Birding Bonanza

Way back on May 15th 2025 (yes, yes, I know, I am a master procrastinator), I was thrilled to be going on a short birding walk with Chris, a very talented birder. Chris proposed that we simply walk around The Point (aka PEPtBO, Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory). I was a kind of disappointed that we were going somewhere I’ve been a million times, albeit not for a dedicated bird walk, but I was happy to agree because he is an expert birder, despite his modest claims to the contrary.

We arranged to meet at the Observatory, which is the trailhead for a 1km walk around a cute little harbour to an old historical lighthouse dating back to 1881. The short trail passes through a few different habitats making it a bit of a hot spot for birding during spring and fall migration. Mid-May is the heart of migration season, but even so, we didn’t suspect that this was going to end up being a banner (BANNER!) day for birds!

Our first clue came when we arrived, and Ashley, the PEPtBO station manager, called us over immediately and asked if we would head straight out to the nets as they were in urgent need of help. By way of some background, when we take birds out of the nets, we walk all the way to the end of a trail, passing by 8 lanes of nets, and we start extracting from the farthest lane (lane 9), working our way back to the station, and clearing the nets as we go. This means that we invariably pass by birds hanging in the nets, which we extract on our return trip, and on a very busy day we might pass 3 or 4 of our 24 nets looking pretty full with a flock of birds (flock being 10-20 birds) as well as several nets with just a few (few being 2-3 birds). However, on this day, walking to the far end of the path, every single net we passed was full of birds, in most cases as many as 30. This was a holy s**t moment. For about an hour, we helped the other volunteers extract and release over 500 birds*, closing the nets as we went so that we wouldn’t keep catching more. It was bananas!! Once the nets were all empty and closed we finally headed out for our walk.

The walk with Chris proved as fruitful as the net capture! He kept a running list on e-Bird of everything we saw and we (“he”) heard and over the 1km walk out and back we racked up 72 species!! Chris is ridiculously good at identifying birds by sound and so there are a few that he heard that I didn’t catch, but most of them he was able to point out to me. The most exciting sound ID for me was a Sora, a timid little marsh bird that we never managed to see.

With Chris’s guidance, I was able to locate and ID several warblers on my own, which frankly was a huge thrill for me! Most of these birds I only ever see “in the hand” when we are extracting them from our mist nets. I also attribute at least half of our sightings to Chris’s expertise. I am much better at bird ID than I was when I started volunteering at PEPtBO, but there’s not way I would have racked up 72 species on my own!

The full list of all 72 birds is below, which will either thrill you as well or bore you to death 🙂

The really easy ones:

1. Canada Goose
2. Ring-billed Gull
3. American Herring Gull
4. Double-crested Cormorant
5. Turkey Vulture
6. Blue Jay
7. American Crow
8. Common Raven
9. Mourning Dove
10. Black-capped Chickadee
11. American Robin
12. American Goldfinch
13. European Starling
14. Red-winged Blackbird
15. Brown-headed Cowbird
16. Common Grackle

I was thrilled to see these in the wild!!

17. Northern Parula
18. Blackburnian Warbler
19. Ovenbird
20. Indigo Bunting
21. Scarlet Tanager
22. Fish Crow
23. Carolina Wren

Warbler central: Many of these I was able to ID on my own. I included number of sightings for the really populous species.

24. Magnolia Warbler
25. Bay-breasted Warbler
26. Yellow Warbler (11)
27. Chestnut-sided Warbler
28. Blackpoll Warbler
29. Black-throated Blue Warbler
30. Yellow-rumped Warbler
31. Black-throated Green Warbler
32. Northern Waterthrush
33. Black-and-white Warbler
34. Tennessee Warbler (25)
35. Orange-crowned Warbler
36. Nashville Warbler
37. Common Yellowthroat
38. American Redstart
39. Cape May Warbler (12)

Birds we saw around the water:

40. Long-tailed Duck
41. Red-breasted Merganser
42. Spotted Sandpiper
43. Caspian Tern
44. Belted Kingfisher

But we were far from done! Rounding out the list:

45. Killdeer
46. Blue-headed Vireo
47. Philadelphia Vireo
48. Warbling Vireo
49. Red-eyed Vireo (15)
50. Northern Cardinal
51. Rose-breasted Grosbeak
52. Red-bellied Woodpecker
53. Hairy Woodpecker
54. Northern Flicker
55. Tree Swallow
56. Barn Swallow
57. Cliff Swallow (12)
58. Northern House Wren
59. Gray Catbird
60. Field Sparrow
61. Song Sparrow
62. Eastern Towhee
63. Baltimore Oriole (10)
64. Eastern Wood-Pewee
65. Least Flycatcher
66. Eastern Phoebe
67. Great Crested Flycatcher
68. Eastern Kingbird

Birds that we heard, but didn’t see:

69. Sora
70. Ruffed Grouse
71. Common Gallinule
72. Mourning Warbler (well, technically Chris saw it flash across the path in front of us, but I was looking the other way and saw nothing)

*We did not band any birds during this net run because the sheer number rendered this too risky for the birds, and instead we just counted species as we released them.