eBIrd Rare Bird Alert!!

We are new users of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird which has a ton of great features for birders including the ability to receive daily Rare Bird Alerts by email which I also subscribed to. I'm not a big fan of subscription email notifications in general but for rare bird sighting opportunities close to home I actually look forward to receiving my daily update. I'll touch base about eBird a bit more in another post but if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it if you want to take your birding experience to the next level, and it's totally free!!

Harris's Sparrow Migration Route

Last week, the daily alerts noted a particularly rare Harris’s Sparrow had been seen several times at the Nanaimo River Estuary. What made this rare bird kind of special is that it is several hundreds of miles off course from its normal migration route through central North America.

Robyn and I have visited the estuary several times before on foot and by kayak and being only an hour and a half from home we decided to do an early morning trip to see if we might get lucky finding this rare traveler and possibly even a Short-eared Owl. In any case it would give us the opportunity to see what other species were there at this time of year.




Robyn’s mom decided to join us for the day to see what this birding stuff that we have been doing so much of was all about. The forecast was for rain starting around noon but we figured we might be able to squeeze in a couple hours of birding so we were on the road at 06:00 am with the goal to arrive at the estuary just after sunrise.

As predicted (ya right!) rain drops started to fall as we arrived at the estuary so I grabbed my camera gear and headed out of the car quickly leaving Robyn to give her mom a crash course on birding while walking around the trails. For the first hour, as the rain showers came and went, I spotted several of the expected LBJ's which we added to our eBird checklist but I didn't see anything resembling the Harris's Sparrow.

Just about the time that my camera gear was getting soaked and I was going to call it a day the rain eased up and I decided to take one last circuit around some low marsh grasses and that's when I saw it!! As it flew past me and into a hawthorn bush I realized it wasn't anything like any of the other LBJ's that I had seen so far that day.

Robyn and her mom had caught up to me and to our delight the little sparrow came into clear head-on view displaying its white breast and the key field marks of a black throat, chin and crown. Lifer #141 - the Harris's Sparrow confirmed and entered into our eBird checklist along with 17 other species.

Since we were in the area and the rain had stopped we decided to visit the popular Buttertubs Marsh and had an unexpected Lifer #142 sighting of a small flock of Cackling Geese within a very large flock of Canada Geese. Several raptors were spotted hunting the migrants that were inhabiting the marsh but thankfully we didn't get to see any successful sorties. Our checklist total of 24 species for the marsh was what I considered to be a pretty good day considering the weather. 

It wasn't quite lunchtime yet so we decided to go check out Neck Point Park to see what shorebirds might be around. Arriving in the parking lot we spotted a specie that seemed to be very popular with some of the park users. Santa Claus had flown in for the day for photo opportunities for the kids. I wonder if the folks at eBird would have seen it humorous if I had added him to our checklist with a confirmation photo? LOL

As predicted, the rain started just near the end of our walk around the park but one of the highlights was spotting a soggy looking Barred Owl which I think might be the first one that Robyn's mom had ever seen. We finished off with 8 species of mostly shorebirds and headed off to celebrate a great day of birding (40 species) at the Firehouse Grill which by the way, if you are ever in Nanaimo, BC has the best sushi on the planet!!