Roofin' It

Studying for exams has taken up most of my time in the past week or so (since my last post), but I have managed to take a few study breaks to get some birding in! The majority of them involved me sitting up on my roof, but yesterday Reuven and I got out for a few hours to cruise around southern Wellington County in the rain to see what we could find. Quite a bit, it turned out - the highlights of 63 species being White-winged Scoter (rare migrant in the county) and Red-headed Woodpecker. I also got my first warbler for the year - as usual, a Yellow-rumped. Another two weeks and most of the warblers will be back!

Back to the roof-sitting. I put in 2 good mornings up there, with 41 and 43 species respectively. I also managed to add a solid 15 species to the yard list (coincidentally I've added the same number to my Wellington list in the past week as well!), with some highlights being Lapland Longspur, Northern Goshawk (my 12th raptor for the yard), and a FISH CROW back on April 8! This brings the yard list up to 87 - getting quite close to my goal of 100 already - perhaps I should've set it higher? Another cool thing today was seeing hundreds of Red Admiral butterflies winging past - looks like these south winds created quite the invasion of this species in the last 2 days.

Record shot of my first Broad-winged Hawk of the year, taken from the roof (April 14)

Another thing I've been doing while not studying is attempting to learn my flight calls - tested it out a bit in the last 2 nights with all these south winds, managed to pick out Hermit Thrush and 5 sparrow species including a Field! For anyone who's interested in such things, this is an extremely good site (for Ontario anyway): http://pjdeye.blogspot.ca/. Just follow the links on the sidebar for songs and calls!

Now, back to studying...