Other updates/news

The Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk returned on Thursday last week and again on the weekend. He perches in the trees quite close to the house, so we get a good look at him. He waits there and waits there and all the smaller birds will work their way back to the feeders and the trees and don't seem to mind him too much. However, the squirrels will definitely freeze in spot. In fact, on Saturday, we managed to get a picture of a squirrel frozen on the same tree the hawk choose to land!







Then, on Saturday we were doing some yard clean up and I was raking up some leaves while Dave checked out and cleaned up all the nesting boxes. Starlings have been making a show of going in and out of the boxes, so we wanted to make sure they weren't building any nests. All of the boxes were empty, so we think it must be displays of territory etc on the part of the Starlings.

Anyway, as I was raking, I pulled up a black/greyish lump of fur. My first thought- could it be an owl pellet??? I called Dave over and I felt around for bones etc that I knew should be in it. Well, deep in the middle of the pellet, there were the bones! A small jaw bone and then what might be some miscellaneous bones. I'm not sure if the entire pellet is composed of one meal or multiple meals. It was pretty cool and exciting to know that at some point there's been an owl in the tree, probably sitting quietly, throwing up pellets. Maybe that's not the most romantic description, but we like it! We haven't heard/seen any Great Horned Owls this year and we usually do in Jan/Feb. We may have just missed them. It's hard to say as this seems to be an off year for many of the winter birds.






Last night we were invited to attend the Bird Study Group of the Hamilton and area Naturalist Club. It was a very informative meeting and we met some very nice people. We plan to take out a membership for the fall (there is only one more meeting this year). We were able to connect with George Holland and sign up for the Chimney Swift monitoring program (SwiftWatch Ontario), so we're excited to participate in the training for that and then the monitoring process. Yay! It is a very large and active group, with many events going on. I think we will learn quite a bit from joining.

http://www.hamiltonnature.org/birds/birdstudygroup.htm

Tonight Dave and I are receiving recognition from Oakville Green and the Oakville Mayor for pictures we submitted to the Oakville Green photography contest. We're excited to attend tonight's event as well. I submitted a few pics from each of us, so I'm not actually sure what the winning photos are.

And finally, the MNR officer is coming out to collect the Cooper's Hawk from us tomorrow. I hope to have more information to share on that soon.