birds birds and more birds

Today, being a Saturday, began for us at 6:00 am. Why such an ungodly hour you ask? Because we went on a guide bird walk down at Tom Thompson park, also known as Leslie Spit. 

Apparently there is a bird festival going on over the weekend and it all began with walks starting first thing. After all, that's when most of the birds are most active. 

So George and I show up in shorts, and me wearing my relatively new white Adidas running shoes. Silly me, i presumed we'd be walking along the road. Instead, they immediately took us into the heart of darkness where mosquitoes pestered and, thankfully, birds chirped beautifully. There were about 15 of us city-folk tramping through the bushes eagerly on the look out for something new. Of course it didn't take long for some guy to announce to the group that he had lost his cell phone and did anyone find it? No we all muttered. Some helpful lady suggested someone call it, but he unfortunately did not know his own cell number. 

Walking through the forest and the fields, our guide pointed out the many different songs we could hear. We even saw a few. The one I wrote down included:

Catbird

Baltimore Oriole

Cowbird

Warbler

Cedar Waxwing

King bird

Common turn.

Interesting fact - the cowbird watches other birds nesting and when the female leaves the nest and her eggs, the cowbird will fly down and lay her eggs amongst the others. The other female returns none the wiser and keeps the foreign eggs warm until they hatch. 

My favourite bird though was the Cedar Waxwing. There were two sitting in a blooming apple tree and let us walk right up to them. Beautiful birds, indeed. 

I wish I had some pictures to share but George did not pull out his fancy new camera once. So i found a pic of the Cedar Waxwing and posted it here.