Season 3, Episode 4: Ingrid and Ethan Whitaker's Lower 48 Big Year

Happy Canada Jay Day.  It’s July 1, 2025 and for most people it’s a holiday and a chance to  barbecue, picnic, get away from the house and watch or set off fireworks after dark.  For birders,(those poor souls that have to work for a living during the week), it’s a day to celebrate birds and go birding with friends, family, or just get away on your own and and listen to the summer breeding birds in a quiet forest, park or glen.  As I write this, I’m sitting on a quiet bench in Long Point, Ontario at the Long Point Bird Banding Demonstration Station at what they call the Old Cut.

Since last we visited, a lot has gone on in the birding world here in Southwestern Ontario.  I still have yet to see a Wilson’s Warbler, but hopefully fall migration will bring one my way.  Aside from that, the last month has been good to me.  I saw a Laughing Gull in Toronto and Sue and I found, and listened to an Acadian Flycatcher in the oddly named Skunk’s Misery.  The other amazing happening, has been an eruption of American White Pelicans that have refused to fly north and west to their breeding grounds.  They’ve been spotted all over southwestern Ontario.  The big news for the local birders, was that 9 of those pelicans are visiting us where I live in Brantford.  They first appeared on the Grand River at Waterworks Park, only minutes from home. And happily, this batch of, perhaps bachelor pelicans, has stuck around and may, verily, spend the summer with us on The Grand.

I only added 11 birds to my year list in June, many of those I should have seen during migration.  But not that sinker, the Willson’s Warbler.  Look, I can understand missing a Worm Eating Warbler,(and yes,I confess I missed that one too), but for Audubon’s sake, really, one of the easiest spring warblers, the bright yellow bird with the black yarmulka, described by American ornithologist Alexander Wilson in 1811!  And it’s a bird that seems to have little fear of peoples as it hunts bugs and such in the outsides of branches, like dogwoods, in the spring.  So yeah, am I bitter?  Heck yeah!

Okay, take a deep breath. Center yourself.  Breath. It’s just one bird.  Not like I missed a Brown Pelican.  Oh yeah, a Brown Pelican showed up in the Niagara region this past Monday. I raced to Niagara-on-the Lake, searched the buoy it had been on, but the heat haze made it impossible to be sure I was looking at it, maybe it was there, maybe it wasn’t. By the time I was able to see the  buoy clearly in t