Skip to main content
While temperatures this last week have been typically wintry here in southern Ontario, the lack of snowfall hereabouts is perhaps less typical. This does have its advantages though; scanning brown, deadened fields for Snowy Owls is much easier than squinting across barren, frozen wastes. Such was the case yesterday, when I drove a few minutes up the road to check out some local fields for raptors and other winter denizens. Almost as soon as I turned off the main road, a white blob caught my eye. Always wary of plastic bags and buckets, I honed in on it with my bins and waited for a movement that would confirm it as an animate object, it duly obliged.
I continued on my loop and bagged a pale Rough-legged Hawk, two sub-adult male Northern Harriers floating about together and a handful or two of Red-tailed Hawks. When I returned three quarters of a hour later, the Snowy was in the same place, but looked shifty. Shortly it flew up into a nearby tree and sat, buffeted by the breeze, until I left.
The obligatory festive shot of some, none-too-worried looking, Wild Turkeys.
While temperatures this last week have been typically wintry here in southern Ontario, the lack of snowfall hereabouts is perhaps less typical. This does have its advantages though; scanning brown, deadened fields for Snowy Owls is much easier than squinting across barren, frozen wastes. Such was the case yesterday, when I drove a few minutes up the road to check out some local fields for raptors and other winter denizens. Almost as soon as I turned off the main road, a white blob caught my eye. Always wary of plastic bags and buckets, I honed in on it with my bins and waited for a movement that would confirm it as an animate object, it duly obliged.
I continued on my loop and bagged a pale Rough-legged Hawk, two sub-adult male Northern Harriers floating about together and a handful or two of Red-tailed Hawks. When I returned three quarters of a hour later, the Snowy was in the same place, but looked shifty. Shortly it flew up into a nearby tree and sat, buffeted by the breeze, until I left.
The obligatory festive shot of some, none-too-worried looking, Wild Turkeys.