A Special Fir Tree

My morning started well with a sighting of the beaver, just before it disappeared under the water as it 
headed home for the day. Its schedule is nocturnal, as is mine:


Just beside the parking area at Lakeside Park is the Greenbrook water treatment plant. It is surrounded by a fence, trees and shrubs and that is where I spent almost my entire morning. I had no need to move at all. There was something special about one fir tree in particular which was attracting lots of attention. First I heard and then saw the young kingbirds in that tree. They have finally left their home in the highest tree at the park


I could fill this post with photos of the kingbirds; they were everywhere, and I took so many, but more interesting is my first photo of a tiny hummingbird on the same fir tree. Not my first sighting, as I saw them much earlier in the year, collecting nesting material from last year's reed heads, but I was unable to take any photos then:


There were young Baltimore orioles, a goldfinch and a flycatcher, which I missed out on. Also this little red squirrel, who was frantically running from branch to branch, dropping pine cones to the ground. Maybe it was going to come back later and eat what it had harvested? It has its eyes clearly fixed on another pine cone in this photo:


In a bush beside the fir tree, I heard the cries of a hungry chick and so went to investigate. It was a young cowbird. Cowbirds are remarkable in their cuckoo-like nesting habits. They remove the hard part of parenting and leave it to someone else. Here is the cowbird looking really cute:


And here it is demanding to be fed by a diminutive song sparrow:


Its surrogate parent seems almost scared to approach:


Quite remarkable:


Copyright © wildlakeside.blogpot.com 2019 Scott Atkinson All Rights Reserved.

Location: Lakeside Park, 206 Lakeside Dr, Kitchener, ON N2M 4C5, Canada

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thrushes and Blue-Winged Teal

Image
I must admit that I am no expert when it comes to thrushes in Ontario. I am well acquainted with thrushes in the UK, but these guys have completely different names. I will do my best to hopefully identify correctly. There are I believe two possible candidates,  Swainson's thrush and the hermit thrush. Very similar-looking birds. One outstanding difference between them appears to be a white ring around the eye of the hermit thrush compared to a buffy eyering on Swainson's thrush. Another distinguishing detail is the colour of their tailfeathers. The hermit thrush has more of a cinnamon colour to its tailfeathers, and this photo does show that. A white eyering and cinnamon tailfeathers, I'm going with a hermit thrush. This photo also shows both the cinnamon tailfeathers and the white eyering. There were many of these thrushes working their way through the leaf litter of the woodland on the far side of Shoemaker Lake. They were very sensitive to any movement. I h
Read more

A Coyote, an Osprey and a Goldfish

Image
I never know what I'll find when I go to Lakeside Park, and sometimes it isn't what I find, rather what finds me. Partly hidden behind the woodland's latticework of twigs and fallen branches, this coyote knew I was there. It could definitely hear my clumsy rubber boots and with the wind coming from behind me, it also had the advantage of scent, but it hadn't seen me yet. I knew that I only had a few moments, if that, to capture some photographs. My autofocus struggled, as did the coyote's sight, to cut through all of the obstructions between us, but I did somehow manage a few shots before the coyote disappeared into the undergrowth.  The unexpected often catches me unprepared. A little earlier in the morning, I was attempting to take a photo of the first migratory warbler that I have seen this year, a yellow-rumped warbler. The warbler would not sit still for an instant, and in the course of attempting to relocate the warbler, I was entirely ta
Read more

A Welcome Return

Image
Lakeside Park has always felt welcoming, and it was an unscheduled return on a dull, misty morning in September that saw me tracing my steps from a year ago. I wondered what would be different and what would be unchanged. The black-crowned night heron's willow tree was uncustomarily empty. The long outstretched branch of the willow which reached out over the water had been a favoured roost, but it held nothing. Perhaps I'd catch sight of the beaver out amongst the lilypads, bobbing up and down as it dabbled in the shallows with its feet, searching for tasty roots. But again, there was nothing. The lake appeared eerily still.  And then my vision started to return. Through the mist, a familiar shape came into sharp relief. A grey silhouette dwarfed by the tall reeds on the far bank. It was tiptoeing its way along the length of a partly submerged branch. I had never observed the night heron hunting, but there it was. There was no light, no detail, just grain and layers in shades o
Read more