
Juvenile Bonaparte’s Gull
The second day of September was supposed to be a nice day so a friend and I made plans to go to Shirley’s Bay for a walk together. She had never been there before, and even for non-birders it’s a great place to view the Ottawa River and walk along the shore. I arrived before she did and started checking out the vegetation around the parking lot; sometimes some interesting birds can turn up in the edge habitat adjacent to the greenbelt trails, and I was not disappointed to see a pair of Indigo Buntings high up in a bare tree. I heard them before I saw them, and if it weren’t for those distinct chip notes sounding like a sharper, thinner version of the call of a Common Yellowthroat, I might not have recognized the pair of brown songbirds in the tree. I only managed to get two quick photos of their backs before they flew off, but those pictures further confirmed my identification, as one of the birds showed blue feathers in the rump area. Only the breeding male is entirely blue; females and immatures are brown, though the young males may sometimes show some blue feathers coming in among the brown.
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