I spent a enjoyable afternoon with my 20-year-old son today, driving the backroads west and north of Newmarket. Although he is not a birder, he took good long looks (and made the right "ooh" and "aah" sounds) at a Snowy Owl that shone like ivory against the dark soil of the Holland Marsh vegetable fields east of Aileen Street and south of Strawberry Lane. He also seemed to genuinely enjoy the fine lines of a Northern Pintail drake that was dabbling in an ephemeral pond near the roadside on Bathurst Street north of Holland Landing. After driving him to his girlfriends' I returned to Bathurst St. N. and scoped the fields to the west. There were at least a dozen more Pintails among the many Canada Geese out there and a few other waterfowl that were simply too far away to identify. A drive down Hochreiter Road would no doubt have offered better views but it looked remarkably muddy and I chickened out. Tundra Swans and other migrant waterfowl should be showing up here any day now. Al Johnston had two Cm. Goldeneye drakes visiting his pond east of Aurora on Friday while Bruce Brydon had a Snow Goose one week ago in north Newmarket. At the north end of Yonge St. in Holland Landing, my dog and I had barely started walking past the first guard rail when a large branch broke in the swamp beside us, carrying a porcupine with it! The quilled critter landed in the water and swam slowly to the raised base of a nearby tree, shaking itself like a wet dog. We left it alone and walked to the north end of the roadway, listening to Red-winged Blackbirds and Cm. Grackles in the wetlands east of us. Looking up into the blue sky at 4:06 p.m. I saw a large, dark bird fly into view. Assuming it would be my first Turkey Vulture of the spring I raised my binos and discovered that it was, in fact, a sub-adult Bald Eagle, white-headed with a mainly dark body but still showing white in the belly and wings. Its mainly white tail had a dark sub-terminal band, but not a big broad one like an immature Golden. At the nearby Holland Landing sewage lagoons there was very little bird activity but I did see my first woolie bear caterpillar of the year and one Northern Harrier just before 5:00 p.m. Ron Fleming, Newmarket York Region is north of Toronto and south of Lake Simcoe _______________________________________________ ONTBIRDS is presented by the Ontario Field Ornithologists - the provincial birding organization. Send bird reports to ONTBIRDS mailing list ONTBIRDS@hwcn.org For information about ONTBIRDS visit http://www.ofo.ca/
