Legs would feast in the mud and then do a fly-by of the tower, Killdeer would gather and buzz us while they called out their name, and other Sandpipers would be seen in the mud flats, or walking along on the edges of the dying lily pads.

There had been an old Beaver lodge at the Trout Pond in Holiday Beach for a long time, but nobody had seen a beaver there for years. That changed in October when one day on the tower I noticed a wake in the pond and checked to see what duck it was. Nope, not a duck. I quickly called out BEAVER! Everyone turned and looked in astonishment at the new visitor to the pond. It was calmly swimming around as if checking out the place, and seemed to be interested in the lodge.

We also had a new addition to the Turtle group in October. Along with the Painted and Blanding Turtles we have a few Map Turtles in the Trout Pond.

One afternoon we were on the tower and had a show of a lifetime as this Fox calmly made it’s way along the edge of the pond.

My Lady and I spent a few days across the border and had our phones in airplane mode so we missed a bit of excitement until we were coming back home. As we were crossing back into Canada my Lady set her phone back and immediately started to receive messages about an Ultra Rare Tropical Kingbird being found in a small park just minutes away from where we were at that time. We immediately made the decision to go check it out. We met a couple of our birding friends there and we were all searching for it. Right after one of them showed me a photo of what it should look like, I saw a flash of yellow fly into a tree nearby. Of course we couldn’t find it again so we drove home to drop our stuff off, pick up the proper camera and binoculars and head back to the park.

Rare Tropical Kingbird. Notice it is missing a tail feather

After a bit of searching we all happily found the little guy flying from tree to tree and resting nicely for us. We were able to get some wonderful photos that day, and it hung around for about a month afterwards until it was no longer seen. We hope that it returned back to Central America, but it’s impossible to tell unless it survived the winter here.

October was also a strange month for other things in the sky. In early October I photographed a large number of sunspots on the sun, while later in the month we had some really interesting things going on with rainbows, sunbows, fogbows and sundogs. What’s interesting about the sunbows is that they appear to be flattened, not creating a proper circle that we would usually expect. Really cool stuff to see.