Great Crested Flycatcher

Yellow-Rumped Warbler

Yellow Warbler - The Best Photo from the Trip !

Birding ! - Point Pelee National Park, Lake Erie

Our interest focussed again on the spring bird migrations and this time we spent three days in and around Point Pelee National Park on Lake Erie, the southern most point of Canada (except for a few islands offshore). It is a world-renowned "Important Bird Area", and famous for the birding concentrations in spring and fall, and monarch butterflies in autumn. Jutting out into the lake, the point provides the first stop-over for birds having crossed the lake heading north in spring. We had a terrific time, and although there were hordes of other birders with expensive "bins", cameras, lenses, and scopes, we managed to find pathways away from the crowd. It is certainly the best concentration of species I have seen in Canada so far, being used to the species rich areas of southern Africa. The morning dawn chorus is loud, and the tiny warblers are delightful. Our trip was well timed, as within a couple of weeks, the trees and bushes will be fully leaved, and many of the small birds will be very hard to find.

World Wildlife Fund CN Tower Climb

Took part for the second year in the annual World Wildlife Fund CN Tower Climb last weekend. Amazingly, this years climb raised over $ 1.1 million dollars with 6200 people participating over two separate events - team and individual. It is extremely well organised, and the more I find out about the organisation here in Canada, the more impressive it becomes. WWF - Canada really does some superb work, and further details can be found in last years Annual Report at http://assets.wwf.ca/downloads/wwfcanada_annualreport2008.pdf. As an example during 2008, and after probably 10 years of negotiation, WWF-Canada was a part of historical agreements with NAFO, the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation. Agreements were signed committing to a cod recovery plan, as well as banning bottom fishing on the southwest slope of the Grand Banks in order to protect cold water corals. Some real achievements being made amongst a very sad state globally on the destruction of wildlife and the environment. Included in the details is that the efforts not only benefit the marine environment, but also the people and communities dependant on what used to be one of the richest fishing areas in the world. New breakthroughs in net design reduce the bycatch, and add to the efficiency of the shipping crews.

Hockley Valley Provincial Park

We continue to explore conservation areas not too far from where we live in Mississauga, Toronto. On Easter Friday we completed a terrific and challenging hike in the Hockley Valley Provincial Park, another of the conservation areas located on the Niagara Escarpment. It turned out to be one of my favourite hikes in all the areas we have hiked close to Toronto. There are no facilities, and we walked for long periods with no sign of human construction or habitation, other than wooden bridges crossing streams. The terrain is also challenging winding up and down the valley slopes.

Beamer Memorial Conservation Area, Grimsby

One of the wildlife sights that has sparked our interest is the bird migrations in this part of the world. Just an hour from where we live, we spent a couple of hours yesterday at Beamer Memorial Conservation Area, a wooded area on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. At this time of year it provides a good vantage point to view migrating raptors. A stong pair of binoculars is needed to view most of the birds, but it really is an astonishing sight to see the birds heading north to their summer breeding grounds. The majority of the birds we saw were turkey vultures, but there were also a couple of hawks that we could not specifically identify, and at least one immature bald eagle (so we were told by one of the other birders !). The escarpment with it's updraft provides good conditions for the birds to travel, and during March and April, tens of thousands of the birds migrate that way.

Photo Selected for Daily Dozen by National Geographic

Really pleased that so far one of the photographs from our South American trip has been recognised beyond this website. The above photograph was selected as one of the daily dozen on the National Geographic website for the second week of March (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/daily-dozen). As a reminder from a previous blog entry, we spent over two hours with this exhausted Magellanic Penguin on one of the beaches close to Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. The chest feathers were covered in a petroleum residue, the result of a recent oil spill. This was one of the birds still alive, but we also came across a number of dead birds washed up on the beach.

South Africa Seizes Shark Fishing Boat

Cape Town - South African authorities have seized a Taiwanese fishing boat accused of violating limits on shark fishing. Inspectors confiscated 1.6 tons of dried shark fins from the vessel and said it was "the biggest alleged illegal consignment during recent years." The boat's permit was valid for just 100kg of shark fins. The environment ministry said the amount of dried shark fin suggested that the vessel had caught at least 30 tons of sharks, nearly 15 times what the crew claimed to have caught. In a statement on Saturday it said the vessel would remain in Cape Town pending criminal proceedings and would be blacklisted worldwide. Shark-finning is fuelled by big profit margins with shark fins estimated to fetch between $400-$700 per kilogram.
- SAPA - (http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2485681,00.html)